It ain't the stuff you don't know that trips you up, it's the stuff you know that ain't so. When, at the 2007 CEDIA Expo, I encountered Klipsch's startlingly new Palladium P-39F loudspeaker ($20,000/pair), I was impressed by its looks. Tall (56"), as beautifully contoured as the prow of a canoe, and clad in striking zebra-stripe plywood, the P-39F is possibly the best-looking speaker Klipsch has ever made.
I've been reading Daniel Levitan's The World in Six Songs: How the Musical Brain Created Human Nature, which makes pretty strong claims for the importance of those tones in time. (Neil McCormick conducted an interesting interview with Levitan in The Telegraph.)
After Fred Kaplan reviewed Boulder Amplifiers' 810 line preamplifier and 860 power amplifier for the December 2007 Stereophile, John Atkinson requested that I listen to the 860 in my own system for a while. Never having reviewed any Boulder kit, I was curious.
I stayed up late last on April 2late for me, anyway: 11pm. I watched the last episode of ER in real time. (Hang in there, peeps, there will be an audio point after the jump.)
You've seen the ads from YG Acoustics: "The best loudspeaker on Earth. Period." It sounds arrogant. But come onhigh-end audio has never been a field of shrinking violets. When Ivor Tiefenbrun of Linn announced that the turntable, not the cartridge or loudspeakers, dictated the sound quality of an audio system, that was a man convinced that he was right and taking on the world. And was Krell's Dan D'Agostino any less arrogant when, in 1980, he introduced the KSA-100 power amplifier? In a world where small size and high wattage were the norms, didn't it take a pair of big brass 'uns to bring out a honkin' huge slab of metal that put out only 100Wpc?
As an audiophile, one of my core beliefs has always been that, once they have heard better sounding music, everybody would want it. That's how it worked with me: My friend Bill sat me down in front of his Quad '57s and cued David Bowie's Heroes on the turntable and once I heard all of those new sounds coming out of my beloved old LP, I was a changed man.
The Telegraph has a slide show of 21 previously unpublished photographs of the Beatles and Rolling Stones, taken mostly by their US tour manager Bob Bonis.
Last week I participated in Music Matters IV, the latest in a series of evening events at Definitive Audio in Seattle. It was my first time, so I didn't know what to expect.