Jason Victor Serinus

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LAAS: Jason’s First Impressions
LAAS 2017
Jason Victor Serinus  |  Jun 03, 2017  |  3 comments
As the second wave of registrants stood in multiple lines in the lobby of the Sheraton Gateway Los Angeles on the morning of Friday, June 2, the Los Angeles Audio Show was already off to a promising start. And what a promise it was. The night before show's open, when I encountered the force behind LAAS, Bob Levi of the Los Angeles & Orange County Audio Society, in a hotel elevator, he told me that pre-registration had already topped 7500 people. That number, it seems, has set new records for attendance at an audio show in Southern California. It also undoubtedly sets a pre-registration record for any first-time high-end audio show in the US that welcomes the general public.
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Lab 12's Tube Preamp & Naya Hybrid Integrated Prototype
Munich 2023
Jason Victor Serinus  |  May 27, 2023  |  0 comments
I was dashing past hundreds of exhibits in the four huge ground-floor exhibit halls of the MOC when Lab 12's exhibit caught my eye. On the recommendation of Herb Reichert, my audiophile buddy, Scott, bought the Lab 12 tube preamp shown above with Stratos Vichos, Lab 12's owner and designer, and forever sings its praises.
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Lamm and Friends Think Big
CES 2018
Jason Victor Serinus  |  Jan 11, 2018  |  7 comments
Given the dramatic drop in the number of high-end audio exhibits at CES, only two companies chose to occupy the huge, high-ceilinged suites on the Venetian Hotel's 35th floor. The first, Lamm Industries, from the quiet little hamlet of Brooklyn, NY (where John Atkinson also lives), threw caution to the winds with a system whose total retail price was $649,440.
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Lamm Goes For Big
CES 2016
Jason Victor Serinus  |  Jan 12, 2016  |  0 comments
Far more sonically successful was the larger Lamm room. There, $266,950 worth of Lamm components, including the new LL 1.1 Signature line level preamplifier ($45,390/pair) and ML3 Signature SET mono power amplifiers ($139,490/pair), joined the big Kharma Exquisite Midi Grand speakers with F-drivers ($225,000/pair), a mostly not-in-production EMT/SME/ZYX turntable set-up, inexpensive Sanus racks ($840 total), and Kubala-Sosna Elation series cabling ($130,600 total) to draw sweeter, warmer, and more accurate sound from the same LP tracks.
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Lamm's New Phono Preamplifier
CES 2014
Jason Victor Serinus  |  Jan 15, 2014  |  0 comments
The complete Lamm system on the 35th floor, whose total retail cost, including $216,070 for the Lamm components, $120,000 for the Verity Audio Lohengrin II S speakers, and $100,000 for the Tech DAS Airforce 1 turntable, along with Kubala-Sosna cabling, was a mere $670,071. But my brief was to cover amplification and shown only in passive display was Lamm Industries' new LP2.1 class-A, dual-monophonic tube phono preamp ($8590 regular, $8890 deluxe.)
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LampizatOr and Mosaic
CES 2014
Jason Victor Serinus  |  Jan 18, 2014  |  0 comments
First, today's language lesson: lampa = vacuum tube (or a valve) in Polish. Hence the name LampizatOr for the young Polish company whose GM70 SET 22W tube monoblock integrated amplifiers ($8000/pair) are point-to-point wired in Poland, and whose motivating force, Lukasz Fikus, seems intent on causing quite a stir on audio forums with statements such as, "I DECLARE universal war against high-end equipment manufacturers: CD player, amplifier, cables, speakers—NO MORE CRAP."
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Larsen Intrigues
CES 2014
Jason Victor Serinus  |  Jan 18, 2014  |  0 comments
John Larsen was on hand to show off his eye-catching Swedish-made Larsen 8 loudspeakers with SD feet ($6995/pair), which are distributed by Audio Skies. Meant to be placed against the wall for full control and bass response, they can descend to 23 or 24Hz, and ascend 20kHz. "They're designed to play with the room, not against the room," Larsen explained of a design that claims to eliminate distortion-creating first reflections. The angle of the tweeter also creates a wide soundstage that was given a run for its money on Telarc's recording of Tchaikovsky's 1812 Overture.
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LAST Seeks New Ownership
News
Jason Victor Serinus  |  Oct 14, 2009  |  0 comments
The first chapter in the history of the LAST Factory, manufacturer of LAST Record Preservative for LPs, is coming to a close. After shepherding for 30 years the Livermore, California–based company he founded, LAST's president, Walter Davies, is retiring to devote his energies to still photography. With Jan and Ric Mancuso, of Trade Secrets Consulting, Davies is looking for a buyer to keep the company in operation.
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Laufer Teknik Wows
AXPONA 2013
Jason Victor Serinus  |  Mar 15, 2013  |  1 comments
Both at and post-show, Buffer (aka L. Langdon Ergmann, Jr.) was charmingly apologetic. Having read my "As We See It," "There's No Business without Show Business," in the April issue of Stereophile just hours before I walked into his Laufer Teknik room, he knew that his inability to supply a list of components and prices, add a track to his Memory Player from one of my six USB sticks, or even tell me what music was playing on his own music server (as in "We don't have an internet connection, so we can't identify the track") had left him a prime candidate for the Duncecap Dealer of the Day award.
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Le Son System Two
CES 2014
Jason Victor Serinus  |  Jan 15, 2014  |  0 comments
A second system which was not playing included Merlin Audio Lab's Korean-designed, Swiss-made 214 preamplifier.
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