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 […]

The systems that most attracted me at RMAF this year were those based around highly efficient speakers driven by electronics with very short, simple circuit paths, almost always single-ended triodes driven by choke coupled tube power supplies. I was also quite taken with a number of turntables, particularly Steve Dobbins’ “The Beat”. This is not […]

The Cable Company (retailer) Music Interface Technologies This year, Gavin Fisher of MIT and his colleagues continued educating audiophiles of the difference between MIT and generic cables. In a system comprising the Electrocompaniet EMP-1 SACD/DVD-A/CD player ($9,990), the EC4.8 preamplifier ($4,990), a pair of the AW400 monoblock amplifiers ($6,250 each) and the Chapman T8 floorstanding […]

As audiophiles many of us have products we have a very particular appreciation of. It could be a beaten up old valve amp found in a parent’s attic that utterly transforms music or a long desired component that can only be obtained by mortgaging the family home. Although some take this interest a step too […]

It’s been my pleasure to own and review several of Allen Wright’s Vacuum State GmbH products. Some of his most famous products have been his upgrades for the early Sony SACD models, the SACD-1, SCD-777 ES, and DVP- 9000ES. A Level 7 upgraded SCD-777 or SACD-1 with a Uber Clock may be the best digital […]

There are very few components that cross over from archiving/professional to high-end audio. The most used cartridge by archivers and restorers is probably the Stanton 500. Yet, you rarely find anyone “serious” about audio using them in a high-end system. A similar line in the sand applies to the turntables used by DJs and archivists. […]

It isn’t often one gets to review a nearly complete system and I jumped at the opportunity to do so, and there is good reason. Reviewing a single component, a speaker, a CD Player, an amplifier, etc. involves certain guess work, and that magic touch it brings to one system might not appear in another. […]

The great audio hobby is not like any other. Yes, it can very easily deplete your lifelong savings and drive you mad in finding the best that you can afford, but it is also the only hobby I know of that can induce a state of nirvana via beautiful sound and heavy use of electronics. […]

I have spent 41 of my 56 years looking for an audio system that sounds so much like music that I rarely think about how it sounds, but find myself immersed in the music I am listening to. I have often put together systems that do some things exceptionally well and thus you find yourself […]

My interest in the Ypsilon DAC 100 from Greece stemmed from several factors. First, its primary technological makeup was very similar to that of the $49k Audio Note UK’s DAC5 Special, my reference for over seven years. For instance, the Greek DAC uses the 24-bit Burr Brown PCM1704K, a chipset from the late 90s and […]

Xact Audio (retailer) In this room permeated with the all-alluring Allnic tube electronics, such as the H3000V variable LCR phono ($13,900), the L3000 Linestage ($10,900), and the M3000 140-watts monoblocks ($12,900/pair), one gets the sense of extraordinary bandwidth via the tubes. The MBL 111F ($39,500/pair) featured the radial tweeter that complimented the unusually resolving Allnics […]

Sinatra and Sextet Live in Paris Mobile Fidelity 180g No. of Discs: 2 Tracks: 1. Introduction – Charles Aznavour 2. Goody Goody 3. Imagination 4. At Long Last Love 5. Moonlight in Vermont 6. Without a Song 7. Day In – Day Out 8. I’ve Got You Under My Skin 9. I Get a Kick […]

Introduction Cable reviews are a very tricky endeavor. In the best of situations, a well-chosen and placed interconnect or power cord can provide that touch of magic to a system in order to bring it to new heights of musical enjoyment, or just simply provide that extra measure of quieting to bring a system to […]

Inevitably, the choices made by a cable designer, conductor type, dielectric, spacing, geometry and shielding, and how these are balanced, determine the electrical properties and thus the cable’s sound. Stage III Concepts has been designing and meticulously hand crafting audio cables since 1996. My initial experience with their cabling was the purchase of one of […]

I should take a moment at the start of this review to explain the name change of the Allnic preamp formerly known as the L4000. It is now called the L3000. According to David Beetles of Hammerton Audio, Allnic’s North America importer, the name change was to facilitate product price grouping and natural mating. Allnic […]

Speaker design is like rocket science; really, I’m being serious! The most failed high-end endeavor has got to be speakers. From the extremely inefficient and difficult-to-drive, to classic and avant-garde horns, speakers are all over the design map and price points; and, all have failings. Because we have such wildly differing rooms, hearing, prejudices and […]

The Company In my review of their speaker cable I said, Auditorium 23 was not “founded”, in the common sense of the word. Rather, it just sort of came into being through the principals’ enjoyment of music in the early 80s. They started with a journey into the past where they learned much about what […]