Table of contents for September 2022 in The Absolute Sound

Atsushi Miura TODAY, MAY 27, 2022, I learned from Art Manzano of AXISS Audio that my dear friend (and Art’s) Atsushi Miura, past general manager of the Lux Corporation (Luxman electronics), president of Lux Audio of America, and subsequently founder of A&M Ltd. (Air-Tight electronics and phono cartridges), passed away at the age of 88. I could go on at length about Mr. Miura’s many accomplishments—he is, after all, a charter member of TAS’ High-End Audio Hall of Fame and earned a chapter of his own in The Absolute Sound’s Illustrated History of High-End Audio, Volume Two: Electronics—but rather than make a list of his many notable accomplishments, I’d rather talk about how he and I became friends. When I first went to Japan, better than a decade-and-a-half ago, I…

IN ANY NORMAL YEAR, TAS would send a phalanx of writers to cover High End Munich, the largest and most important audio show in the world. This year, out of an abundance of COVID-related caution, the magazine sent a somewhat smaller contingent: me. So, you know how every year JV apologizes to exhibitors and readers that he may have missed some rooms? Please recall that sentiment this year—times five. Nonetheless, between inhaled schnitzels and streusels, I covered a lot of ground. Which is good because there turned out to be a lot worth covering. After a two-year hiatus, manufacturers could barely contain the pent-up flood of new product releases. Further, despite the MOC’s famously inhospitable acoustics, more exhibitors than usual managed to conjure up good sound. Overlaying these achievements was…

Located in the small town of Süßen, Germany, about a 45-minute drive from Stuttgart, Acoustic Signature (AS) has been at the forefront of turntable technology for the past 25 years. One of its keys to success is taking control of the entire manufacturing process. Robert Harley tells me that he was impressed during his factory visit by the fact that everything is machined in-house, down to the smallest tonearm parts. The development of the Neo Series reflects the culmination of its anti-vibration and diamond-coated bearing technologies. Our JV has previously reviewed the flagship Invictus and Invictus Jr. models and concluded as follows: “The word is thrown around too freely in this business, but to my ear the Invictus Jr. with the TA-9000 tonearm is Gunther Frohnhoefer’s masterpiece—certainly the best turntable/tonearm…

In case you’re wondering, NuPrime Audio was founded in 2014 by Jason Lim, who previously co-founded NuForce Audio, with the express goal of continuing NuForce’s high-end product line. The Evolution STA amplifier is a prime example, nudging forward the state of the art in Class D amplification. Right out of the box it was clear that this $4995 stereo amplifier meant business. Heavy for a Class D amp at a net weight of 23 pounds and sporting a power rating of 230Wpc into 8 ohms, it was ready to rock. The front panel is rather sparse looking with a small power LED and a power switch on the left that’s well camouflaged and hard to pick out. No sex appeal here. Both RCA and XLR inputs are provided on the…

When I got into classical music in my early teens, I bought my first two LPs in a thrift store; I still have them, and to this day I get the thrill of the hunt walking through a thrift store’s hallowed doorway. I thought it would be fun to write about a handful of thrift scores I’ve fallen in love with. We crate-diggers may never find that first-state Beatles butcher cover for a dollar, and we will always see plenty of records by Mantovani, Don Ho, Mitch Miller (and, of course, a certain title by Herb Alpert & the Tijuana Brass). Still, there are plenty of treasures to be had. At this point, many of the gems you’ll find were originally released on small, private press labels and barely made…

MUSIC SONICS Gems from Armenia. Aznavoorian Duo. Cedille. MUSIC SONICS Confluence—Balkan Dances & Tango Nuevo. Carrettin, Gajić. Sono Luminus. MUSIC SONICS Impulse. Bak, Lee. Bright Shiny Things. The Aznavoorian sisters, cellist Ani and pianist Marta, have independently established successful international careers and have also concertized together for decades. For their first recording as a duo, they’ve assembled a program that celebrates their Armenian heritage. Much of the recital comprises short pieces tinged with longing, sadness, and a sense of place. The two composers that may be familiar to general listeners are Aram Khachaturian and the revered Komitas Vartabed. Others include Arno Babajanian, Serouj Kradjian, Alexander Arutiunian, Vache Sharafyan, and Avet Terterian, whose Sonata for Cello and Piano channels the same musical ethos of the briefer works in a more substantial…

I recently visited Magico’s factory in Hayward, California, where I heard the company’s flagship M9 loudspeaker and learned about its design. The occasion also marked the recent completion of an acoustic overhaul of the Magico factory listening room. Magico has a compelling track record of technical innovation and of creating great-sounding loudspeakers. The all-new M9 is the ultimate realization of the company’s technologies and aesthetic, and also introduces a ground-breaking new cabinet construction. Significantly, the M9 is also the first Magico loudspeaker to benefit from two new sophisticated measurement instruments. I had seen photographs of the M9 on Magico’s website but was floored to experience the speaker in person. Its sheer size, massive drivers, and stunning execution in flawless carbon fiber and aluminum are awe-inspiring. As I learned by seeing…

I learned recently that my 34-year-old nephew would be relocating from the Midwest to the large eastern city where my wife and I live, in fact to a neighborhood near ours. It’s welcome news. He’s a wonderful person—smart, funny, and generous—and it’ll be great to have him around for all those reasons. But there’s also, I’ll admit it, the whole speaker thing. Finally, there will be somebody nearby to help me move large loudspeakers. Seriously, that’s one of the problems with big speakers—they’re big. Unpacking them and getting them into the ideal position in a room (if there even is an ideal position) often requires the assistance of another person who can confidently maneuver a heavy, bulky object without harming that object or himself. It’s worth it, we remind ourselves,…

I’ve been singing the praises of the Aesthetix Mimas ever since its debut a few years ago. (My review appeared in Issue 294.) Twice awarded a Golden Ear by me, it is one of the top integrated amps on the market today and remains an absurdly good value, to boot. In standard factory trim, Mimas is a purist linestage—a dual-mono hybrid design coupled to a 150Wpc (8 ohms) output stage. Its chassis is a modular platform that allow owners to add features as they become available—essentially future-proofing their investment. At the time of the original review’s publication, however, the rear bays of the Mimas were empty, as development of the modular dual-input mm/mc phono board and DAC card was still in the early stages. Ultimately, I did write about the…

IF YOU WANT an example of how far music servers have advanced in the last ten years, look no further than Lumin’s new P1 network player. The P1 offers a feature set precisely tailored to today’s music systems, blurring the lines between traditional component categories. The product combines a network streamer and DAC along with extensive preamplifier functions, including ten digital and analog inputs, source switching, and volume control. It even has three HDMI inputs with 4k passthrough and ARC (Audio Return Channel) along with an HDMI output—important features if you use the P1 as part of a multimedia system. Add full MQA decoding and Roon Ready operation along with a sophisticated fully balanced DAC, and you have the makings of a serious product. The P1 doesn’t include integral music…

British singer, songwriter, and guitarist Mark Knopfler perched comfortably in the pantheon of All-TimeGreat-Rock-Guitar-Gods when he disbanded Dire Straits in 1995 and released his solo debut, Golden Heart (Warner), the following year. It met with unenthusiastic reviews: Critics said the Scottish-born axeslinger had failed to explore new terrain, and U.S. sales sagged. Still, Knopfler honed his songcraft and has built an impressive solo catalog, teaming with longtime collaborator and keyboardist Guy Fletcher, while releasing nine solo studio albums, plus live albums, soundtracks, and a critically acclaimed country-duo project with Emmylou Harris, 2006’s All the Roadrunning(Warner/Nonesuch). It’s time for a solo career retrospective, albeit a partial one. Enter Mark Knopfler: The Studio Albums, 1996-2007(Warner/ Rhino), a hefty 11-LP set containing five 180-gram double albums and a single disc of rarities. The…

MUSIC SONICS Arcade Fire: WE. Columbia. Canadian indie-rock icons Arcade Fire have wholly embraced the thematic album side approach for WE, their sixth studio album. WE splits its economical 40 minutes essentially down the middle, with Side 1 (denoted as I) functioning mainly under an individualistic introspection umbrella and Side 2 (dubbed WE) operating with a much wider, all-are-welcome embrace. Co-produced by the husband/ wife tandem of Win Butler and Régine Chassagne along with Nigel Godrich, WE synthesizes its humble New Orleans studio beginnings with broader, open-air instrumentation (a Godrich specialty). The initially minimalist opener “Age of Anxiety I” is the very definition of feeling claustrophobic, with Butler’s measured lead vocals mixed way out front and guest Josh Tillman (a.k.a. Father John Misty) providing, just as the credits state, “stomps…

CH Precision C1.2 DAC/Controller CH Precision’s C1.2 features include a four-fold increase in processing power over its predecessor. This massive increase has allowed CH to significantly revise and refine the PEtER spline-filter algorithm and introduce fixed-point processing. Further, an all-new, MEMS-based master clock has increased clock accuracy and reduced timing error, while increased local regulation and sophisticated power-management have significantly reduced the digital noise floor. Input compatibility has been fully updated and now includes full MQA compliance. Plus, there’s an improved, by-passable, hybrid digital/analog volume control. The step up in musical performance is accompanied by the same user-configurable input topology and expandable system capability, allowing owners to add external power supplies, a T1 Time reference master clock, or upgrade the C1.2 to three-box, dual-monaural-E)AC form. There’s even the capacity to…

If you’ve been following my phono cartridge reviews in TAS or Ken Kessler’s in HI-Fi News & Record Review, you already know that DS Audio’s optical cartridges (oc’s) are the hottest new things in LP playback. Though the theory behind using a massless beam of light rather than comparatively massive coils or magnets to convert the movements of a stylus into electricity is not new (it dates to the 1940s), it took a latter-day technology whiz, Japan’s Tetsuaki “Aki” Aoyagi (head of DS Audio), to perfect it. The optical groove-reading system is fairly easy to explain: The intensity of a light from a miniaturized “lamp” inside the cartridge is continuously modulated by the movement of an extremely low-mass “shading plate” attached to the stylus/cantilever. As the stylus vibrates, the shading…

Critical Mass Systems’ Joe Lavrencik has been designing and fabricating various types of vibration-control devices for many years now (I can remember hearing his first stand-alone boxes almost two decades ago.) He is a serious inventor, and each new generation of his products has been more effective than the last, culminating in the massive, handsome-looking, and pricey Olympus and MAXXUM stands and platforms, which do precisely what they’re intended to do—kill the effects of airborne, floorborne, and self-generated vibration via constrained-layer damping without any major sonic trade-offs. This has not always been the case with Joe’s gear—and with vibration-control systems in general. His initial CMS offerings, for instance, lowered background noise and smoothed out jittery frequency response quite effectively, but they also took a toll in dynamic life, rather in…

Meet one of Slovakia’s best kept secrets. I was surprised to discover that tube specialist Canor Audio has been developing and manufacturing high-end audio products for nearly 25 years. In case you’re wondering, the name comes from the Latin for “song” or “tune.” The emphasis is on manufacturing user-friendly and aesthetically pleasing audio components. The Canor AI 1.10 integrated amplifier is a prime example of that. Superficially, it appears to be yet another routine push-pull amp, generating 40Wpc in ultralinear mode from a pair of KT88 beam tetrodes. But there’s more to it than meets the eye. For starters, the amp operates in a pure Class A and features an autobias circuit. Canor does not design products around off-the-shelf output transformers. Instead, output trannies are designed in-house for each specific…

MUSIC SONICS Al Di Meola/JohnMcLaughlin/Paco de Lucia: Saturday Night In San Francisco. Impex (LP). Across two-months of touring, this trio of disparate guitar virtuosi relished night after night pushing and playing off each other. Their final shows in front of a fired-up audience at San Francisco’s Warfield yielded Friday Night in San Francisco, one of the great recordings, both musically and sonically. Impex’s recent 45rpm remains the best among the many reissues I’ve heard. Now Impex has released the long-awaited bookend from the second and final show, Saturday Night in San Francisco. Half of the six selections are compositions performed solo by the player who wrote it, while the remaining are played by the trio. None are repeated from Friday Night. Mastered by Bernie Grundman from master tapes stored for…

Michael Vamos Audio Skies “I believe we must focus a lot more on young people and on women.” How did your interest in the high end begin? Some people gather around the TV to watch a series or sports. My friends and I listened to music and went to concerts, instead. Every gathering we had was with music. My first year at high school, during a weekend camp out, the amps broke down. One guy drove a 150-mile roundtrip to bring back fresh amps, because a weekend without music was just not an option. Music has always been a part of my life. When I was a kid, my parents would have parties, and I would groove to the music. I had my first system at around 14. What in…