Budget Component Reviews

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Budget Component ReviewsHeadphone Reviews
Apple AirPods Pro 2 noise-canceling, wireless, in-ear headphones
Rogier van Bakel  |  Mar 07, 2023  |  17 comments
You won't see many Apple products in these pages, and for good reason. As Stereophile Editor Jim Austin wrote to me recently in an email, "Apple may have the best acoustic-design facilities in the world, but its products are designed by engineers who don't seem to respect perfectionist sound—which is appropriate for a company that aims for the vast middle of the bell curve." Has that changed?
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Budget Component ReviewsDigital Processor ReviewsComputer Audio Reviews
Apple AirPort Express Wi-Fi Hub-D/A processor
John Atkinson  |  May 08, 2005  |  4 comments
Usually, a Stereophile "Follow-Up" follows up (duh!) a full review of the component in question. This review, however, is intended to flesh out a cryptic comment made by Wes Phillips in April's "As We See It": "When Apple introduced its AirPort Express wireless multimedia link," Wes wrote, "it even included a digital port so that an audiophile—such as Stereophile's editor—could network his system, using the AE to feed his Mark Levinson No.30.6 outboard D/A converter. 'Sounds okay,' deadpans JA."
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Budget Component ReviewsMedia Server Reviews
Apple iPod portable music player
Wes Phillips  |  Oct 05, 2003  |  0 comments
It was John Atkinson, that legendary ornithologist, who first pointed it out: "Have you noticed how frequently you see women using the iPod?"
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CD Player/Transport ReviewsBudget Component Reviews
Arcam Alpha MCD 6-disc CD changer
Brian Damkroger  |  Aug 05, 2007  |  First Published: Oct 05, 1998  |  0 comments
Think about it for a second: If you could buy a six-disc CD changer that sounded every bit as good and was built just as well as a similarly priced single-disc player, would you be interested?
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Budget Component ReviewsIntegrated Amp Reviews
Arcam FMJ A19 integrated amplifier
Stephen Mejias  |  Jan 02, 2014  |  2 comments
"J-10? What's an integrated amplifier?"

It was fall 2000. I'd just begun working at Stereophile, and I clearly remember sheepishly, innocently putting this question to former senior editor Jonathan Scull.

I think the question confused him—not because he didn't know the answer, but because the answer seemed so obvious, the question itself should have been unnecessary. How could anyone not know what an integrated amplifier is? I might as well have asked, "What's a song?"

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Budget Component ReviewsDigital Processor ReviewsHeadphone Reviews
Arcam irDAC-II D/A processor
John Atkinson  |  Jun 20, 2017  |  14 comments
For digital playback, in recent months I've been breathing some rarefied air, pricewise. In December 2016, I reviewed dCS's Rossini Player and Clock, followed in May 2017 by Meridian's Ultra DAC, and in June by Chord's DAVE DAC. The Rossini Player costs $28,499 without the Clock, the Meridian $23,000, and though the DAVE is less expensive than either at $10,588, that's still a fair chunk of change. Even PS Audio's PerfectWave DirectStream DAC, which I bought following Art Dudley's review in September 2014, costs $6899 with the Network Bridge II, which hardly counts as "affordable."
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Budget Component ReviewsIntegrated Amp Reviews
ARCAM Radia A25 integrated amplifier
Herb Reichert  |  Apr 09, 2024  |  7 comments
I've been to a few bowling parties and passed a bottle around a few fire pits, but I've never watched an audiophile unboxing video. Lately though, I have been paying closer attention to my first impressions of each new audio product as it enters my realm.

I'm finding it interesting to notice how a device previously unseen and unheard declares itself one small step at a time as I open its box, feel its heft, observe its form, study its manual, and, finally, wire it into my system. Those start-up experiences, plus my gut feelings during my first moments of music listening, establish a tone of innocent discovery I wish would last the whole month. It never does.

I mention this because my first impressions for my first-ever review of an ARCAM product, the Radia A25 integrated amplifier, were in that "innocent and receptive" mode from the instant I saw the box sitting outside my door.

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Budget Component ReviewsDigital Processor ReviewsComputer Audio Reviews
Arcam rBlink Bluetooth D/A processor
Sam Tellig, John Atkinson  |  Feb 14, 2014  |  First Published: Dec 01, 2013  |  6 comments
Am I the only one who values content and convenience over sound quality?

There. I've said it. I am not an audiophile; ie, someone who's in love with recorded sound for its own sake. The search for ideal sound can leave a person burned out and broke.

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CD Player/Transport ReviewsBudget Component ReviewsIntegrated Amp Reviews
Arcam Solo CD receiver
Art Dudley  |  Jul 24, 2005  |  0 comments
Here we are, back to the Arcam I know and love: a company that not only invents good products, but good product categories as well. Like the Arcam Black Box of the 1980s, which gave so many people fits at the time—yet which, once you heard it, made good musical sense. It made good marketing sense, too: With that one stroke, teensy, weird, nestled-away-in-the-English-countryside Arcam did nothing less than create the domestic market for outboard digital-to-analog converters.
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Budget Component ReviewsMedia Server Reviews
Astell&Kern AK100 portable media player
John Atkinson  |  Jul 25, 2013  |  First Published: Aug 01, 2013  |  18 comments
Apple's iPod came of age in the fall of 2003, when, with the release of iTunes 4.5, the player was no longer restricted to lossy compressed MP3 or AAC files. Instead, it could play uncompressed or losslessly compressed files with true "CD quality"; users no longer had to compromise sound quality to benefit from the iPod's convenience.

Enter Astell&Kern. At the beginning of 2013, this brand from iRiver, a Korean portable media company, introduced its AK100, a portable player costing a dollar short of $700 and capable of handling 24-bit files with sample rates of up to 192kHz.

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Budget Component ReviewsDigital Processor ReviewsComputer Audio Reviews
ASUS Xonar Essence One Muses Edition D/A processor–headphone amplifier
John Atkinson  |  Mar 07, 2014  |  1 comments
Back in the summer of 2009, USB-connected D/A processors that could operate at sample rates greater than 48kHz were rare. Ayre Acoustics had just released its groundbreaking QB-9, one of the first DACs to use Gordon Rankin's Streamlength code for Texas Instruments' TAS1020 USB 1.1 receiver chip. Streamlength allowed the chip to operate in the sonically beneficial asynchronous mode, where the PC sourcing the audio data is slaved to the DAC. But high-performance, USB-connected DACs like the Ayre were also relatively expensive back then, so in the January 2010 issue of Stereophile I reviewed a pair of soundcards from major computer manufacturer ASUS , the Xonar Essence ST and STX, which, at $200, offered a much more cost-effective means of playing hi-rez files on a PC.
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Budget Component ReviewsComputer Audio Reviews
ASUS Xonar Essence ST/STX soundcards
John Atkinson  |  Jan 24, 2010  |  8 comments
With all the current fuss about getting audio data from a computer to a standalone D/A processor via S/PDIF, USB, FireWire, WiFi, or Ethernet (footnote 1), it has been overlooked that the oldest way to get audio from a PC is to use a high-performance soundcard plugged into the host machine's motherboard. I remember how excited I was when I installed a Sound Blaster Pro 16 board in the 486-based Dell running Windows 3.1 that I was using in the early Clinton era, plugged its analog output into my high-end rig, and played back 16-bit/44.1kHz files.
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Stand Loudspeaker ReviewsBudget Component Reviews
ASW Genius 100 loudspeaker
Robert J. Reina  |  Aug 22, 2008  |  0 comments
A while back, out of the blue, I was contacted by audio distributor May Audio Marketing. They wanted to know if I was interested in reviewing any models from the Genius line of German manufacturer ASW Loudspeakers. I have a lot of time for distributors such as May Audio, whose primary role is to promote lesser-known European audio products on this side of the pond. All of May's principal clients—Castle, Enigma, and Gradient speakers; Sonneteer and Sphinx electronics; and Roksan turntable systems—are much better known in their home countries than in the US.
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Stand Loudspeaker ReviewsBudget Component Reviews
ATC SCM 11 loudspeaker
John Marks  |  Dec 14, 2009  |  0 comments
The venerable British company ATC Loudspeaker Technology was founded in 1974 by Billy Woodman, and is famous within the professional community for developing the first soft-dome midrange driver, and for their well-regarded line of active (powered) studio monitors, the user list of which is a veritable Who's Who of mastering engineers. ATC loudspeakers are all still made in the UK, and were a favorite of the late J. Gordon Holt.
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Floor Loudspeaker ReviewsBudget Component Reviews
Athena Technologies AS-F2 loudspeaker
Robert J. Reina  |  Aug 18, 2002  |  0 comments
I have always had an affection for speakers designed and manufactured by the Canadian conglomerate Audio Products International Corp. (API), which markets speaker designs under the names Mirage, Energy, Sound Dynamics, and Athena. In fact, it was 20 years ago that API created the first budget speaker that caught my attention, the Mirage 350. At the time, the 350 was the only speaker I'd heard that cost less than $300/pair. It sounded open, musical, and detailed without seeming bass-shy. (A larger successor, the 460, was for many years my reference home-theater speaker.) Although I've been impressed with many other API designs I've heard over the years at friends' houses, press events, and hi-fi shows, it had been more than a decade since I'd formally reviewed an API product.
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