At the extreme high end—Halcro, VTL, Boulder, etc.—reviewers gush about a lack of character. If you're paying $20,000, you want a preamplifier or power amp to disappear. At those price points we also want extreme, unfatiguing resolution, and noise that's well below what most people would consider audible. But at those prices, an absence of character is definitely something most people aspire to.
Nelson Pass is a consummate engineer, but he got his start in physics, earning a bachelor's degree from UC Davis. As he worked on his degree, he was already an audio designer, focusing on loudspeakersgreat training for a designer of audio amplifiers. Soon, in 1974, he cofounded Threshold Audio with René Besne, of audio and folk-dancing fame; their goal was to build electronics, partly because the field is less competitiveit's harder than building speakers.
If you're after an elegant classic look and a compact form factor, you'd be hard-pressed to do much better than the Luxman NeoClassic series, including the SQ-N150 integrated amplifier ($2795) and the D-N150 CD player ($2595). Both are new, and both are now shipping.
Late on Friday at the New York Audio Show, I found myself explaining to an audiophile friend, also in attendance, my reaction to the big room sponsored by ESD Acoustic, and to their huge, extravagant, ostentatious five-way horn systemthe one my colleagues Sasha Matson and Ken Micallef described in detail, and about which my colleague Herb Reichert contrasted his favorable experience here in New York with his unfavorable experience at the 2018 Munich show.
No hi-fi is an island entire of itself; every component is a piece of the system, a part of the mains.John Donne, from The Compleat Audiophile, 1623
Around the time I took over as Stereophile's editor, I bought a Peloton, the internet-enabled stationary exercise bike. It was a lifesaver during the pandemic, when gyms were closed; despite the poor audio quality and the awful music many of the instructors choose, it's good, diverting exercise.
"Imagine a lake," reads the website of the Noise Pollution Clearinghouse (NPC) , "filled with semi-tractor-trailer trucks, magically skimming across the water.
The most notable aspect of Benchmark Media Systems' DAC3 HGC ($2195), which I favorably reviewed in the November 2017Stereophile (footnote 1), is its low noise floor. John Atkinson's measurements corroborated Benchmark's claim that the DAC3 is capable of "at least" 21-bit performance. While significantly less than the theoretical potential of a 24-bit data format, 21 bits is still the state of the art, and corresponds to a dynamic rangethe ratio of the highest achievable digital-domain volume to the DAC's internal noiseof 128dB. That's well above the dynamic range that most power amplifiers can achieve. A good-measuring high-end solid-state amplifier is likely to have a dynamic rangethe highest attainable ratio of signal to noiseof about 100dB ref. its maximum power.
Recently, I found myself in an email conversation with two colleagues on the nature of reproduced audio. How should we think about it? The conversation was provoked by a "hybrid" (live and online) presentation of the Pacific Northwest section of the Audio Engineering Society called "What Does 'Accurate' Even Mean?" The presenter was James D. "JJ" Johnston, a distinguished researcher in the field of perceptual audio coding and a co-inventor of MP3.
Among many other honors, Johnston was selected to present the Richard Heyser Memorial Lecture at the 2012 AES conventionan honor shared by our own John Atkinson, who had given that lecture the previous year and was one of the participants in this email conversation. The other was Tom Fineso, it was me and two sound engineers.