CES 2013 Complete Coverage!!
Stereophile editors John Atkinson, Stephen Mejias, Robert Deutsch, Larry Greenhill, Jason Victor Serinus, and Jon Iverson report live from the show. Hundreds of posts!!
Listening #121
By the end of last month's column I'd invested a total of $290 in acquiring and refurbishing a 55-year-old Rek-O-Kut Rondine Jr. turntable. In the weeks that followed I spent just a few dollars more on some small parts--one of which sprang from a technology that I don't believe existed in the 1950s--that made small but welcome improvements in the performance of this outwardly simple player.
Music in the Round #58
NAD's T 187. Another pre-pro? And not inexpensive at $3000! Why do I care? First of all, NAD has come to the forefront of established full-range manufacturers as innovators in digital audio.
Music Has No Borders
“Dude, I have a huge stack of records you should probably take a look at, tons from Tía Viví, Dad, Mom, and Bobe. There’s probably some stuff in there you can take with you,” Alberto advised.
The Bad Plus-the Magnificent Threesome
In a discussion about what their music is--and is not--Dave King, drummer for the Bad Plus, remembers opening a show for free-jazz patriarch Ornette Coleman at the New Jersey Performing Arts Center. After their set, the band joined the audience to watch Coleman.
The Entry Level #25
There I was, sitting on the orange couch, with just a few hours to kill before my scheduled departure to Denver, Colorado--I'd been invited to the eighth annual Rocky Mountain Audio Fest, where surely I'd be moved to tears by some of the greatest, most advanced, most expensive hi-fi systems known to man--and I could not believe the awesome sound coming from my modest little stereo.
Spendor Classic SP100R2 loudspeaker
In late 1996, as Listener magazine entered its third year of existence, the Spendor SP100 became my reference loudspeaker, and would remain so for a considerable time. My decision to try the SP100 was influenced by John Atkinson's review of its antecedent, the nearly identical Spendor S100, in the December 1991 issue of Stereophile.
Octave Audio RE 290 power amplifier
Ever since I became a Stereophile contributing editor, people have asked me, "How do you determine what equipment you're going to review? Do you get to pick your own, or does John Atkinson tell you what to do?"
2nd Edition, Late January 2013
Music? Or Sound?
The demo seemed simple enough. A distributor proposed a session for the Bay Area Audiophile Society (BAAS) that would pit his relatively low-cost speaker cable against an ultra-expensive competing model named for a Norse god.
Recording of February 2013: The Clifford Brown/Max Roach Emarcy Albums
Trumpeter Clifford Brown's death in a car accident on the Pennsylvania Turnpike on June 26, 1956--his second wedding anniversary--set up an eternity of unanswerables headed by the belief, among many, that had Brownie lived, his star would now be as high as or higher than that of Miles Davis.
"This is exciting," says Thiel's new CEO, Bill Thomas
We reported last November that Thiel Audio Products, the Kentucky-based speaker manufacturer founded by Kathy Gornik and the late Jim Thiel, had been had been acquired by a private equity firm based in Nashville, TN, and that Gornik was no longer with the company.
Records To Die For2012
At a time in history when the music business seems less interested in making anything of lasting value than in churning out disposable music--hits intended to be consumed for a few days via iPod, then left behind--the notion of cherishing the masterpieces, the records to die for, seems a lost art.
YBA CD 1 Blue Laser CD player
I'm about to out Yves-Bernard André as one of the great unknown tweakers of high-end audio. (My own predilection for stepping into uncharted tweakwaters is well known.) Yves-Bernard, his wife and partner Ariane Moran, and importer/distributor Daniel Jacques of Audio Plus Services seemed perfectly sanguine about letting the cat out of the bag.
Long Live High-End Audio
While we contemplate high-end audio’s long, slow, and stinking death, Magico, manufacturer of high-performance, high-priced loudspeakers, is in the mainstream press: USA Today ran an article earlier this week, which asked, “How much would you pay to bring music to life?”
R.I.P High-End Audio?
Slowly, painfully, high-end audio seems to be dying. We all know it but we're apparently unable to resuscitate the patient. US dealers are closing at alarming rates--it must be the economy. Women continue to avoid the High End--it must be the technobabble combined with male equipment fetishism. Younger people aren't hopping aboard--it must be all those other things competing for their money. (Then again, it might be the High End's abhorrence of rock'n'roll.)
Bruckner: Symphony 9 (with Finale)
This reconstruction of the Ninth's Finale is the result of 30 years' work by Bruckner scholars Nicola Samale, John A. Phillips, Benjamin-Gunnar Cohrs, and Giuseppe Mazzuca (SPCM). For this new "Conclusive Revised Edition 2012," SPCM shortened by 18 bars the coda, of which little of Bruckner's writing survives, and reworked it to include, based on Bruckner's description, a development of the trumpets' "Alleluia" in bar five of the Adagio.
Source Stereophile
