search

Equipment used during the preparation of this review included a Mark Levinson No.23.5 power amplifier, the French YBA 2 preamplifier or the Mod Squad Line Drive Deluxe passive control unit, the former feeding the power amplifier via 15' lengths of AudioQuest Lapis unbalanced interconnect, the latter via 1m lengths of AudioQuest Diamond.

Source components included a Linn Sondek/Lingo/Ekos/Troika setup sitting on an ArchiDee table to play LPs, an Aiwa portable DAT recorder and a Revox PR99 to play master tapes, and the VTL D/A processor driven by a Meridian…

I use a mixture of nearfield, in-room, and quasi-anechoic FFT measurement techniques (using primarily DRA Labs' MLSSA system with a B&K 4006 microphone calibrated to be flat when used on-axis up to 30kHz—see "Follow-Up," October 1991, Vol.14 No.10—plus an Audio Control Industrial SA-3050A 1/3-octave spectrum analyzer with its own microphone) to investigate factors that might explain the sound heard. The impedance phase and amplitude of the speakers were measured using the magazine's Audio Precision System One.

Looking first at the manner in which the…

Description: Three-way, reflex-loaded, stand-mounted loudspeaker. Drive-units: 1" (25mm) metal-dome tweeter, 4.5" (118mm) metal-cone midrange unit, 7.5" (190mm) metal-cone woofer. Crossover frequencies: 300Hz, 3kHz. Crossover slopes: 18dB/octave low-pass at 300Hz, then 24dB/octave at 900Hz low-pass (woofer); 18dB/octave high-pass, 24dB/octave low-pass (midrange); 18dB/octave high-pass (tweeter). Frequency response: 50Hz–18kHz ±2.5dB. Sensitivity: 86–87dB/W/m (2.83V). Nominal impedance: 6 ohms (minimum 4 ohms). Amplifier requirements: up to 250W.
Dimensions: 24…

I remember being completely bowled over by the sound. It did some things far better than any tubed component I had heard, and I was so impressed by those things that I did not at first detect the things the TR-1 was doing worse than tubes. I am confident that I would run screaming from the room were I to listen to it today, though a lot of its shortcomings were doubtless being masked…

Between 1796 and 1798, when Haydn composed The Creation, he was the most beloved composer the world had ever known. Already an old man, he had befriended and outlived Mozart and was deeply religious: he prayed daily that he might live to finish this oratorio. "I spent…

Have you heard? Michael Lavorgna and John DeVore are into vinyl. They are also into beer. In the hearts and minds of these two manly men, vinyl plus beer equals love. A trip to the record store, punctuated…

SWF ANALOG FETISHIST looking for a few good LPs. Send photo to P.O. Box 433, Indianapolis, IN.
MWM WITH TUBES seeks same for hot days and hotter nights. Reply to P.O. Box 12, Los Alamos, NM.

I mean, wouldn't that be great? Not only could we all hook up with that Special Someone a helluva lot easier than hanging around hi-fi huts with red hankies protruding from our back pockets, but we could also send messages to the manufacturers telling them what we really…

So what does it sound like? "Tube-like" is not a word I'd use to describe the DIA 100—tonally,…

As has been the case with other budget gear under review, the DIA 100 spent most of its time in my Real World system, an audio assemblage painstakingly designed to exactly replicate the kind of affordable home hi-fi system an actual taxpaying citizen of these here United States would set up in his or her living room. No expense was spared trying to duplicate the exact living and listening conditions which affordable hi-fi gear might encounter in the typical non-dedicated listening room that people lucky enough not to be hi-fi critics usually listen to music in. And,…

The Acurus DIA would not complete the one-hour, 1/3-power preconditioning we perform as a matter of routine. The test was run four times: twice, before going to CG for listening, the DIA shut down after 45 minutes; twice more, after CG was finished with it, it shut down 20 minutes into the conditioning. It was running hot at shutdown (footnote 1), but not unusually so, indicating that its thermal protection may have been set to trip early.

The Acurus's input impedance into its CD input measured between 11k ohms and 12k ohms at volume-control settings up to…