Table of contents for August 2020 in Stereophile

Hi-fi system resolution has long been the cause of heated arguments. But when it comes to converting digital data to an analog signal, there can be no argument. Data go in at one end of a DAC and an analog signal comes out of the other end, with a noise floor directly rated to the combination of the converter’s digital and analog resolution. Ever since I started measuring digital products for Stereophile, I have been expressing a D/A processor’s effective resolution in terms of the equivalent number of bits. With a typical FFT-derived analysis of 16-bit data, the levels of the individual FFT bins lie around 130dB below full scale. When the noise floor drops by 6dB, that’s equivalent to another bit of resolution. The immediate impression was of extraordinary…

I measured the Gold Note DS-10 with my Audio Precision SYS2722 system (see the January 2008 “As We See It”1). I powered the DS-10 from the PSU-10 EVO supply, which, following the instructions in the latter’s manual, I placed to the D/A processor’s left, separated by a few inches. I performed a complete set of measurements from the balanced outputs, repeating some tests from the unbalanced and headphone outputs. As well as using the Audio Precision as a source of data, I used Roon and mconnect Control to send data to the DS-10 over my network via Ethernet. I also used a USB connection to send data to the Gold Note from my batterypowered MacBook Pro running Adobe Audition and Pure Music. The DS-10’s coaxial S/PDIF input and the AES/EBU…

For logistical reasons, I measured a different sample of the Volti Audio Razz (serial number V1, 007) to those auditioned by Tom Gibbs. (There wasn’t a grille supplied with this sample.) I measured the loudspeaker’s farfield behavior with DRA Labs’ MLSSA system and a calibrated DPA 4006 microphone. I used an Earthworks QTC-40 mike for the speaker’s nearfield responses. I repeated some of the testing with Dayton Audio’s OmniMic V2 and DATS V2 systems. Volti specifies the Razz’s sensitivity as “97dB.” My estimate was 93dB(B)/2.83V/m—while this is lower than the specification, it is still much higher than average. Although the Razz’s nominal impedance is specified as 6 ohms, the magnitude (fig.1, solid trace) rarely drops below 8 ohms. The average impedance is around 12 ohms, though there is a minimum…

ON ICONIC SINGER-SONGWRITER JAMES TAYLOR’S 20TH ALBUM, AMERICAN STANDARD, THE LANKY CROONER ADAPTS THE CLASSIC AMERICAN SONGBOOK TO HIS EASY-ROLLING MUSICAL WAYS. THE RESULT IS AN AMERICAN MIXTURE OF TIMELESS SONGCRAFT. Where some popular singers use the songbook canon to increase record and ticket sales, Taylor has no need to change himself or increase his audience. He’s as comfortable as any man can be, having sold many millions of records the world over for almost 50 years. He wasn’t always so comfortable. Taylor’s breakthrough success of the early ’70s, including the albums Sweet Baby James and Mud Slide Slim and the Blue Horizon, came while Taylor was deep in the throes of a heroin addiction that would destroy his marriage to singer-songwriter Carly Simon. But his hits kept coming: “How…

Play It Again Sam PIASR1135LPX (24/48 FLAC stream/Qobuz, available on CD and vinyl). Obaro Ejimiwe, prod.; Shuta Shinoda, eng. I Grow Tired But I Dare Not Fall Asleep is the fifth album by twice-nominated Mercury Prize musician Obaro Ejimiwe, also known as Ghostpoet. Appropriate comparisons are to Massive Attack or Nick Cave; a Google search turns up descriptions of his music as “claustrophobic,” “dark,” “sombre,” and “dystopian.” Well, yes, but Ghostpoet, and this album in particular, offers more than just that. Ejimiwe isn’t so easy to categorize. Listening to IGTBIDNFA conjures, in my mind, an image of walking through a rainy Paris backstreet, raincoat collar turned up, hands in pockets. In terms of tempo and introspection—and, yes, beauty—Miles Davis’s Ascenseur pour l’echafaud comes to mind, except that this isn’t jazz,…

Cedille CDR 195 (Auditioned in 24/96 FLAC. Also available on CD). Elaine Martone, prod.; Bill Maylone, Michael Bishop, engs. Sedate music is not what Eighth Blackbird has recorded of late. The 24-year-old Chicago-based sextet’s primary instruments (flutes, clarinet, violin, cello, percussion, and piano)—are here augmented indelicately by sandpaper, metals, accordion, harmonica, and “auxiliary piano”—in service of three world-premiere commissions from David Lang, Michael Gordon, and Julia Wolfe, Bang on a Can’s three founders. Intended to work as a coherent whole, the album’s five tracks—the three parts of Lang’s these broken wings broken up by Gordon’s the light of the dark and Wolfe’s singing in the dead of night—exploit the Blackbirds’ mobility: We can’t see their movements, but they were choreographed and organized into a theatrical structure, per the composers’ request,…

David Nebel, violin; Baltic Sea Philharmonic (Stravinsky), London Symphony Orchestra (Glass), Kristjan Järvi, cond. Sony Classical 19075882982 (24/96 WAV; also available on CD). Vilius Keras, Jakob Händel, prods.; Joël Cormier, ed.; Engineer not specified. The pairing of these two concertos, composed in 1931 and 1987 respectively, works so well that it begs the question, why hasn’t anyone done it before? The first work on the program, Glass’s concerto—did they list Stravinsky first in the title in the hope it would sell more copies?—was composed when he was 51 and begins with fast-moving, rising-and-falling passages that build and dissipate like waves. The somber outlook that pervades many of Glass’s mature compositions surfaces early, morphing into an elegiac sense of acceptance in the middle movement. The end begins with extreme propulsion—Glass identifies…

Blake, piano; Correa, vocals Red Piano Records 14599-4443 (CD). Frank Carlburg, Aaron Harley, prods.; Jeremy Sarna, eng. At age 85, Ran Blake may be the most unjustly obscure jazz pianist, an artist with an exquisite touch and an eccentric style, influenced by an odd blend of Bartok, Pentecostal gospel, Thelonious Monk, the rain-soaked romanticism of film noir, and the dark suspense of Alfred Hitchcock. Blake has described himself as “a filmmaker who doesn’t know how to hold a camera,” and the songs he plays—especially the standards and ballads—have a dreamlike cinematic flow. He immerses himself in these dreams with almost pure instinct: Long ago, when he played a concert of music from Hitchcock’s Vertigo, he said afterward that he could literally see the scenes from the movie, as vivid as…

The two biggest sonic jolts I’ve experienced involving phono preamps were from two very different ones: the Petr Mares’s Connoisseur 2.0 and Boulder’s 2008, which was reviewed in the July 2002 Stereophile (Vol.25, No.7).1 The first was hand-built, single-ended, housed in a wooden case, limited to 100 units, and, when I got to hear it in the mid-1990s, cost around $6000, or about $10,000 in today’s dollars. The other was a featureladen, double-chassis monument to flexibility and surface-mount high technology. It featured beautifully finished, flush-mounted mirrored buttons your fingers just wanted to press. A friend had brought over the Mares. Before we hooked it up, he insisted we look inside. There, I found the electronic equivalent of the game “Twister” (which, for those of you unfamiliar, is a form of…

The Weiss DAC202, which Erick Lichte reviewed in January 2012, was one of the highest-resolution digital processors I have measured, so I was intrigued to see if the DAC502 would match its predecessor’s performance.1 As I had done with the DAC202, I measured the Weiss DAC502 with my Audio Precision SYS2722 system (see the January 2008 “As We See It”2). Apple’s USB Prober utility identified the DAC502 as “DAC501” from “Weiss_Engineering_ Ltd.” with the serial number string “0.0.1.”3 The USB port operated in the optimal isochronous asynchronous mode, and Apple’s AudioMIDI utility revealed that the DAC502 accepted 32-bit integer data sampled at all rates from 44.1kHz to 384kHz. The AES/EBU and S/PDIF inputs accepted data sampled at rates up to 192kHz. The DAC502’s maximum output level at 1kHz with the balanced…

ROGUE SPHINX V3 INTEGRATED AMPLIFIER I am proud of the fact that my first review for Stereophile was of a modestly priced integrated amplifier called the Rogue Audio Sphinx.1 Specified at 100Wpc into 8 ohms, 200Wpc into 4 ohms,2 it played the KEF LS50s like it was made for them. It was simple and handsome and cost only $1295, phono stage included. I chose the Sphinx because it was a hybrid tube–class-D design that, to my ears, blended Frenchwine tube flavor with the grip and authority of class-D solidstateness. The Sphinx was proletariat, not patrician, but it still showed me the merry music of Paris during La Belle Époque. With the LS50s, a VPI Traveler turntable, Ortofon 2M Red phono cartridge, Oppo CD player, and some AudioQuest wire, the entire…

I consider Charles Mingus one of the great American composers, at least on par with the most celebrated American classical dudes. With apologies to fans of that music, I’d much rather listen to this record, or any of several other Mingus recordings, than, say, Billy the Kid or Rhapsody in Blue. What makes Mingus great is precisely that, in contrast to Copland and Gershwin, when he explored the vernacular, it wasn’t some pale imitation. Some jazz records can seem generic, their solos interchangeable. Mingus’s music is rarely generic. Like Thelonious Monk’s, his music is instantly recognizable. And there is real passion in Mingus—joy and anger and devotion and love—all right there on the music’s sleeve. Mingus may be unique among composers in his ability to harness passion and wildness in…

Legacy Recordings (CD 9439736692, also available on LP). Buddy Cannon, prod.; Tony Castle, Steve Chadie, Bobby Terry, Andrew Mendelson, engs. At 87, Willie Nelson has recorded 70 solo albums ranging from outlaw country to Americana pop to orchestrated jazz standards—all infused with his inimitable voice, generous wit, and smart choice of repertoire. He started slow, retiring from music twice in the ’50s and ’60s, but today he is a national treasure, having dispatched evocative recordings as good-old-boy storyteller and modern-day troubadour, anchored by his last 14 albums on Legacy. This new, mostly acoustic album, First Rose of Spring, finds him playing his well-worn six-string, Trigger, and singing in a classic country-pop mode. Two of the 11 songs are written by Nelson with Buddy Cannon, the album’s producer. On their love…

Philadelphia Orchestra, Yannick Nézet-Séguin, cond.; Westminster Symphonic Choir, Choral Arts Society of Washington. American Boychoir; many soloists Deutsche Gramophone DG 00289 483 7871 (CD). Alexander Van Ingen, Andrew Mellor, prods.; Brett Cox, Charles Gagnon, engs. Yannick Nézet-Séguin commands the massed orchestral and choral forces in this concert performance of Symphony of a Thousand with assurance, propelling the tuttis with a high level of energy and infusing even the brass playing with buoyancy and lift. The quieter passages are shaped with a nice ear for color and, in Part II, a chamberlike intimacy; transitions have a lovely flexibility. The conductor guides the various episodes with a sure sense of direction, though he underplays the Veni Creator Spiritus recap in Part I. The Philadelphia Orchestra, fine as it is, has never before…

Altin Sencalar, trombone; Chris Glassman, bass trombone; five others Clef DCR-161 (CD). Michael Dease, prod.; Eric Wojahn, eng. The trombone is enjoying a renaissance in jazz. Think Marshall Gilkes, Gianluca Petrella, Alan Ferber, John Yao—and Michael Dease, who produced this album and plays on one track. Altin Sencalar and Chris Glassman must now be added to the trombonebadass list. They are young, but they were ready for their recording debut. The two-trombone front line is a rarity in jazz. The paradigm is J.J. Johnson/Kai Winding. Sencalar and Glassman sound like 21st century prodigy grandchildren of Jay and Kai. They are similarly, equally joined at the hip. They are also equally capable of separating and creating complex contrapuntal collisions and sublime collective cacophonies. One difference is that Glassman plays bass trombone,…

HEDD Audio HEDDphone ONE Thanks to Herb for his introduction to the HEDDphone ONE. Let me add some remarks about “what happened before.” Oskar Heil, inventor of the Air Motion Transformer, had presented a headphone himself, but it was never produced. Although I visited him quite a few times, eager to start with a compact version of his AMT idea, I missed the chance to see them. In the end, he dropped the project. The idea to combine the AMT virtues like clarity and dynamic behavior in a full-range transducer that would drive a new kind of headphone has been in my mind for the last 5 years. A first AMT headphone approach was made some 20 years ago by Martin Dürrenmatt with the Ergo; he basically put the ESS…

US: SEATTLE Julie Mullins Amid many audio show cancellations and resultant complications in the wake of the COVID-19 crisis comes some good news: A brand-new audio show has been announced: the Pacific Audio Fest in Seattle. The presenters are Show Director Lou Hinkley, founder of Daedalus Audio, and Show Manager Gary Gill, who is also founder and director of the Capital Audio Fest. (CAF’s end-of-October 2020 show, its 10th, will probably be canceled due to COVID-19, Gill told Stereophile, but a final decision has not yet been made.) Per a recent press release, Pacific Audio Fest’s inauguration is slated for August 6–8, 2021, allowing time—hopefully—for the pandemic to pass. That timing, though, is coincidental: Hinkley and Gill have been planning to present the show in that time frame for about…

In contrast to phono cartridges and analog tape recorders, digital audio converters distinguish themselves by the fact that they can be fashioned in an almost infinite number of ways. Therefore, the odds against two manufacturers’ DACs or ADCs sounding exactly the same are extremely large. Nevertheless, I’ve heard countless audiophiles say that “bits are bits” and that today’s digital-to-analog converters sound mostly the same. Some go as far as to declare today’s DACs blameless—neutral—when debating issues of audio-system sound quality. In my view, such opinions deny the likelihood that widely varied methods for reclocking, format conversion, oversampling, interpolation, currentto-voltage conversion, and reconstruction filtering affect the sound character of the music files being rendered. My experience suggests that many budget DACs do sound the same: slightly blunt, unsupple, noisy, processed. A…

I felt like I’d just been offered a choice of 31 flavors of Baskin-Robbins ice cream topped with up to 57 varieties of Heinz ketchup, 57 condiments, and 47 brands of coddled cream. My head began to spin, my stomach churned, and my mouth grew very dry as I read that Gold Note’s DS-10 ($2995) was a “chameleon DAC” with 192 setup options that enable it to “completely blend in with different music genres, giving the listener the opportunity to adapt the behavior of the unit to the music playing, to one’s stereo system and, most of all, to the listener’s taste.” My brain was rattled by memories of Michael Green Designs Chameleon tunable speakers and the frightening number of hours I had devoted to trying to get them to…

I first looked at the behavior of the Piega Connect wireless control unit, using my Audio Precision SYS2722 analyzer.1 Measured at its analog output jacks in variable mode, this had a maximum gain of 0.3dB. The fixed mode offered the same 0.3dB gain. The analog input clipped at 2.2V. A 1kHz signal at–12dBFS at the coaxial and optical digital inputs resulted in a level at the analog outputs of 534mV, suggesting that the Connect’s gain architecture is very similar for both analog and digital signals. Both digital inputs locked on to data sampled at rates from 44.1kHz to 192kHz, but when I looked at the frequency response with a 192kHz stream, it appeared that the data were downsampled to 96kHz (fig.1). The analog input impedance was 14k ohms from 20Hz…

When I performed the measurements of the original Rogue Sphinx integrated amplifier to accompany Herb Reichert’s review in the August 2014 issue of Stereophile, I was impressed by what I found.1 “Even without taking into account its affordable price, Rogue Audio’s Sphinx offers excellent measured performance with little sign of the usual compromises made in class-D designs,” I concluded, adding that it “also has an excellent, moving-magnet–compatible phono stage.” Starting on the previous page, Herb reports on the sound of the new V3 version of the Sphinx, which features a new phono stage that can be switched between moving-coil and moving-magnet operation. Editor Jim Austin suggested that I should examine the V3’s measured performance, so I hooked up Herb’s sample (serial number 3057) to my Audio Precision SYS2722 system (see…

Nothing about Alice Phoebe Lou’s musical career reflects industry norms. She maintains complete control over every aspect of her work, from creation to release. The result is always original and fascinating. Lou is at her best when she has an audience to connect with; this live performance is an ideal introduction to her powerful voice and courageous message. Now 26, the South African singer, songwriter, and guitarist moved to Berlin when she was 17, earning a living by busking. She has never signed a traditional recording contract; after three EPs and four full-length albums, she still produces most of her own work, releasing it on her eponymous label. Hardly the average DIY musician, she has always maintained the highest technological standards, as reflected in the sound on this album. Lou…

Highway 20/Thirty Tigers H2006 (CD, also available on LP). Lucinda Williams, Tom Overby, Ray Kennedy, prods.; Ray Kennedy, Brian Lucey, engs. Strong words, sharp elbows, and mortally intense guitar playing plunge the listener into deep waters at the start of this recording, as Lucinda and her longtime band members form a firing squad, blasting away at current events. The tough “You Can’t Rule Me” sets a defiant tone that Williams returns to later on “Bone of Contention.” Williams drawls her hot-caramel vocal over a dense, relentless bass pattern from David Sutton, gut-punching drums from Butch Norton, and urgent, textural guitar rhythms and leads from Stuart Mathis. Williams know how to twist the knife, and she goes for the kill on the disdainful slow-burner “Man Without a Soul.” On this scorching…

Hyperion CDA68307 (CD). Phil Rowlands, prod. and eng. Clara Schumann, wife of Robert, and Fanny Mendelssohn, sister of Felix, were estimable musicians, but women were not readily accepted as composers. Clara Schumann was a noted virtuoso pianist, and after her husband’s death, she maintained a career, especially as an advocate for his music. Fanny was known locally, in Berlin as pianist and composer, but a music career was out of the question. Clara Schumann’s well-wrought trio demonstrates familiarity with Robert’s two musical personalities, “Florestan” (turbulent) and “Eusebius” (lyrical). Both make appearances, notably in the first movement’s contrasting themes, one unsettled, the other yearning. The Scherzo has charming uplift. The Andante begins gently, grows incisive. The finale builds an irresistible momentum. Fanny Mendelssohn’s Trio echoes the agitated aspect of Felix’s style,…

Ambrose Akinmusire, trumpet, Rhodes; five others Blue Note B0032104-02 (CD, also available as LP, download). Ambrose Akinmusire, prod.; Andy Taub, eng. Records by Ambrose Akinmusire are much-awaited events because there are so few of them and because he is the most important trumpet player to enter jazz in the new millennium. This release is a concept album. The concept is ambitious: to render in music the lethal contradictions and defiant triumphs of black experience in our present American moment. Akinmusire is not about indulging his monstrous chops. He employs his unpredictable, searing, fearless trumpet to serve stories, which he has said are about “the pain, beauty and optimism of blackness.” He plays with long, mournful tones or jagged edges or explosive, joyous breakouts. Pain is deep on “Roy,” an elegy…

For two months, I’d been planning to attend Terry Riley’s appearance at Seattle’s 536-seat Illsley Ball Nordstrom Recital Hall. For two weeks, I’d been planning to watch a presidential-candidate debate on television. Only one problem: As it turned out, the two events were scheduled for the same night. Even after a decade of trying to master the muddle known as multitasking, it was impossible to do both. The resolution to the conflict was less challenging than you might imagine. Hearing Terry, who turned 85 in June, perform live one more time meant the world to me. After I left the Bay Area, I despaired of ever again encountering the man whose seminal minimalist composition, In C (1964), inspired Philip Glass, Steve Reich, and John Adams. Released in 1969, Terry’s third…