Vincent Belanger was named official musical ambassador of Audio Note UK as of February 1st, 2016. Two years and some months onward, I am curious not only as to what this position entails and how it came to be. To get down to the matter, I interviewed Vincent to find the answers to the questions and more, hopefully. […]

I love gear, music and people. I don’t like the prospect of growing old. I know it is an inevitability, but that doesn’t mean I have to accept it without reservation. Over the years I have attended many a hi-fi show as both attendee and journalist and participated in more hi-fi related online groups than […]

The Mundorf speaker is available as a package of parts and detailed plans for constructing the speaker boxes, not actually meant to be sold assembled. I’m sure many of our readers have heard of the West German company Mundorf in the context of highly regarded speaker crossover parts, such as capacitors, coils, resistors, complete crossover […]

  Respondent: Martin Grennall, Audio Note, Room 5226.   What’s the “elevator pitch” description of your company?    “Audio Note (UK) is Europe’s largest and most established manufacturer of ultra performance high fidelity equipment”. What makes your company and products special – how do they stand out from the pack?    No other audio company invests as […]

Read Part 1 Part 2: Eugene Bullard, Florence Embry Jones, Willie Lewis Valaida Snow and Bill Coleman This is the continuing story of how the Montmartre section of Paris was transformed into a booming Harlem-style Jazz district between the World Wars. Jazz arrived in Paris with the wild success of Josephine Baker in the mid-1920s. […]

The digital revolution of the 1980s that spawned the digital audio compact disc was catalyzed partly by new advancements in transistor miniaturization. Integrated circuits had finally emerged and empowered innovators to fit a laser generating and reading system along with the necessary codec circuits into a small box. The promise of this revolutionary digital audio […]

Text: Marc Silver Photography: Jeff Dunston   January 9, 2018: Today started out gloomy cold and rainy as I drove to the Sacramento International Airport for a 7:30 am flight to attend the 2018 CES in Las Vegas. This normally short flight turned into a half day of boredom and sitting. Though I have to […]

Over the past two years my go-to cables have been from Clarity Cable and TEO Audio, makers of the Liquid Cables. I have put together literally dozens of systems using these brands, from full looms of one brand to mixtures of both. Most of the time I use them in combination to improve the performance […]

  Respondent: Arthur Smuck, Destination Audio, Boardroom 3.   What’s the “elevator pitch” description of your company? Destination Audio makes the world’s finest horn loudspeakers and single-ended triode high fidelity equipment. We are the destination for lovers of music who admire beautiful design and require the highest quality craftsmanship.   What makes your company and […]

Lyra builds approximately 400 Etna and Atlas cartridges a year, with all final assembly and voicing done by a single individual; consequently, it is not unusual to wait for several months after placing an order before one’s cartridge is delivered. The cartridge I ordered, the Atlas SL, differs from the normal Lyra Atlas in having […]

Michael Stern, conductor Kansas City Symphony Jan Kraybill, organ   Side A 1.       Adadio – Allegro moderato (10:18) 2.       Poco adagio (9:43) Side B 1.       Allegro moderato – Presto (7:25) 2.       Maestoso – Allegro (8:01)   We’re living in the wake of the great vinyl generation of the 70s when labels poured their resources into […]

“In a class of its own” HiFi enthusiasts know their classes of solid state amps, the most commonly used ones being Class A behemoths that tend to run hot, Class A/B solid state designs that tend to run cooler and often yielding more watts per dollar, and Class D, or Switching (chip) amps, which are […]

Publisher’s note/warning: This article depicts French nightlife of the 1920s and contains one semi-nude image of personality of note on page 1.   Part 1: Josephine Baker, Ada Bricktop Smith, Alberta Hunter and Friends Here’s a once-upon-a-time story almost too outrageous to be true — how the Montmartre section of Paris was transformed into a […]

  The Pass Laboratory Xs Phono arrived after I have wrapped up my review of the Hartvig TT turntable system with the Ikeda IT-345CR1 tonearm and the 9TT moving-coil cartridge. The phono stage at that time was the Pass Labs XP-25, a $10,600, two-chassis phono stage that raised the splendor of vinyl playback to such […]

33rpm 180gram vinyl HQ Pressing Fidelio Music Inc. FALP025 45rpm 2-LP set Test Pressing Record Technology Inc. CAM5-4109, January 4, 2017 Remastering engineer: Bernie Grundman www.recordtech.com Side A: 1. Little Black Lake 4:09 2. Soothing Your Soul 3:30 3. Hoping Love Will Last 4:31 4. Dragonfly 3:25 5. Do What You Please 3:09 Side B: […]

EMM Labs firmware update to DA2 digital to analog converter Read the EMM Labs TX2 and DA2 Review. DA2 V2 Firmware Update Details: More than a year in development, the DA2’s DSP engine has been completely updated. The updated DA2 now has a newly redesigned digital signal path that is built from the ground up […]

Publisher’s note: In my upcoming Pass Laboratories Xs Phono preamplifier Review, I provide brief technical description of the unit for readers’ benefit. But no writing by me or any other reviewers can surpass insights and the sense of adventure directly from the pen of the phono stage’s own designer, Wayne Colburn. Hence, instead of quoting […]

A star of the audio industry has fallen. Arnie Nudell passed away from complications of pnuemonia and his family put him to rest on Monday, November 20, 2017, according to an account by Bill Leebens on his Facebook page. Generations of burgeoning audiophiles grew up reading about Arnie’s pioneering accomplishments, from his tenure at Infinity […]

It’s not Just a PC – It’s A Component Let’s start with some perspective. The Stage III power cords, especially the Proteus, the subject of this review, and its siblings at the top of the Stage III pantheon, are not for the faint of heart. We’re not talking about any other power cords that purport […]

Les Grandes Eaux Musicales De Versailles, Le Concert des Nations, Alia Vox AV9842, 2004 L’Orchestre De Louis XIII, 1601-1643, Alia Vox AV9824, 2002 Jean-Baptiste Lully, L’Orchestra Du Roi Soleil, Alia Vox AV9807, 1999 Jean-Philippe Rameau, L’Orchestra De Louis XV, Alia Vox AVSA9882, 2011 Dagogo readers fascinated by the Versailles cable television drama series will be […]

Ethernet: a family of computer networking technologies commonly used in local area networks (LAN), metropolitan area networks (MAN) and wide area networks (WAN). It was commercially introduced in 1980 and first standardized in 1983 as IEEE 802.3, and has since been refined to support higher bit rates and longer link distances. Over time, Ethernet has […]

The final part of my show report reveals the final two awards nomination, namely “Best System Performance” and the “Ultimate Cost No Object Design.” Both recipients come from the same room which were in Boardroom V. Since it is difficult to separate the components here I will say that CD sounded better here than anywhere […]

Entering Boardroom 3, I found my choice for “Best Industrial Design” in the Whammerdyne Truth 2a3 amplifier and Best Value in PureAudioProject loudspeakers. This is a large, 69lb $25,000 amplifier that puts out 4.2 watts per channel. Cables were handled by Verastarr cables leading to the very impressive PureAudioProject Quintet 15 Horn1, each speaker utilizes […]

My buddies in the local audiophile klatch get a glimpse of my angle on gear when I update them via email. They often are able to come by and listen. Once in a while they rib me, suggesting I’m being too effusive, but when they hear what I’m raving about they typically retract their criticism. […]

It figures, the one category of speaker I thought I could safely ignore through the years is the one I should have been paying closer attention to. I had concluded through listening events at shows, dealers and audiophile friends’ homes that lower power and high efficiency speakers were not the way to go to attain […]

The Anti-separate When I was growing up, my parents had a fancy Telefunken console audio system. It was an all-in-one system: speakers, AM and FM tuners, preamp, turntable and amp. My very first stereo was similarly an all-in-one unit. However, as I began to progress down the path of the audiophile, or should I say […]

This is the tale of a failed early stereo album that would have been the premier recording by a legendary San Francisco revival jazz group, Bob Mielke and The Bearcats Jazz Band, although it never issued a record. Recent recovery of the original master tape makes possible presentation of the extraordinary two-microphone “mid-side” stereo artifact […]

Eficion Another room that I quite enjoyed was Room 5205 using Eficion F250 speakers ($9,950), Plinius SA103 power amps ($10,150), Exemplar Audio eXception SE preamp ($5495), Oppo UPD-205 4k Audiophile disc player ($1,299) and Line Magnetic LM-502CA DAC ($1,800). I happen to own this DAC which sadly will soon be discontinued. This system had a […]

This commentary is a review of remarkable new technology from Jack Bybee. But it’s also a sketch of his intriguing concepts and the rarely profiled man behind them. I first met Bybee more than twenty years ago, adopting his AC filtering in the mid-1990s. I’ve followed his work with keen interest ever since, acquiring several […]

At some point after my Audio Note M10 review is written, a reviewer has to make the decision whether to purchase the review sample or return it to the manufacturer. For me, this is generally a fairly straightforward process as, other than with respect to digital pieces, I seldom make changes to my system. In […]