Going from being an audio hobbyist to a professional reviewer is like passing kidney stones in an emergency room staffed with <I>Playboy</I> bunnies: Not only can you <I>not</I> have what you want, but you don't even want it anymore. In fact, you begin to consciously associate desire with a blinding pain in your crotch.
Given Audio Note's early dominance of the low-power scene, you'd expect any loudspeaker from them to be a high-efficiency design, and you'd be right. What you wouldn't expect is how they go about doing it, since none of the 20-odd models in their speaker line appears to be much more than a plain-Jane two-way box, with nary a horn or whizzer in sight.
Not only is it possible for a thinking person to now and then drastically change his point of view, if for no other reason than the sake of change—if one wishes to prevent self-seriousness and various other forms of mental decay, it's probably an outright must. So it was that I recently began to wonder if everything I know about record players might be wrong.
Within a few years of entering the US market, Australian audio manufacturer Bruce Halcro Candy cemented his place in audio history by designing a amplifier that Paul Bolin said (<A HREF="http://www.stereophile.com/solidpoweramps/683">in the October 2002 <I>Stereophile</I></A>) "could well justify the creation of a 'Class A+' amplifier category in 'Recommended Components'," and the low distortion characteristics of which prompted editor John Atkinson, a man who has elevated the craft of understatement to a high art, to reach for the word <I>astonishing</I>. That was the Halcro dm58 monoblock ($29,990/pair), which has only recently been superseded by the Halcro dm78.
<I>One should be able to see that things are hopeless and yet be determined to make them otherwise.</I>—F. Scott Fitzgerald
My stepfather wore only second-hand clothes as a child and never understood why anyone would deliberately wash the color out of his new dungarees. By the same token, the senior members of our hobby, many of whom recall with fondness the transistor's advent, don't understand why anyone would now wish to throw away their newfound power. Some people deserve to be blessed for their point of view, even as the world moves away from it.
The Hartleys I wrote about <A HREF="http://www.stereophile.com/artdudleylistening/106listen">last month</A> may be the loudspeaker drivers that time forgot, but the venerable Lowthers of Sidcup, England, reign supreme as the horseshoe crabs of the loudspeaker world: strange, ungainly things that have scarcely changed since the days when Franz Schmidt and Robert Johnson walked the earth. Literally.
There was once an Englishman named H.A. Hartley, who was a contemporary of H.G. Baerwald, P.G. Voigt, P.K. Turner, and other men whose first two names are lost to us. Hartley was a capable designer and audio theorist, not to mention a gifted lecturer and writer—his literary achievements include a book on astrology (footnote 1), of all things—and he's often credited with coining the expression <I>high fidelity</I>. Most important of all, in 1928 H.A. Hartley teamed up with the aforementioned P.K. Turner to create an audio manufacturing company known as Hartley Products, Ltd. The Hartley company made electronics and loudspeakers, the latter of which included full-range coaxial drivers using energized field coils and, later on, quite powerful permanent magnets—just like their countrymen at Lowther Loudspeakers, Ltd.
Analog maven Wally Malewicz is no stranger to these pages. His first commercial product, a cartridge-alignment tool called the WallyTractor, became a hit among the vinyl cognoscenti after Michael Fremer wrote about it in "Analog Corner" in the November 1998 <I>Stereophile</I>, and Malewicz's full kit of Wally Analog Tools was the joint winner of our <A HREF="http://www.stereophile.com/features/724/index5.html">Accessory of the Year</A> award in 2002.