Table of contents for May 2021 in Stereophile

“I got some Audio-Technica ATLP120X turntables in the other day, which had been back ordered for maybe 6 or 7 months, so I called to see if they had more. I was told there were 17,700 of that model on back order,” a dealer I know told me recently in an email. That number surprised even this diehard vinyl advocate. The $279 direct-drive AT-LP120X looks somewhat like a Technics SL-1200; it could almost be a knockoff. For a few hundred dollars, it includes a tonearm that won’t ruin your records, a built-in phono preamp, and an AT-VM95E cartridge—an upgrade from the AT-95SE, which is already stupidly good for not much money.1 The AT-LP120X offers decent performance and even has a built-in A/D converter and a USB output. If you want…

“Do you swear to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, so help your filaments?” asked the audiophile judge of the tube. “Since I am the truth,” respondeth the tube, “I have nothing to say that is not already declared by my sound.” “But I must have the truth, and without bias!” proclai-meth the audiophile. “What good is a tube without bias?” answereth the tube. Having uttered these words, the tube began to glow. It gloweth with a light so golden that the audiophile’s eyes were forced to close and his ears to open. Images did appear before them, images so overwhelming in their brilliance that the audiophile was filled with wonder at the divine power of music, and questions about absolute truth lost their urgency…

With the large, heavy loudspeakers that Michael Fremer tends to review, I drive to his place with my test equipment. We maneuver one speaker onto a dolly and wheel it into his driveway for the measurements. However, with the 685lb Wilson Chronosonic XVX, this wasn’t possible: I had to perform the measurements with the loudspeakers set up in Michael’s room. The presence of early reflections from the room’s boundaries meant that it wasn’t possible to perform my usual gated, farfield frequency response measurements. Other than impedance and sensitivity, the only meaningful measurement I could make was the spatially averaged frequency response. Wilson specifies the Chronosonic XVX’s sensitivity as a high 92dB/W/m. My estimate was numerically the same using Stereophile’s usual units: dB per 2.83V—not per watt—measured at 1m; the units…

In the words of Schiit Audio’s Jason Stoddard, “Measurements, schmeasurements! If you want measurements, we got measurements: the Magni Heresy’s got you covered. But if you’re ready to have some fun with something completely different, Vali 2+ is for you. Enjoy tube sound without tons of noise, play with different tubes without having to get a second mortgage for a matched quad, and see what this whole tube thing is all about!”1 In my words: Triode vacuum tubes (like those in the Vali 2+) are simple glass-and-metal devices that when used as audio-frequency amplifiers give rise naturally to some amount of second harmonic character, which audiophiles (including myself) have generally agreed sounds pleasant. Additionally, my 100 years of critical listening have inclined me to believe that some amount of second…

FALCON ACOUSTICS LS3/5A GOLD BADGE LOUDSPEAKER In the April 2021 issue of Stereophile, Herb Reichert wrote that he’d spent “almost 40 continuous years using first the kit, then the Rogers, then the Falcon LS3/5a’s. Now, a new 5a has entered my world. It is what Falcon calls the ‘Gold Badge’ version ($2999/pair), and I think it might be the best LS3/5a ever produced for general consumption.”1 The Falcon Acoustics’ Gold Badge LS3/5a is a new version of the Falcon LS3/5a Herb reviewed in the July 2015 issue2 and which he has been using ever since. Herb tried driving the new Falcons with a variety of amplifiers and concluded, “No matter which amp I was using, every time I put the new Falcon LS3/5a Gold Badges in the system, I did…

In Revinylization #9, I profusely praised the expensive, unobtanium Electric Recording Company (ERC) stereo reissue of Sonny Rollins’s Way Out West. The record was superb-sounding and beautifully made.1 “Clearly, these records are valuable in part because they’re rare. But only in part. They’re also valuable because they’re beautifully cut, well-crafted, and gorgeous. I can live with their business model, even if I don’t love it. I’m just glad there’s a place in the world for objects like this.” I still am—but I’m also still ambivalent about hyperlimited editions such as those issued by ERC. “I wish this experience could be more widely shared,” I wrote—“that ERC would press more copies and sell them, maybe, at a lower price.” Most ERC issues are limited, like the Rollins, to 300 copies; only…

SARAH VAUGHAN Sarah Vaughan Vaughan, vocals; Clifford Brown, trumpet; Paul Quinichette, tenor sax; Herbie Mann, flute; Jimmy Jones, piano; Joe Benjamin, bass; Roy Haynes, drums. EmArcy/Universal/AcousticSounds (LP). Chad Kassem, reissue supervisor; Ryan Smith, remastering. Sarah Vaughan was the supreme jazz singer. Smoky lows, silky highs, precise articulation across five octaves, a keen connection with a lyric, boundless harmonic inventiveness, and a sense of swing, which swayed and simmered, front and center, always. Later, Vaughan barely hid her boredom when stuck with material that didn’t suit her, but at her peaks, with small ensembles, she was, and remains, matchless. This eponymous album, recorded in December 1954 when Vaughan was just 30, ranks among her classics—and thus among the classics of jazz vocal albums. Midtempo standards (“Lullaby of Birdland,” “April in Paris,”…

By the time this issue of Stereophile arrives in your mailbox (and on news-stands), Lyric Hi-Fi & Video, the legendary symbol of male-dominated, uber-luxury hi-fi retail, will be closed forever. This makes me sad. I wasn’t just a client of Lyric; I worked there. Sometime after 1956, Michael Kakadelis, known to almost everyone as Mike Kay, went to work at a second-floor hi-fi shop called Lyric. In 1959, he bought the business and moved it a little bit north to a street-level storefront at 1221 Lexington Avenue. It stood there from then until now. Lyric began selling hi-fi in the era of Fisher and Marantz. They continued into the era of William Z. Johnson’s Audio Research, Jim Winey’s Magnepan, and Mark Levinson’s—well, Mark Levinson. Until just a few days ago,…

I would now be a prosperous gentleman had I been a clever fellow during the 1980s and held on to some of those Western Electric 300B vacuum tubes I used to buy for nothing and toss around casually. Unfortunately, I have no talent for acquisition or hoarding. I remember once driving down to North Carolina with my Eddie Electric business partner, Ryoichi Kimura. We were going to an old farm hidden at the end of a long gravel road. The guy who owned the place employed teams of teenage boys in white vans to travel the country gathering Altec and Western Electric gear from abandoned small-town movie theatres. As we navigated the farm’s rutted lane, I heard gunshots. I spotted a group of shirtless boys with trucker hats and…

When I unpacked one of the Evolution Mono-block amplifiers (serial number EVO2027), I wondered if I had the correct amplifier, as it looked identical to the Doshi Monoblock V3.0 that JVS reviewed in November 2018.1 It even uses the same quartet of Tung-Sol KT150 output tubes. But as Jason describes in this review, there are significant differences. As with the older amplifier, before I started examining its performance on the test bench with my Audio Precision SYS2722 system (see the January 2008 “As We See It”2), I left the amplifier powered up for 30 minutes then checked the bias current for each of the four KT150s using the front-panel display and the four trim pots on the top panel. I set all four to the recommended 190mV. The trim pots…

Big changes are afoot at Mytek. First up: The Mytek Brooklyn AMP+, the newest version of the compact, class-D Brooklyn AMP.1 The AMP+ is already in production. In my 2018 review of the original Brooklyn AMP, I wrote that the class-D amplifier exuded “a consistent sense of truthfulness, striking resolution that was never analytical, spacious soundstages, superb dynamics, and some of the ‘blackest’ backgrounds I’ve ever heard … with the right recordings.” I continued, “The AMP let me revel in its reproduction of the low end, with zero overhang or bloat, and profoundly impressive retrieval of micro- and macro-detail—but in doing all this, its touch was always light and never surgical.” Since then, Mytek president, founder, and chief designer Michal Jurewicz has been busy. Late last year, the company split…

After installing the single GE 6BZ7 dual-triode tube, I measured the Schiit Vali 2+ with my Audio Precision SYS2722 system (see the January 2008 “As We See It”1), repeating some tests with the magazine’s sample of Audio Precision’s current top-line APx555. I took a full set of measurements from both the front-panel headphone jack and the single-ended preamplifier outputs on the rear panel in both the High and Low gain settings. The Schiit’s input impedance is specified as 50k ohms. I measured 45k ohms at 20Hz and 1Hz, and an inconsequential drop to 40k ohms at 20kHz. The maximum gain from both the preamplifier and headphone outputs was very close to the specification at 14.1dB, High gain, and 0.9dB, Low gain. The Vali 2+ preserved absolute polarity (ie, was noninverting)…

IN HER REWORKING OF THE BEATLES’ “WITH A LITTLE HELP FROM MY FRIENDS,” ON THE 2018 TRIBUTE ALBUM, A DAY IN THE LIFE: IMPRESSIONS OF PEPPER (IMPULSE RECORDS), BROOKLYN GUITARIST AND COMPOSER MARY HALVORSON REINVENTS BOTH HER INSTRUMENT AND THE SONG. Most baby boomers can hum the tune of the Beatles’ classic, from Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, in a handful of notes. It might take longer to recognize Halvorson’s joyous, angular version. A master of jazz phrasing, guitar technique, avant-garde discourse, and effects pedals, Halvorson bends the Beatles song to her 21st century will. Playing her large-body Guild Artist Award archtop guitar through a Line 6 DL4 Delay Modeler pedal and a Fender Princeton Reverb amplifier1 — the guitar strings and body and the amplifier are both miked…

Daniel Lanois may not be a household name as a solo artist, but over four decades he has gained great notoriety as a producer. After serendipitously catching Brian Eno’s attention with his homespun recording projects in the late ’70s, Quebec-born, Ontario-based Lanois became protégé and then partner to the ambient/pop tastemaker; together, they innovated sonic techniques and worked with such off-the-radar experimental jazz artists as soft-pedal pianist Harold Budd and fourth-world trumpeter Jon Hassell. In 1984, Eno enlisted Lanois to coproduce U2’s breakthrough The Unforgettable Fire. That was followed three years later by the same band’s chart-busting Joshua Tree. Mean-while, Lanois found favor with Peter Gabriel and produced 1986’s So, Gabriel’s best-selling record. “One of the things I learned with Daniel Lanois is a total respect for the magic of…

BEETHOVEN Symphony No.9 Mendelssohn Choir of Pittsburgh; Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra, Manfred Honeck, cond. Reference Recordings FR-741 (CD). Dirk Sobotka, prod.; Mark Donahue, eng. From Reference Recordings, we can count on pellucid sonics, including here. You can “hear through” the textures even in the most violent tuttis, with no trace of congestion. In the finale’s “recitatives,” the divided low strings are wonderfully enveloping. The Adagio’s airy woodwind chorales are almost tangible. After decades of increasingly weighty performances, Manfred Honeck’s Ninth returns to a Toscaninian paradigm without sacrificing tonal mass. He characterizes episodes vividly and firmly sets up important structural arrivals. Tapered dynamics help shape motifs, though some imposed “rebound effects” sound finicky. The opening movement offers an almost dizzying panoply of shifting colors, cleanly reproduced. A buoyant, driving Scherzo includes all…

US: SCHAUMBURG, ILLINOIS, AND WORLDWIDE Jason Victor Serinus Due to concerns over COVID-19 transmission, two U.S. audio shows have revised their dates for 2021. AXPONA has shifted (again) from August 27–29 to October 29–31, and the small New York Audio Show has moved from June 25–26 to December 3–4 in New York City. AXPONA’s announcement was distributed March 3 to the “AXPONA Community” by Event Director Liz Miller Smith and VP Sales Mark Freed. Reached by phone and email, Miller Smith told Stereophile, “When offered these dates, we had to make a very quick decision and we chose the option that did not overlap with any other audio shows.” Exhibiting companies, the announcement read, do not need to take any action. The date change makes for an astoundingly tight lineup:…

I never met Audio Research Corporation founder William Zane Johnson, who died in 2011. But when he founded his now-legendary company in 1970, I and my ragged troupe of Dynaco modifiers were in the trenches, fighting the sand-warrior hordes during the first transistor onslaught. Our battle was almost lost when that shiny new warrior appeared on the north ridge. He, too, brandished a modified Stereo 70. He hailed from Minnesota, a land of extreme cold, walleye fishing, and northern lights. His company’s flag displayed a glowing vacuum tube, under which the words “High Definition” were inscribed. I felt certain he was fighting a lost cause—that we all were. I was wrong—and here we are today, celebrating William “Bill” Johnson’s achievements and the 50th anniversary of his company with a super-deluxe…

Other than the “+” appended to the name on the amplifier’s top and bottom plates, the Brooklyn AMP+ appears identical to the original Brooklyn AMP that was reviewed in the September 2018 issue. I summed up the earlier amplifier’s behavior on the test bench1 by writing “Mytek’s Brooklyn AMP is a tiny powerhouse offering respectable measured performance.” I used my Audio Precision SYS2722 system (see the January 2008 “As We See It”2) to test the Brooklyn AMP+. Like its predecessor, the AMP+ has an output stage operating in class-D, so I inserted Audio Precision’s auxiliary AUX-0025 passive low-pass filter between the test load and the analyzer. This filter eliminates RF noise that could drive the SYS2722’s input circuitry into slew-rate limiting, and I used it for all the tests other…

Halvorson’s engineer on Artlessly Falling, and on several of her previous recordings, is Nick Lloyd, owner and engineer at the label Firehouse 12, which he cofounded with brass player Taylor Ho Bynum, another Anthony Braxton protégé. Lloyd’s other production/engineering credits include albums by Bynum, Braxton, Wadada Leo Smith, and the Kronos Quartet. Lately he’s been collaborating with composer David Lang, cofounder of Bang on a Can. Lloyd is also a musician, a Hammond B3 specialist who has played on recordings by The National and Taylor Swift. I asked Lloyd about working with Halvorson. “Mary’s concept for the music is so clear at the outset (and I’m spoiled by this) that we are really just working toward a transparent representation of her vision for the music. There is still a lot…

VARIOUS ARTISTS Nuggets, Original Artyfacts From the First Psychedelic Era, 1965–1968 Rhino R1 2006/081227971113 (2LP). 2021. Lenny Kaye, prod.; Chris Belman, reissue eng. Nostalgia for the 1970s is a cultural thing right now, and the original Nuggets anthology, released in 1972, stands as a lasting testament to that decade’s spirit of exploration, rebellion, and honest cheesiness. At the request of Elektra Records President Jac Holzman, Lenny Kaye, a young music writer and record store clerk (later the guitarist in the Patti Smith Group), assembled two LPs of forgotten one-hit wonders from mid-’60s psychedelic rock. The collection was, in spirit, a descendant of Robert Smith’s Anthology of American Folk Music. The music has been called “garage rock” even though many of the tunes were recorded in major studios and some were…

Magico M2 The team at Magico sends our thanks for your thoughtful follow-up review on the M2 loudspeakers. As you witnessed during your visit to the factory, we take great care and pride in designing our own transducers, enclosures, and dividing networks with the goal of producing a loudspeaker that provides the clearest window for the input signal provided. We are honored to receive Stereophile’s 2020 Loudspeaker of the Year and Editor’s Choice awards for the M2 and appreciate your recognition of the high-level engineering and design work dedicated to every Magico loudspeaker. Peter MackayMagico, LLC SME Model 6 Thanks so much for taking the time to thoroughly put the newest SME Model 6 integrated turntable through its paces amidst your current million-dollar inventory of turntables! The fact the Model…