Jason Victor Serinus

I admit that I didn't get what the Fink Team of Essen, Germany was all about until I met the man himself, Karl-Heinz Fink, who is well known within the industry for designing many important loudspeakers marketed by other companies. Fink, who also owns the Epos loudspeaker brand, began his own engineering company 40 years ago. Then, about seven years ago, the late and revered Ken Ishiwata of Marantz asked him to build a big speaker for Marantz. Out of that came the Borg, a two-way system with an AMT tweeter that was launched five years ago. The Borg Episode 2 (€30,000/pair), which is marketed by the Fink Team, replaces the original model.

The Nonesuch Records CD Steve Reich: Pulse / Quartet arrived with its sonic bonus unheralded. With no MQA designation on the album cover or disc, few would have known of its MQA provenance had not posts appeared on Facebook that, when inserted in a player capable of decoding MQA, it can deliver high-resolution MQA.

The first and only time I heard a live performance of Mahler's five-movement Symphony No.7, from Michael Tilson Thomas and the San Francisco Symphony, I left Davies Symphony Hall confused. The bad press that the 70+ minute work has received for over a century, mainly for its innate ambiguity, convinced me that it was, at best, a problematic work—one that Mahler might have eventually revised had he lived long enough. But after listening to DSD128 files of Iván Fischer and the Budapest Festival Orchestra's new recording of the symphony for Channel Classics, released March 29 in SACD format, I've come to consider it a somewhat shy flower that puts on a brave face and remains in the shadows until a strong conductor coaxes it into the light and convinces it to share all of its bloom and fragrance.

Moon by Simaudio of Quebec showed its two newest slim-box Evolution Series components. The first, the Moon Evolution Series 760A dual-mono, class-A/B balanced power amplifier ($8000), is "conservatively rated" at 130Wpc into 8 ohms, and boasts a zero global feedback circuit, proprietary output transistors, and class-A output to 5 watts. The company's Costa Koulisakis claims of its unrelated Evolution Series 820S power supply ($8000)—intended for use with the Evolution Series' 740P preamplifier, 610LP and 810LP phono preamplifiers, and 650D and 750D CD/DAC transports—"We've never done a better power supply in our lives." Together with other Evolution series components, the system produced notably spacious sound.