Audio Note UK Audio Note UK was showing at the T.H.E. Show at Flamingo. I stopped by on the first day and wish I had a chance to return later in the show. Audio Note now has a new TT2 turntable and custom designed tone arm made in Austria. The table will be available in […]

Immersing myself in the CES/T.H.E. show environment again this year, I was like a fish swimming in water – right at home! At the end of three days of running the halls of the two hotels I felt as if I could do another three days. That’s how much I love exploring audio equipment and […]

It happens in the blink of an eye, in a flash, at the speed of light – the signal is sent, the music plays, and the ears are awash in waves of sound. The soul is stirred, and the mind feels… Free? Empowered? Thrilled? What is it like to hear sound conveyed at the speed […]

Your “Old Beatnik” fell into a bit of luck in November. My wife had to go to work in Paris for a whole week, in fact she would be there for eight days. Well I couldn’t imagine not be a gentleman and going along to keep her happy. Of course, while she had three free […]

Bob Dylan The Original Mono Recordings Label: Legacy Genre: Folk Rock Box Set of nine 180 gram LP Bob Dylan needs no introduction, and neither do most of these records. Pretty much this is folk music; but even 40 years removed from their original release, these albums still hold up musically, sonically, and have a […]

In the first part of “Pushing the Art of Listening to Vinyl” I shared with you about the remarkably lifelike sounding Shindo 301 Vinyl Playback System. It’s my goal to share with you in this three-part series of articles the system I have found to play vinyl in an incredibly lifelike manner. This has been […]

The much maligned transistor, the object of disdain and ridicule from audiophiles and musicians, doesn’t deserve its reputation. Most “transistor sound” is a result of multiple cascaded gain stages, electrolytic coupling caps and overuse of feedback. For some reason, electrical engineers think that just because they can get .0001 % distortion with feedback, then it […]

UPDATE 1/18/2011 Further investigation into op-amp rolling the Minimax DAC has been fruitful. I obtained these custom National Semiconductor op-amps for the EE DAC per recommendation from Chris and Melissa Owen of Clarity Cable, whose cables I am currently reviewing, and I consider this to be another efficacious improvement. This newest op-amp set is one […]

In this second part of my review of the Aural Symphonics family of cables, I will be describing the progression of effect each Aural Symphonics “Chrono” interconnect has wrought on the sound of my system and the final cumulative effect. I will also be describing the final effect of sound after introducing the Aural Symphonics […]

I was a fairly early adopter to SACD. I had struggled with redbook CD, finding only the Audio Note UK units really to my liking. I guess mostly I am a vinyl lover, but I was excited about what I was reading about the Sony SCD-1 and 777s. In 2000, I purchased a Sony SACD […]

As many of you know I am a big fan of the finer SET amps and of speakers that do not use crossovers. These two facts, along with the fact that the Turning Point Audio SD-X2s are 94 dB efficient, makes them immediately a speaker that I am interested in. So, it was with great […]

After attending CES 2010 and being impressed with both Audio Note rooms, I decided that I really needed to bring in one of Peter Qvortrup’s digital front-ends. Audio Note digital is most famous for its unique design in that all of their players use no digital or analog brick wall filters and no oversampling. Virtually […]

It would seem to me that the audiophiles on the other side of the pond have had PMC to themselves for far too long. This should not be the case. Especially when you consider the entire pedigree of action packed, star studded, blockbuster Hollywood soundtracks, sometimes those being the best part about the movie, that […]

by: Industry To all of my friends and colleagues: I’d like to wish you a warm and happy holiday season and take this moment to thank you for your friendship. Ours is a small industry, comprised of people who are motivated by a passion for music. We’re an unreasonable bunch with extremely high expectations chasing […]

I fell in love with music like most people as a child; in fact I think you have to be forced to not love music. Truth is most people need music. There are some who become too busy, too serious, too macho, or maybe somehow come to think of it as frivolous, but those people […]

As 2010 comes to a close it is perhaps timely to remind ourselves that it was a year that brought several notable anniversaries with it in the history of audio. Of course most wouldn’t be expected to get any attention even in the audio press but even the 90th anniversary of the first public radio […]

This morning I wandered into the kitchen in no particular rush. I grabbed my glasses and slipped them on, surveying the back yard. The scene caught my attention. Early winter light filtered through the clouds low on the horizon, a birch tree standing in the foreground laden with tiny droplets of water. The glow from […]

Crescent/John Coltrane Quartet 180g 45rpm 2LP Brand/Label/Format: ORG/Original Recordings Group/Impulse 180g 45rpm LP (2LP) Mastered by Bernie Grundman from the Original Analog Master Tapes Produced by: Bob Thiele Engineered and mixed by: Rudy Van Gelder This 1964 recording has been reissued by ORG as a limited edition double 45rpm set. It features one of jazz’s […]

This is the first time I’ve visited the Aaudio Imports’ Parker, Colorado headquarters in the winter months, and in my Californian heart I never thought I would once again wake up to a snowy morning. I lived in a snow-and-ice-laden Chicago for years before moving to California in the early 1990s, and snow in the […]

Pay Not To Play I would pay good money to have Kevin Hayes, owner and designer at VAC, listen to an amplifier. If you purchase a Valve Amplification Company product you are paying Kevin to listen to your product extensively before you use it, and you should be elated. He listens to everypiece of gear […]

For the early part of my audiophile pilgrimage, I, like most other audiophiles my age, listened to push-pull class A/B amps. In the mid to early eighties, I discovered class A transistor amps, and then in the mid to late eighties I came upon the Beard P35, a wonderful little pure class A push-pull tube […]

I am now four articles behind in my “second job” of writing audio reviews. In order to catch up I decided to write up the review that would be the quickest and least complicated, and this is it. However, and more importantly, I’m doing this review first because it’s by far the biggest bang for […]

  Life’s a Journey The first time I ever heard a Garrard 301 that I know of anyway, was when I was seventeen and a freshman at Baylor. I was trying to get a part time job at a Stereo Shop in Waco, Texas. When I entered the store their main system was playing. It […]

Somewhere along the line there is the “What if…,” person. Things tend to get done the same way to the point of entrenchment, a seemingly unshakable similitude. It’s no different for audiophiles who routinely assemble source, amplification and speakers, stringing them together with cables. Then someone gets the idea, “What if…,” and with that vision […]

A New Standard After an experience like that of direct comparison between passive and active crossover modes of the DSW realization dawns that this speaker can be made to work supremely well with virtually any set of components. With the ability to craft a personalized crossover there is no condition for which there is not […]

The Making of An Outlier Speaker The DSW brings three ideal conditions to one design – Build Quality, Driver Selection and Configuration, and an Active Crossover. Though some may disagree with the selection of internal wiring or the tension clips used to connect leads, the execution of the assembly is expertly. If the criterion for […]

Introduction Prior to purchasing a McCormack UDP-1 that was specially updated by Conrad Johnson, badged the “deluxe”, Conrad Johnson’s products had been well outside of my scope of interests in all things audio. Then last year, solely on the basis of verbal recommendations from some close friends and on the strengths of the qualities of […]

I received a large number of MIT cables to evaluate, including power cables, power conditioners, speaker cables, RCA and XLR interconnects, and digital cable. There is no way to do justice to this wide range of cables in a single review, so I decided to break this up into two separate but related reviews: first, […]

Classic Audio Loudspeakers Classic Audio was demonstrating their T-3.4 Project high efficiency horn system which uses an all-wood 300 HTZ radial tractrix horn coupled with a beryllium-fitted compression driver, two 15” woofers (one firing to the front, the other to the floor), a 4” beryllium diaphragm loaded into a field coil compression driver and finally […]

Have you ever turned a corner to be face to face unexpectedly with someone you find so amazingly attractive that it makes your stomach go soft and your legs feel weak? Of course you have, we see people everyday we find physically attractive, but we learn to block it out. Until, without any notice, without […]