Inhaltsverzeichnis für April 2022 in Stereophile

I start this review with a confession. I have consistently found that when I play CDs on a transport and feed the digital data via AES3 (AES/EBU) to a D/A processor, the music has more drive, particularly at low frequencies, than it does when I send the same 16/44.1 data to the same D/A processor via my network. However, these days I almost always stream my music rather than playing physical discs. Not only is it much more convenient; the wealth of metadata available with Roon 1.8 is addictive. I also have convenient access to much more music: my growing library of hi-rez files and hi-rez music streamed from Qobuz. I don’t understand why there should be an audible difference between AES3 and network audio. The data are the same…

I measured the performance of the Schiit Freya + with my Audio Precision SYS2722 system,1 checking some of the results with the magazine’s top-line APx500. The preamplifier preserved absolute polarity (ie, was noninverting) with both balanced and unbalanced inputs and outputs and in all three output modes. Its XLR jacks are wired with pin 2 hot, the AES convention. The maximum gain depended on whether the tube stage was operating and whether I was using the unbalanced inputs and outputs or the balanced inputs and outputs. In passive mode or with the solid state buffer, the maximum gain with the single-ended inputs at the single-ended output was –6.1dB. It was –0.08dB at the balanced output for both the balanced and unbalanced inputs, ie, just below unity gain. With the tube…

Jonathan Ward, a historian of recorded sound, has some surprising news. Thousands of early 78rpm recordings were made not to preserve music but as disposable materials for selling gramophones. With manufacturers hoping to expand their sales globally, demo records featured regional music aimed at appealing to regional buyers. On his blog Excavated Shellac —and now on a 100-track compilation, Excavated Shellac: An Alternate History of the World’s Music (1907-1967), curated and produced by Jonathan Ward and remastered by Michael Graves—Ward has lovingly plucked a selection of these artifacts from music history’s rubbish heap and unearthed background information on each in a herculean feat of research. His work lays bare a rich, hidden world of recording. This endlessly fascinating collection, which can be downloaded as 16/44.1 WAV, FLAC, or MP3 files…

Charming Disaster (CD). 2022. Ellia Bisker and Jeff Morris, prods., engs. The music of Brooklyn-based duo Charming Disaster—singer/songwriter Ellia Bisker and Jeff Morris—has often been referred to as gothic folk in their 10 years together. Their fourth album might also be called historical narrative folk. Which is not to say that they’ve changed their style. Inspired by scientist Marie Curie, Our Lady of Radium still shimmers with horror. This nine-part song cycle invites listeners deep into Curie’s life and mind. Her experiments with radioactivity offer plenty of potential for dark lyrics and musical weirdness. So does the poisoning of young women who painted radium on watch faces, as explored in the song “Radium Girls.” The project started as research in 2017, then got pushed to the side. When the pandemic…

OUR Recordings 6.220676 (SACD, auditioned as DXD download). 2021. Michael Emery, prod.; Mikkel Nymand, eng. Perhaps it required visionary filmmaker Stanley Kubrick to first inform us of the interstellar reach of the music of György Ligeti. On this album, the frequently unfathomable otherworldly essence of his choral music is brought into sharp relief by its pairing with three folklore-based choral settings composed by his predecessor, Zoltán Kodály. Superbly recorded in DXD—the dynamics from the moderately sized Danish National Vocal Ensemble are startling—the recording makes a convincing case for high-resolution engineering. Take, for example, Ligeti’s “Hälfte des Lebens” (Halfway through life) from Three Phantasies after Friedrich Hölderlin (1982), which demands a quintuple forte from 16 voices. Wrapping your mind around what that might sound like may begin to prepare you for…

Mabern, piano; Eric Alexander, tenor saxophone; Vincent Herring, alto saxophone; Steve Davis, trombone; John Webber, bass; Joe Farnsworth, drums Smoke Sessions SSR-2107 (CD, download). 2021. Paul Stache, Damon Smith, prods.; Paul Stache, eng. Harold Mabern made this record when he was 81, 20 months before he died, with a sextet full of badasses 30 years younger. You might think his five sidemen had to go easy on their aging leader. If you thought that, you would be wrong. The guy here with the most striking ideas, the most juice, is Harold Mabern. They called him Iron Man. For 60 years, he was one of the elite post-bop pianists. It would be silly to list all the important people he played with. The list is too long. (Hint: It starts with…

Old-school vs. internet Selling hi-fi gear online is hardly new. If you count mail-order sales, which is much the same thing, it’s been happening since before amazon.com was a discount bookstore. Long before. At first, online sales were mainly for inexpensive and moderately priced items, but over time, people have grown comfortable buying higher-priced goods online: computers, cars, and yes, higher-end audio equipment. The pandemic has accelerated this trend. Many hi-fi manufacturers and importers have remained true to the traditional sales model, and for many hi-fi products, especially the expensive ones, the model continues to work well. Yet, a growing number of hi-fi companies—manufacturers, distributors, and dealers—have noticed that ignoring internet sales means leaving money on the table. Unfortunately, the two approaches have long seemed to be in conflict. The…

What? Suddenly a new Japanese cartridge manufacturer? That’s what I was thinking when Mockingbird Distribution’s Phillip Holmes dropped three cartridges on me from DYLP Audio. Never heard of them—but then I’d not heard of MuTech either when Holmes sent me one of that company’s $4500 RM-Kanda (now Hyabusa) moving coil cartridges, which I reviewed in the March 2019 issue’s Analog Corner.1 If that cartridge is not on your moving coil radar, you ought to put it there. Holmes sent three made-in-China DYLP Audio cartridges: the MC Ruby-1, the MC100 Mk II, and the Mono. All are part of the Windbell series, and all are presented well in nicely finished wood boxes with QR codes on the glossy outer packaging that you can scan to access the company’s website, lpaudio.cn. Go…

Have you ever walked through fresh snow in the woods with all your senses heightened? When I did, shortly before the New Year, it was as if I was seeing nature for the first time, through a fresh lens. Never had white-coated surfaces appeared so white. Nor had shapes seemed so magical. It felt as if I had happened upon a pristine landscape unexplored by human or beast. Those mesmerizing moments were precipitated not by nature but by spending several previous hours listening intently for differences between three stellar preamplifiers: the solid state D’Agostino Momentum HD ($40,000 US), which is my reference; the solid state darTZeel NHB-18NS ($53,000 US), which had entered my system several months before; and the tubed Engström Monica Mk3 ($60,000 US), which is the subject of…

I measured the Lumin P1 with my Audio Precision SYS2722 system.1 Looking first at the digital inputs, the AES3 and coaxial and TosLink S/PDIF inputs accepted data sampled at all rates up to 192kHz. Apple’s AudioMIDI utility revealed that the P1 accepted 16-and 32-bit integer data via USB sampled at all rates from 44.1kHz to 768kHz.2 Apple’s USB Prober app identified the Lumin as “LUMIN” from “PMS” (Pixel Magic Systems, presumably), and the USB port operated in the optimal isochronous asynchronous mode. The Lumin’s analog outputs with the Invert Phase control set to Off preserved absolute polarity (ie, were noninverting) via all of the P1’s digital inputs. The maximum output with full-scale 1kHz data and the Gain set to High was 2.95V from the P1’s single-ended analog outputs and 5.89V…

In the 1990s, I was a globetrotter, interviewing musicians in diverse locales for several publications. My habit when arriving in London was to hit the duty-free shops for Cuban Montecristo cigars, move on to the newsagent for the latest issues of Hi-Fi News and Hi-Fi Choice, then take a leisurely romp through Oranges & Lemons, Richer Sounds, and Sevenoaks Sound & Vision—three major London audio stores. On at least one of those trips Cyrus Audio caught my eye. With its sleek, sculpted half-width façades, Cyrus equipment looked like it belonged in the dash of the Aston Martin DB5 I wasn’t driving as it sped around a fast curve on the Strand, and you couldn’t get it in the US. Founded in the late 1970s by Farad Azima, Cyrus was originally…

Starting with her out-of-now-here triumph at the 2010 Thelonious Monk Jazz Competition and continuing with the release of four albums including three Grammy winners, Cécile McLorin Salvant, still just 32, has been raising eyebrows and neck hairs for a dozen years. She reigns as the supreme jazz singer of our time, ranking among the best of all time. More remarkable, she keeps getting better, and, rarer still, she keeps evolving, expanding her repertoire of styles—which was vast from the start—without losing a wisp of her deep blues, swing, precision, wit, operatic range, or storytelling drama. Ghost Song, her debut on Nonesuch, is unlike anything she’s recorded. It contains no jazz standards. It begins with a gorgeous a cappella, which sounds like Hildegard of Bingen and segues into Kate Bush’s “Wuthering…

Ninja Tune (Download). 2022. BCNR, prods.; Sergio Maschetzko, eng. The members of the British band Black Country, New Road know how to improvise, giving a sense of freedom to their second album. What makes Ants From Up There gripping is how that improvisation is counterbalanced by complex composition. The result defies expectations at every turn. The accompaniment for “Bread Song” pays homage to one of Steve Reich’s aleatoric pieces. Armed with that information, you might expect an experimental melody. Instead, the extemporaneous instrumental sounds bloom into a mushroom cloud of energy in support of a quiet, conventionally constructed vocal line. Every track contains baffling puzzles that reward multiple listenings yet refuse to be solved. The meter of “Chaos Space Marine” is accented four plus two plus two, giving the frantic…

Vienna Philharmonic, Christian Thielemann, cond. Sony Classical G010004595494F (CD). 2022. Florian Rosensteiner, prod.; Martin Leitner, eng. This is one of Thielemann’s more straight-forward Bruckner outings. The symphony’s opening has good buoyancy and clarity, with nice, open textures. Its climax gets a bit heavy, but then the second group is gentle and poised, and the development maintains a nice lightness. The conductor also finds moments of nuanced expression: Thus, the oboe is pleasantly woolly in the third theme, but the clarinet, recapping it, is more subdued and reflective. The coda’s brief ruminative episode, interrupting the customary hurtle into the home stretch, is refreshing. A restrained gravity pervades the Andante. The Scherzo is forthrightly athletic, and the Finale starts as if the music were already in progress, a nice touch. The gratuitous,…

Jost, vocals, harmonica; Jim Ridl, piano; Dean Johnson, bass; Tim Horner, drums; two others PJ Music PJM-0121-2 (2 CDs). 2021. Paul Jost, prod.; David Power, eng. Paul Jost is that rare phenomenon among jazz vocalists: a true stylist. He has spent his life in music, mostly as a drummer. He came late to singing. He is almost 60 but did not release his first vocal recording until 2015. This new double album is his third. His phrasing is asymmetrical. He sometimes talks his lyrics, as if he were thinking out loud. Just when you decide that quiet introspection is his thing, he breaks loose and scats with wild abandon. He sings standards but also covers pieces by Randy Newman, Luiz Bonfá, and Donovan. It is very risky for Jost to…

US, WORLDWIDE, AND ON THE INTERWEBS Julie Mullins In our February issue’s As We See It, Editor Jim Austin discussed the recording industry’s return to profitability, supported mainly by paid streaming subscriptions. Vinyl sales also played a minor role. But vinyl wasn’t the only format to rise in 2021. CD sales also increased, for the first time since 2004, reaching 40.6 million units sold, according to MRC Data’s 2021 U.S. Year-End Report in collaboration with Billboard. (Penske Media Corporation and MRC “joined forces in late 2020 to form P-MRC Data,” the report states.) In 2021, CD sales went up by 1.2% year-over-year compared with 2020’s total of 40.6 million units. Releases from pop-music divas Taylor Swift and Adele factored heavily into the rise of disc sales: Adele’s 30 was the…

Look closely at the audio system in the photo. It belongs to my friend, and fellow audio seeker, Devon Turnbull (aka Ojas).1 Notice every object in the room, particularly the arrangement of amplifiers, and turntables, and that awesome herd of cartridges on the table in front of the listening chair. May I suggest you regard these diverse objects as ceremonial utensils arranged in an aesthetically pleasing manner, for the pleasure of the main listener? For the sake of this short story, I will honor myself with the title of Shokyaku (Japanese for main guest) and my friend Devon as my esteemed host (Teishu).2 This tale of record-playing and discovery will be most clear if you consider the events I am about to describe as ritual communions practiced in front of…

I measured the Engström Monica Mk3 with my Audio Precision SYS2722 system,1 checking some of the results with the magazine’s top-line APx500. (I made sure that the inputs were set to Stereo, as indicated on the front-panel display.) The volume control appeared to operate in approximate 1.5dB steps at the top of its range and 1dB steps at lower settings. The maximum gain was 4.8dB at the balanced outputs for both the balanced and unbalanced inputs. The gain with the single-ended inputs at the single-ended outputs was –1.2dB, ie, 6dB lower, as specified. With its input toggle switches in the down position, the preamplifier preserved absolute polarity (ie, was noninverting) with both balanced and unbalanced inputs and outputs. The Engström’s balanced and unbalanced input impedances were 20k ohms at 1kHz…

What am I doing with a vacuum tube preamplifier? I haven’t owned a tubed preamp since I bought a Sonic Frontiers Line 3 preamplifier at the turn of the century. I set that aside within a few years as I moved into multichannel because multichannel tube-based electronics were, and still are, rare. My last home experience with a vacuum tube was with a PS Audio Stellar M1200 monoblock power amp, which is a hybrid with a 12AX7-based input stage. But why not? As I wrote in reviewing a tube preamp1 back in 1997, “if the results are worthwhile, why should I care if the designer builds an amp powered by rats on a treadmill?” The Freya’s sound in solid state buffer mode is what I expect from a good preamp…

I measured the Cyrus CDi-XR using my Audio Precision SYS2722 system.1 This player doesn’t have digital inputs, so I used test signals burned on a CD-R. As these signals are restricted to a word length of 16 bits, this affected my measurements of resolution and noisefloor. I used the Pierre Verany Digital Test CD to check the CDi-XR’s error correction. It played the tracks with gaps in the data spiral up to 0.5mm in length without stuttering, but there were audible glitches when the gap was 0.75mm and longer. The Compact Disc standard, the so-called Red Book, requires only that a player cope with gaps of up to 0.2mm, but the Cyrus’s error correction is not as good as that of the best players or transports I have measured in…

John Coltrane spent his final years with Impulse! Records, from 1961 until his death, in 1967, at the age of 40. Those years were his most adventurous, as he sorted through every sound he could create in his spiritual quest, as he put it, to “get the one essential.” His range of recordings in those years spanned from “Greensleeves” to A Love Supreme, from ballads with pop singer Johnny Hartman to multiphonic fireworks with alto saxophonist Eric Dolphy. Two new Coltrane reissues on vinyl, from the partnership of Universal Music and Acoustic Sounds, typify the breadth of this range and the depths of his explorations. Live at the Village Vanguard, recorded on November 2 and 3, 1961, was Coltrane’s first live album, catching a growing trend of laying down…

EMI EMI2047 (24/192KHz FLAC download). 2022. Elvis Costello, Sebastian Krys, prods.; Ron Taylor, eng. Most of us mellow with age; there’s no sin in that. Hell, nowadays I can even cope with people playing U2 in my presence. But whilst mellow doesn’t have to mean bland, it can sometimes blunt a musician’s art. For me, for a while Elvis Costello has been too much of the elder lyricist rather than the cutting iconoclast he once was. Okay, no one expects an angry Peter Pan, but let’s face it, with everything going on in the world, there’s plenty to get heated up about. With The Boy Named If, Elvis puts his teeth back in. This music has energy. There’s a sense that these are songs he had to write and which…

Alina Ibragimova, violin; Cédric Tiberghien, piano Hyperion CDA68322 (auditioned in 24/96 WAV). 2022. Andrew Keener, prod.; Oscar Torres, eng. A thirst for good tunes led me to this new recording of Mendelssohn Violin Sonatas. For a composer as prolific as Mendelssohn, it may come as a surprise that of the three completed sonatas and one sonata fragment on this 67-minute recording, Mendelssohn chose to publish only one, which he composed the year he turned 14. Even more astounding, the finest and most original of the lot, the Sonata in F major (MWV Q26) from 1838, remained in manuscript form until 1953, when violinist Yehudi Menuhin brought it into the light, albeit in somewhat bastardized form. It wasn’t until 2009, the bicentennial of Mendelssohn’s birth, that unadulterated copies of Mendelssohn’s two…

World Circuit/BMG WCV050BOX (2CDs + 2LPs). 1997/2021. Ry Cooder, prod.; Jerry Boys, Bernie Grundman, engs. In 1996, American guitarist Ry Cooder and British label owner Nick Gold traveled to Havana to make what they thought would be a Cuba-meets-Africa record with musicians from Mali. When the Malians didn’t show up, Cooder and Gold, with help from local bandleader Juan de Marcos González, mustered a group of mostly older Cuban singers and players, coaxing some out of retirement, and recorded an album of mainly traditional compositions at the historic EGREM studios. Buena Vista Social Club was a worldwide sensation, selling in the millions, winning a Grammy, spawning spinoff albums by individual artists, and inspiring a documentary film of the group’s 1998 performance at Carnegie Hall. Now Gold’s World Circuit label, currently…

Magic picture shows Axiomatically, audiophile audio is about quality of reproduced sound. Experientially though—for me at least—it’s about visions in the mind’s eye. The older I get, the more attentively I listen to recordings, the more importance I assign to the myriad moving pictures I see between my speakers. As I walk about my garden under the dome of city noise and sky, the mixed sounds that enter my brain are of two types: those whose source is within my field of vision, and those I can’t see directly but can still picture in my mind. Every time I hear a jet passing overhead, I’m aware of “seeing” a jet without looking up. My partner, bb, says I didn’t actually see that jet—the one that made the noise. She says…