Stereophile Staff

Pay $350,000 for an amplifier?!?!! Michael Fremer takes a deep breath and plugs in the Wavac SH-833 monoblock power amplifier in order to hear for himself what he might get if he traded in his house. "When tmh's Jim Ricketts asked me if I wanted to review this eight-box assemblage," says MF, "the first thing I did was laugh at the ludicrousness of the situation. Then I said, 'Why the hell not?'"

From the January 2004 issue, Michael Fremer writes about the "SUV-like, limited-edition, 20th-anniversary" Musical Fidelity Tri-Vista kWP preamplifier & Tri-Vista kW Monobloc power amplifier. No doubt the "bank-vault-like" designs will get your attention, but as Fremer discovers, after you close your eyes, it's "sheer sonic pleasure."

Winter had just touched down in Santa Fe two days before the recording sessions were to begin, leading Wes Phillips to wonder if the damp air would wreak havoc with tuning. But he needn't have worried, writing that violinist Ida Levin "played with such intense concentration that sometimes she seemed about to levitate off the floor as she chased a melodic line into the ether." In Duet: And Two to Carry Your Soul Away, Ida Levin and John Atkinson join Wes Phillips in chronicling the recording from both musical and technical perspectives.

With multichannel DVD-Audio just around the corner, the surround-sound debate among audiophiles is starting anew. But how far have we come with surround sound in 30 years? J. Gordon Holt wrote "Bye Bye, Quadrifi?" back in 1971, in which he explored the same dilemmas faced by today's audiophile.