Inhaltsverzeichnis für July 2025 in Stereophile

SOUND UNITED FINDS A NEW HOME WITH HARMAN Mark Henninger Masimo Corporation has entered into a definitive agreement to sell its Masimo Consumer Audio division, which is made up of the former Sound United hi-fi brands, to Harman International, a subsidiary of Samsung Electronics, for $350 million in cash. Pending regulatory approvals, the transaction is expected to close by the end of 2025. The sale transfers an extensive portfolio—including Bowers & Wilkins, Denon, Marantz, Polk Audio, Definitive Technology, Classé, and Boston Acoustics (although that brand is just a name at this point)—to a buyer with business firmly rooted in audio. The deal includes the HEOS multiroom streaming platform, which Sound United has developed into a robust, hi-rez–capable system that competes with Sonos. Harman mentioned HEOS in its press release; Masimo…

I performed a complete set of tests on the Quad 33 preamplifier with my Audio Precision SYS2722 system.1 Looking first at the 33’s performance as a line preamplifier, all the inputs and outputs preserved absolute polarity, ie, were noninverting. The balanced input impedance was close to 20k ohms from 20Hz to 20kHz; the single-ended input impedance was 8.7k ohms at 20Hz and 1kHz, 8.2k ohms at 20kHz. The preamplifier’s balanced output impedance was a low 111 ohms from 20Hz to 20kHz; the unbalanced impedance was 119 ohms from 20Hz to 20kHz; the headphone output impedance was a very low 3 ohms across the audioband. The Quad’s maximum gain was 0dB (unity gain) for the balanced input to the balanced and unbalanced outputs and the unbalanced inputs to the unbalanced output.…

Just when I thought my equipment reviewing schedule was locked in for many months, an unavoidable last-minute cancellation sent me scrambling for an alternative. Jim Austin to the rescue. To his query, “How would you like to review a tube preamp from Canor, of Slovakia?” I answered with an enthusiastic “yes!” In addition to the exciting prospect of reviewing the first tubed preamplifier to come my way in a long time, hearing the Canor Hyperion P1 preamplifier ($12,500) in my system would enable me to get a handle on the sound of gear I’d only encountered once, at High End Munich 2024.1 As is often the case at shows, I left without a clear sense of the preamp’s contribution to the system’s sound, let alone its ultimate potential. The Canor…

Ryan Truesdell launched his Gil Evans Project in 2012 with Centennial. It contained 10 Evans arrangements, including two original Evans compositions, that had never been recorded. The project was made possible by the fact that Truesdell had been granted access to the Evans family archives. Evans was a towering figure who had been responsible for some of the greatest recordings in the history of jazz, like his own Out of the Cool and Miles Davis’s Sketches of Spain. Evans died in 1988, and Centennial was something the jazz world never expected to have again: a brand-new Gil Evans record. Truesdell assembled a large orchestra containing many of the best jazz musicians in New York and used an eminent engineer, James Farber. After Centennial, every May, Truesdell began playing annual week-long…

It’s on tape Why should we worry about the conservation and preservation of old analog master tapes when they’ve long ago been transferred to digital? It’s a reasonable question—especially since AI-powered digital signal processing is on the horizon, promising perfect repair of bad-sounding digital audio files. Musicians and many audiophiles are skeptical that DSP could ever perform authentic correction on natively analog domain-transferred music files, the way (eg) Plangent Processes can.1 A forceful argument for better preservation of the surviving tapes is that when they’re gone, we’ll have lost not only the absolute (if also decaying) reference but also vital information that can be essential to applying authentic corrective processes. The 1950s through the 1980s marked a golden era of music recording. Over those 40 years, an astounding number of…

The iron-and-tube ethos Woo Audio’s 20th Anniversary WA24 headphone amplifier comes in a distinctive, low-slung chassis that welcomes the eye with gentle angular volumes and bright, frosty-surfaced, copper-toned controls. In the always-crowded Woo–JPS Labs–Stax room at CanJam 2025,1 Woo’s new $12,999 flagship caught everybody’s eye, sitting on a table next to its similar-looking stablemate, the $8999 WA23 LUNA, a tube-rectified single-ended amplifier that, unlike the new WA24, uses 2A3 tubes. I asked Woo Audio founder Jack Wu how he came up with this design. He told me, “My brother, Zhidong Wu, designed it. He did all the original drawings. But after that, we worked together, slowly revising and refining those drawings. We started out with a 3D-printed model, then we had numerous revisions leading up to a metal sampling. It…

Back when gasoline had lead in it and amplifiers came with circuit diagrams in the back of the manual, there was an unspoken understanding that power meant weight. A professional camera was a Graflex Speed Graphic or a Hasselblad 1000F, built like a small battleship and nearly as heavy. Powerful car engines were cast-iron V8s with cylinders you could stick a fist in. And of course, serious amps had transformers that could double as boat anchors. These days, amplifier design often emphasizes efficiency. Class-D amps in particular have come a long way. Many are terrific, and they’re undeniably practical. But there’s still something uniquely satisfying about a design that prioritizes timeless expression over economy of electricity or space. What you can expect from this no-holds-barred amp is vitality.spirit.Brio The Pathos…

I used my Audio Precision SYS2722 system1 to measure the Quad 303. I performed a complete set of tests in two-channel mode, then repeated some of the tests in bridged-mono mode. I preconditioned the amplifier at⅛ the maximum power into 8 ohms for 30 minutes before starting the testing. At the end of that time, the heatsinks were hot, at 111.1°F/43.9°C. The top panel’s temperature was 85.3°F/29.6°C. The Quad 303 preserved absolute polarity with both the balanced and singleended inputs in both two-channel and bridged-mono modes. The balanced input is wired with pin 2 hot, the AES standard. The balanced input’s voltage gain at 1kHz into 8 ohms was 22.6dB; unusually, the single-ended input’s gain was higher, at 29.2dB. The gains in bridged-mono mode were respectively 29.6dB and 34dB. The…

When I unboxed the Canor Hyperion P1 preamplifier, the four 6922 tubes, two for each channel, were installed, but the 6H30PI dual-triode tubes, labeled “1” and “2,” were packed separately. I carefully installed these tubes in the sockets that corresponded to their numbers and checked that the 6922 tubes were correctly seated. I performed a complete set of tests with my Audio Precision SYS2722 system1 then repeated some of the testing with the magazine’s APx500 analyzer. I immediately encountered a problem in that there was no output from the right channel, from all the balanced and unbalanced inputs and outputs. I checked that all the cables I was using were okay. Then, after powering down the Hyperion P1, I rechecked that all the tubes were correctly installed. The problem persisted,…

Best of the blues—from Kansas Chad Kassem knows what it takes to make an immortal blues record. “Somebody who lived down in Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi, the South. They lived through it. Their story is real, and their voice is real.” The founder/owner of Analogue Productions and longtime blues true believer, Kassem’s record label, mail-order warehouse, and vinyl plating and pressing plant—all headquartered in Salina, Kansas—were recently profiled in The New York Times (“The Wizard of Vinyl is in Kansas,” March 5, 2025). Among his many business ventures, Kassem is part of the new Craft Recordings vinyl-reissue series of titles drawn from the Bluesville catalog, which is owned by Craft’s parent company, Concord Records. Kassem’s fascination with and respect for the blues began in his hometown. “I’m from Lafayette, Louisiana, so…

Two things that don’t suck There are things that make me feel so unpleasantly lightheaded that some days I worry my cranium might float away like a helium balloon. Like baby animals generated by AI that I can no longer distinguish from real ones. Skin care for tweens. Headlines about American politics that read like headlines about Turkmenistan. The music of Charli XCX. And being middle aged. Even the term is a con. At 54, I’m not in the middle of anything, and given the way my back feels in the mornings, the thought of living to 108 fills me with terror. There are things about this stage of life that arrive imperceptibly, and not just the physical frailties. Chief among them is the way one’s time on earth begins…

Despite the InPoL Legacy operating partly if not wholly in class-A—which means that increasing the current leaving those 4mm speaker outputs causes the amplifier to cool down rather than heat up—I preconditioned the unit by running it at 10% of the rated 100W/8 ohm output for one hour. Over that period, distortion (fig.1) increased slightly, from ~0.047% to a steady 0.06%; this uplift with temperature is a feature of most low-feedback designs. The distortion is second-and third-order in roughly equal measure. The maximum spot temperature registered across the heatsinks was 59.9o C at a room temperature of 20o C, so this expanse of ornate metalwork requires careful siting and plenty of airflow. It draws 855W from the wall at idle. Such is the physical scale of this amplifier that it’s…

Launched in 1967, Quad’s highly original, elegantly styled 33 preamplifier and 303 power amplifier were Quad’s first all–solid state designs and among the first solid state separates. The 303 may have been one of the first “vertical” amplifiers. Together with the 405 stereo amplifier, which came out in 1975, and the FM2 and FM3 tuners, these products proved to be enduring, widely feted successes from their launch until they were discontinued, the 33 in 1982, the 303 in 1985. Meanwhile, they enjoyed massive production runs, were marketed worldwide, and were much admired for their modern industrial design. It’s said that Quad sold 120,000 33 preamps and 100,000 303 amplifiers. Across two versions, the 405 sold even more. Quad introduced new versions of the 33 and 303 (each component $1599) in…

The first commandment for a Stereophile reporter is to remain neutral about any product under review. But when a company has a history of making things you like, that isn’t always easy to do. Reviewing the VPI Avenger Direct turntable with its 12" FatBoy tonearm, I concluded, “The Avenger Direct recasts records I thought I knew well, revealing secrets and expressing a purer sense of each one’s interior life.” Covering the VPI Scout 21 for Stereophile’s sister website, AnalogPlanet, I wrote, “this $3300 table seriously swung and played it all warm and toasty, displaying a big heart. I would even say it displayed an inherent love of music, reflected in its wide rhythmic gait and warmhearted embrace of the LPs I spun on it. The 21 ’table is quite the…

An audience with the Queen In 2010, the funky-eclectic New Orleans band Galactic—known today as much for being the owners of the city’s storied Tipitina’s club as for their music—cut their song “Heart of Steel” with singer Irma Thomas for their album, Ya-Ka-May. The band noticed that Thomas soon included the same tune in the sets that she played with her band. In 2022, Galactic decided to revisit the Thomas connection and came up with the idea of collaborating with her on an entire album of new music. Thomas, now 84, cut her first single, “Don’t Mess with My Man,” for New Orleans–based label Ron in 1959. Her biggest hit, “Wish Someone Would Care,” rose to #17 on Billboard’s Hot 100 in 1964. While her career went fallow for a…

Pathos InPoL Legacy On behalf of Pathos Acoustics and Harmonia Distribution, we would like to thank Rogier van Bakel for his excellent review of the Pathos InPol Legacy. He seems to have caught the bug we all catch when it comes to Pathos and its products. We are honored to be the distributor of this wonderful Italian brand because of the passionate and positive response their products receive from people who, like us, truly love music. When Mr. van Bakel wrote, “The sheer power of the performance, funneled through the Pathos, hit me in the gut,” we all remembered our first experience with a Pathos product, so this statement resonated with us. It’s why we listen to music. David Schultz (President) Jesse Luna (Vice-President) Harmonia Distribution QUAD 33 and 303…