Long weekends…really long weekends. It comes as no surprise. Their hype and advance marketing make their impending … a foregone conclusion. For the attendee it is a chance to get away, embrace the hobby, and marvel/revel in all that is on offer for 3 days. For the industry: manufacturers, distributors, dealers and members of the […]

Publisher’s note: Every product comes with an Owner’s Manual to familiarize the customer with its operations. These documents are often written in a dry style and to the point. But once in a while, we come across vast sections in Manual that reads like a smooth presentation of ideas and juicy description of brilliant technologies, […]

Also read Doug’s Exogal Comet DAC Review (2015) and Exogal Ion PowerDAC Review (2016) When my Dutch friend and ski instructor, Marty, taught me downhill skiing I was quite intense and asked him to take me to successively more challenging slopes. Starting at age 27, in three brief seasons I went from novice to skiing […]

Debuting its UIA-2 Platinum loudspeaker system at the 2018 California Audio Show, Unisinger is registered in California while its speakers are engineered and made in Dalian, a port city in northeastern China. Dr. Rong Zhang, Unisinger CEO in charge of operations and direction of the company, is a Stanford Ph.D. in Chemical Physics (1990), and […]

Publisher’s note: Bolden opens on May 3rd in select theaters. This column marks the release of the motion picture Bolden, directed by Daniel Pritzker with music by Wynton Marsalis.  Like them, I’ve gone in search of the true story of the first known jazz man and his legend.   The First Jazz Celebrity Buddy Bolden […]

Publisher’s note: Announcing a new Series, “Reign of the Mini-Monitors.” Loudspeaker systems pressurize the space between the speakers themselves and the listener. Placing large, multi-driver speakers in a small room curtails the system’s potential, while forcing a pair of small speakers to play in a large room exposes their limitations. Using the right size of […]

Respondent: Rick Craig, Selah Audio, Room 5108, 2019 California Audio Show. What’s the “elevator pitch” description of your company? We design and manufacture speaker kits and assembled systems for home audio and theater. What makes your company and products special – how do they stand out from the pack? Selah Audio speakers are custom built […]

Also read The Real Billie Holiday, Part One – 1930s Also read The Real Billie Holiday, Part Two – 1940s This profile of Billie Holiday is presented in three chapters covering the 1930s, ‘40s and ‘50s respectively.  She’s quoted from interviews and her famed autobiography, Lady Sings the Blues.  Representative recordings, podcast clips and readings […]

Also see Part 1  

Also see Part 2  

It was bound to happen. Eventually I would be my own man and stop being a slave to my preconceptions and long held beliefs. Stubbornness can only go so far until it’s simply no longer viable, no longer enviable, and no longer attractive. What was I thinking? For too long I held that the inclusion […]

REALITY ‘I am not a Starfleet commander, or T.J. Hooker. I don’t live on Starship NCC-1701, or own a phaser. And I don’t know anybody named Bones, Sulu, or Spock.’ – William Shatner After a certain number of encounters with rabid fans blurring the line between reality and fantasy, it becomes necessary to set the […]

At the eighth annual (2018) California Audio Show, Benjamin Zwickel, founder of Mojo Audio, enjoyed discussing the technologies he incorporated into his products at his ‘quiet room’ booth in the HeadMasters Auditioning Room. The level of energy he imparted was palpable and infectious. For attendees who crave details and industry insider insights, Ben was the […]

Also read The Real Billie Holiday, Part One – 1930s and Part Three – 1950s This profile of Billie Holiday is presented in three chapters covering the 1930s, 1940s and 1950s respectively.  She’s quoted from interviews and her famed autobiography, Lady Sings the Blues.  Representative recordings, podcast clips and interviews add detail and perspective to […]

2018 was a year where, between my law firm, my ailing parents and my not-for-profit activities, I was working 75-hour weeks and I had little time to write reviews. However, I never stopped checking out new components to try and further improve my system. I’ve recently started a phased retirement, and am finally able to […]

 Also read The Real Billie Holiday, Part Two – 1940s and Part Three – 1950s   This profile of Billie Holiday is presented in three chapters covering the 1930s, 1940s and 1950s respectively.  She’s quoted from interviews and her famed memoir, Lady Sings the Blues.  Representative recordings, podcast clips and readings add detail and perspective […]

An Antenna No More! This past year numerous readers and followers of mine on Twitter and Facebook continually asked me to recommend a budget phono stage, and to this end I had acquired the following phono stages: Parasound ZPhono Cambridge Audio Duo NAD PP2e Musical Fidelity V90-LPS Rega Fono Mini Pro-Ject Audio Phono Box DC […]

Where it all started It always helps to know where it all started. Thomas Edison invented the phonograph in 1877. His invention was able to record sounds onto tinfoil wrapped around a rotating cylinder. It used a steel needle attached to a resonator mounted at the end of a horn, all of which moved across […]

Tracks: 1. Dreaming of the crash 2. Cornfield chase 3. Dust 4. Day One 5. Stay 6. Message from home 7. The Wormhole 8. Mountains 9. Afraid of time 10. A place among the stars 11. Running out 12. I’m going home 13. Coward 14. Detach 15. S.T.A.Y. 16.Where we’re going   The film critics’ […]

Publisher’s note: ‘Design Notes” is created to feature the informative and well written documentary inside the User Manual of products to the readership, to offer knowledge and viewpoints that we believe will benefit and even entertain us. Every product comes with an Owner’s Manual to familiarize the customer with its operations. These documents are often […]

Publisher’s note: Every product comes with an Owner’s Manual to familiarize the customer with its operations. These documents are often written in a dry style and to the point. But once in a while, we come across vast sections in Manual that reads like a smooth presentation of ideas and juicy description of brilliant technologies, […]

Parasound maintains a relatively long history in Hi-Fi. The brand has been around for decades and while still going strong, reliably and dependably, it manages to do so without a great deal of fanfare. Workmanlike is a word that has been used to describe their products; rugged and sturdy, they soldier on. I joined the […]

Writing this article takes me back to when I spent inordinate hours on opamp rolling DACs. I dabbled in it initially in an effort to see whether swapping them had any appreciable effect. That turned into a veritable extended study, with dozens of hours spent comparing first solid-state opamps and then discrete opamps from three […]

I was at a Hi-Fi show in the Fall where, as I walked down one corridor, I heard the same band, playing the same track and not wholly in sync with each other from four successive rooms. It dawned on me at that moment that there had to be more than the apparent restrictive canon […]

Let’s get my bias against higher gauge speaker cables out in the open from the start. I am not a fan of higher AWG (thinner conductor) speaker cables. Nor am I impressed with higher AWG power cords. Audiophiles have their preferences, and mine is toward lower AWG (heavier conductor) speaker cables and power cables. Bill […]

Also read: Frank “Big Boy” Goudie: Jazz On Three Continents  Part 2 of 3, South America 1939-46 and Europe 1946-56 Frank “Big Boy” Goudie (b. 1899 Louisiana – d. 1964 California) has been almost completely overlooked by jazz history, a mere footnote until recently.  A skilled musician, his career paralleled the history of jazz itself: origins […]

Just say Allo to Digital Audio Motivation is a wondrous thing, as is procrastination, and if you get the timing just right, one saves you from the other. It’s at this crossroads that I find myself having to write about Allo’s USBridge device and respond to a letter forwarded to my publisher. Let’s start with […]

Can you buy an SACD for a single track? The Best SACD Track ever? With rising prices for everything from used LPs to new SACDs and downloads, can you really justify buying an album just for a single track? I guess all audiophiles have bought many discs to get their favorite track, just to find […]

Earlier this year I wrote a piece contrasting a pair of USB devices that respectively market themselves as specialists in re-clocking, re-generating and recovering. As it happens iFi products have been making a bit of a splash and in writing up one of their portable DACs earlier this year I became more familiar with the […]

Finding a dedicated and reasonably priced CD transport in 2018 is no easy task. Indeed, it is difficult enough to find CD players nowadays dedicated to playing Compact Disc.  Before I continue a question that needs to be addressed, especially for younger readers as the CD is almost becoming the relic of LP, what is […]