Intro Is there a more well-known company in audio than McIntosh? Sure, Wilson Audio, Krell and Quad are the stuff of legends, but those companies are for hard-core audiophiles; the masses think hi-fi means Bose (egads!) or, if they’re a bit more knowledgeable, will think of McIntosh as the defining brand of “hi-fi.” However, it’s […]

Many pioneers of the audio industry have borne the brunt of a reluctant and skeptical customer base, and have faced the risk of rejection bravely. If lucky, they also stand to reap their trailblazing visions. In those days, unlike the vastly advanced iterations in today’s cable products, high-end audio cables were just beginning to replace […]

Let me just say it in the first sentence: the GINI iTube is a nifty product. It looks nifty – in fact, it looks like a big white iPod with two little iPods – it makes nice music from cool sources like the iPod, iBooks, and of course from other computers and any other line […]

This is a review of the XLH M-2000 Self-Analyzing monoblock amplifiers. Most audio reviews start with a description of the physical appearance of the product. I generally skim over those parts of the review, except where they provide information about features and number of inputs and outputs. As a result, I’m going to change things […]

“One eye open, sometimes it’s both, but the Cyclops eye of the camera lens opens & closes just like the eyes in our heads! And with them both you see a single view, although we observe with two individual orbs. It’s the picture you see, whether that observation is the single plane flat surface of […]

This all started when Steve Woolsey, my long time audio-bud, jumped early on the SACD band wagon and purchased a Sony SCD 777ES. Then David Robinson of Positive Feedback began writing about the SCD1. A few months later (Aug. 2000), I discovered the Audio Asylum website, a much friendlier and smaller community then. There, several […]

Introduction What does the name “Einstein” bring to mind when mentioned? Oh sure, some people think “genius” and simply leave it at that. But not to astrophysicists; to them, he’s much more—he’s a revolutionary. Prior to Einstein, Newtonian physics was the norm in scientific circles: the belief that time was an absolute construct to be […]

There are a lot of speakers I have liked and owned: Advent, Altec, Celestion, Gershman, Infinity, KEF, Klipsch, Spender, Spica, and Vandersteen. There were many others that came home with me for evaluation, but there’s only one that I wish I had never gotten rid of, the QUAD 57s. I spent a lot of time […]

The subject of this review, the Shindo Monbrison preamplifier, was a demo unit from Pitch Perfect Audio in San Francisco, it already had over 400 hours of playing time. The first thing I noticed when I unpacked the Monbrison was that it didn’t look anything like the pictures I had seen of it. It was […]

The first three Dagogo Reviews published in our September Issue describe what today’s technological competency can do to three categories of products: an SACD player, a tube preamplifier, and a loudspeaker. Among the reviewed is a modified Sony SCD-777ES, an SACD player I owned until last summer, which I stopped using in light of the […]

This will be the first of 2 installments on the medium of Photography, with regards to the history, background, devolvement, etc. of the medium itself; while the 2nd installment will be a direct response / point of view in facture, from two different working artists in the field. “…But that’s not really a true art […]

A new year brings the Consumer Electronics Show, and the opportunity to review the latest audio designs. Right now, I have no less than three 300B amplifiers crowding my listening room and competing for my attention. The DA08SE’s were first to arrive just a few days after C.E.S. ended, courtesy of C.C. Poon, proprietor of […]

You youngsters out there may think that Oracle is the name of a database management system, and the name of the company that owns and sells it. You older (and, I hope, wiser) folks know that an “oracle” is an entity that is a source of wise counsel or prophecy, usually supernatural in nature. In […]

Prologue The 1980’s was a period of certain enlightenment for the audio industry. After a decade’s worth of joint engineering efforts between Sony and Philips, the industry finally introduced the compact disc technology to the market, injecting unprecedented excitement and energy into both the music and the hardware manufacturing business. Just as the compact disc […]

They’re white. They’re heavy. Heavy-duty even. They have lots of ins and outs. They’re in my office and they get lots of attention… and that’s without anyone even listening. I have had the AudioEngine A5 powered loudspeakers in my office for just about two months now. They are always on… mostly at low volume in […]

I’ve been treated like royalty. My ears have been treated like royalty. John Quick, Verity & Nagra’s North American marketing rep, drove down from Massachusetts to deliver the Tamino x2’s, Verity’s entry-level loudspeaker, to my Philadelphia home. What a gentleman. He did all the unpacking… from those awesome protective foam-lined luxurious flight cases. He placed […]

Wayne Parham of Pi Speakers is an Electrical Engineer with a software consulting business, Parham Data Products, and the very passionate belief that everyone should have high quality speakers he’s become the John Beresford Tipton of Audio. Pi Speakers will sell you a completed speaker for your living room, saloon or church, but Wayne would much rather give […]

The Roksan Caspian FR-5 Speakers are tall, elegant beauties. Taller than both my Meadowlark Kestrel II’s and the Verity Audio Taminos, which are also in for review. With their high-gloss deep lacquer on black, and with their straightforward geometry, they are also very confident-looking speakers. Clean and simple, they look like a fine piece of […]

The I60 is a Chinese-assembled, Genesis-designed 60-watt, KT 88-based integrated amp with a passive linestage. It uses a special hand-made, stepped volume attenuator featuring precision-matched resistors. According to the Genesis website, the I60 uses very low negative feedback, with hand-selected and matched components, such as custom designed hand-wound output transformers with high-grade copper and silicon […]

The Tour Saturday, 8th April, England; day of the Aintree Grand National when even the most dour-hearted individuals are often tempted to venture through the door of the local bookmaker to place the almost customary pound on a four legged nag which inevitably deposits it’s jockey unceremoniously on his backside before half a dozen fences […]

Accustic Arts of Germany not only produces an entire audio system of electronics, speakers and cables, it also runs a professional recording studio, thus is uniquely positioned to harness a wealth of knowledge from aspects of audio engineering. Coordinated by Martin and Steffen Schunk, the sons of the company’s founder, Fritz Schunk, the company’s tremendous […]

So I’m back and have been listening to the Audia ‘Flight CD-One’ for over a month. This has given me a chance to listen to it with almost every kind of music. It let me do some serious listening. It let me listen to it as I write and I work. I’ve even listened to […]

Error: In July’s Review of Roksan FR-5 loudspeaker system by Sandy Greene, in a paragraph which he stated, “I was not surprised as I really liked, not loved, the Roksan Caspian CD player with Rogue amplification”, it should’ve read: “I was not surprised as I really liked — no — loved, the Roksan Caspian CD player with […]

Here again with another perspective venture, on course with a series of articles that have direct and informative takes from various professional artists culminated from a succession of personal interviews. This following excerpt was from an interview with a visual artist, working primarily with the acrylic and tempera mediums, in a category that would most […]

I have always noted with great curiosity and interest the fundamental and the rather consequential significance of sonic characteristics between transistors and vacuum tube circuits. My personal inclination is I prefer the gestalt presentation of tubes, since the impression they convey in comparison to solid-state is a better sense of harmonic structure, palpability and bloom, […]

Foreword by Constantine Soo Steve Keiser is setting out to design a preamplifier of his ideal, and has agreed to share his thoughts on the priorities of the design with Dagogo’s readers. Dagogo is privileged to be chosen as the exclusive platform for presenting such rare articles by the creative mind behind the original B&K […]

Reviewing a Ken Shindo component outside of a full Shindo system is to miss a lot of what the artist had in mind (don’t read that to mean the amp must be used in a full Shindo system, far from it). It means we are dealing with handmade electronics that are works of auditory art. […]

My System B&K Reference 31 Preamp/Processor, B&K Reference 7270 Amplifier, Boston Acoustics VR-970 Speakers, DIY Infinite Baffle subwoofer, DIY speaker cables using Belden 1810A, DIY audio cables DIY using Canare LV77S, DIY sound treatments. When evaluating the Song Audio, I used three sources: a Music Hall Maverick SACD/CD Player (which I was evaluating at the […]

(Effective August 1, 2009, Maxxhorn has changed its company name to AFFIRM AUDIO. -Ed.) Legendary horn iterations of the past, such as those from Altec-Lansing, JBL and Klipsch utilized separate horns for reproducing specific spectrums via complex crossover schemes to attain sufficient bandwidths, while still being able to play loud; and their purist counterparts as […]

It had been a while since I last auditioned a preamp, and I had asked Constantine Soo to get me a solid state pre to review. When he told me that I would get the Sphinx Laboratories Project Eight to play with, I drew a complete blank. I had never encountered Sphinx Laboratories products before. […]