In November 2016, the Berlin Philharmonic made a stunning record-release announcement: a boxed set of all four Brahms symphonies, conducted by Sir Simon Rattle, on six LPs, recorded and mastered direct to disc in September 2014. The release would be limited to 1833 setsa quantity chosen in honor of the year of the composer's birthat a price of 499 per set.
CH Precision's P1 phono preamplifier, which I wrote about in the April 2017 issue, is not going back to its manufacturer. The longer I used it, the more obvious it became that I couldn't part with it, even though I said I couldn't afford it. The cost was stiff even at the accommodation price (at retail, the CH Precision P1 and its optional X1 power supply are $31,000 and $17,000, respectively, footnote 1), but I decided I could afford it, and bought it for myself as a 70th-birthday present. No, I can't hear as well as I did 30 years ago, but my listening is better than ever.
Maybe you've seen the widely circulated New Yorker cartoon: Two guys stand in front of a nicely drawn, tubed audio system, under which are shelves full of LPs. One guy says, "The two things that really drew me to vinyl were the expense and the inconvenience."
Ortofon (footnote 1), which turns 100 in 2018, launched the original Windfeld cartridge nearly a decade ago. Named for cartridge designer Per Windfeldwho had just retired at age 75, after 30 years with the companythat top-of-the-line cartridge cost $3400 at the time of its introduction.
At audio events held by the Los Angeles and Orange County Audio Society, I'm usually called on to speechify about one thing or another, or to roast an honoree at one of the Society's December Galas. But at the spring 2017 Los Angeles Audio Show, Bob Levi, the Society's president, quipped, "This is one awards dinner where you won't have to entertainso relax and enjoy!"
The death of a company founder, whether sudden or expected, often produces trauma. Whoever was tapped to replace the visionary Steve Jobs would be handed a thankless task, but at Apple, timid Tim Cook's so-far unimaginative performance as caretaker demonstrates the difficulties of succession. As Jobs beat Sony to the iPod, Cook let Amazon beat him to the Alexa.
The Reed 3P tonearm, which I reviewed in my April 2016 column, was an impressive piece of imaginative engineering and manufacturing prowess. I asked Reed's importer, Axiss Audio, if I could hold on to the 3PI was already planning to review Reed's Muse 3C turntable. I'm glad I didthe 3P ($5000) and 3C ($15,000) make an outstanding combination. (When the only complaint you have about a turntable is that the cable from its power jack to the power supply isn't long enough to reach the floor, you can be sure you're going to write a very positive review.)
Brooklyn-based Grado Labs has been in business for 64 years, manufacturing moving-iron phono cartridges, headphones, and, for a while, even a unipivot tonearm with a wooden armwand, as well as the sophisticated, S-shaped Signature Laboratory Standard arm.
It was great fun having our editorial coordinator, Jana Dagdagan, shoot a video profile of me in my listening room. As I write this, it's had more than 88,000 views. While the ratio of thumbs up to thumbs down has remained consistently around 10:1, some of the negative comments, particularly about our industry and about this magazine, do enrage me.
In February 2017, for the first time in almost 20 years, I visited Rega Research's factory in Southend-on-Sea, UK. I found a company that had added to its just-built factory a second building of the same size, had added an upper level within that space, and already was running out of space. Corridors and walkways were being used for assembly and storage.
In 1964, Shure Brothers shook up the cartridge market by introducing the original V-15 moving-magnet cartridge, which then cost $67, equivalent to about $530 today. It came packaged in a deluxe, wooden, jewelry-style boxcommon practice for today's cartridges, but back then unheard of.
At Stereophile, we don't generally allow Mulligansreview do-overs. Usually, we take a second look at a product we've reviewed only when the first sample turns out to have been defective, especially if it was damaged in shippingand we rarely do even that.
Peter Ledermann, founder and chief designer of Soundsmith, Inc., began his adventures in phono cartridges by reverse-engineering Bang & Olufsen's Moving Micro-Cross moving-iron cartridges for customers B&O had abandoned when it got out of the LP player business, and putting them into production. The B&O cartridges were of the direct plug-in variety; once they were no longer made, a worn or broken B&O cartridge would render a B&O turntable unusable.
Why am I once again falling down the rabbit hole of alternating current? A while back, I committed to listening to SMc Audio's AC Nexus power conditioner, designed by SMc founder Steve McCormack and distributed by dealer Hi Fi One.
Bergmann Audio (footnote 1) launched its first turntablethe Sindre, which featured an integrated tonearmin 2008. The Sindre's acrylic platter and tangential-tracking tonearm both floated on air bearings; it had an outboard motor controller, a separate air pump for the air bearings, and cost $21,000.