Tabla de contenidos para September 2020 en Stereophile

How goes your quarantining? Honestly, my life hasn’t changed much here. I’m locked in the basement as usual, happy to have a good audio system and overwhelmed by my musical choices. Other than minimizing shopping expeditions and wearing a mask, the biggest change in my life is a spike in requests from readers for upgrade advice. I’ve never been so busy answering reader emails. Two months ago, I ran out of space while covering the unsubtle sonic improvements of the passive CAD Ground Control system. Now that I’ve lived with the CAD for another couple of months, I can render my verdict: I can’t live without it. After listening for weeks, I pulled it out of my system, listened for a few minutes, put it all back immediately, then wrote…

As much as I admire Belgian amplifier designer Bruno Putzeys’s accomplishments, I have harbored some misgivings about class-D amplifier sound. I do not believe it represents the future of perfectionist audio. Despite the fact that today’s active loudspeakers depend entirely on class-D’s free horsepower, light weight, and low-temperature operation, I think it sounds vacant compared to class-A. Class-D’s primary engineering virtues are its extreme power-to-weight ratio and power-efficiency, as well as its high damping factor. Class-D’s chief audiophile virtue is its uncanny transparency, especially in the six lowest octaves, ie, below 1.3kHz. When I listen to good class-D (with a fat, stable linear power supply), I feel like I am gazing into a clear, glass-smooth pond. I can see all the way to the bottom. But (sigh) there are no…

The email from Herb Reichert was intriguing. “I am, with great difficulty writing about HoloAudio’s new two-chassis May DAC,” he wrote. “It is death quiet and very natural. It makes every recording sound non-digital.” Once Herb had finished writing his review of the HoloAudio for the August issue’s Gramophone Dreams column, I sped to his Bed-Stuy bothy and grabbed the May DAC, both to get it on my test bench and to take a listen for myself. The review sample was the top-of-the-line Level 3 version,1 with both the processor and power supply having the serial number 1911541872. Before doing any listening, I measured the May with my Audio Precision SYS2722 system (see the January 2008 “As We See It”2). Apple’s USB Prober utility identified the May as “Holo Audio…

Used copies of Sonny Rollins’s classic 1957 record Way Out West are easy enough to find. The album has been reissued some 30 times on vinyl, most recently in 2018 on Craft Recordings (but read Michael Fremer’s take on that reissue before buying1). You can still buy Original Jazz Classics reissues from 1988—sealed—for about $20. If you want an early pressing, though, your opportunities are limited. If you want an early pressing in collectable condition, expect to pay real money. And if you want that early pressing in pristine condition, good luck with that. This is the niche the Electric Recording Company (ERC) fills. No, ERC reissues aren’t early pressings, so ERC makes sure their reissues are better than the originals ever were. They ensure authenticity in all the ways…

I am fascinated by DACs and the shifting sands of today’s digital-audio marketplace. This month, I am reporting on two more DACs, both made by Denafrips: the $4498 Terminator, until recently their flagship DAC, and the $768 Ares II, the company’s least expensive model. Like the HoloAudio May DAC I described last month, both Denafrips converters employ R-2R conversion schemes, and both render recordings into direct, unprocessed sound. The Denafrips Terminator is not new. It has been around since March 2017 and has been reviewed and discussed (but not in Stereophile). When I checked, Stereophile’s Recommended Components listed a baker’s dozen sigma-delta DACs, five of which use the same ESS9038Pro chip; two use the ESS9028 chip. Five others employ FPGAs. Inexplicably, there was not a single R-2R ladder DAC. Especially…

Loudspeaker manufacturer GoldenEar Technology was founded in 2010 by a team led by Sandy Gross, who over the decades was responsible for a succession of affordable high-performance loudspeakers from Polk and Definitive Technology.1 Gross continued that tradition with GoldenEar: Even the company’s flagship, the Triton Reference, which I favorably reviewed in January 2018,2 was priced a couple of dollars short of $8500/pair. (GoldenEar was acquired by The Quest Group, the parent company of cable company AudioQuest, in January 2020; Gross continued with the brand as president emeritus.) When Stereophile Editor Jim Austin asked if I would be interested in reviewing GoldenEar’s new stand-mounted design, the BRX (for Bookshelf Reference X), which is competitively priced at $1599/pair, I was interested to find out if what I had liked about the brand’s…

Yamaha: The name evokes memories of my youth when those muchcoveted receivers were out of financial reach, leading me to rely upon entry-level Kenwoods and Pioneers and others that sounded worse. Everyone who ever had a cheap receiver blow up—that’s what caused me to move from Kenwood to Pioneer—or heard an old Akai that made LPs sound like 128kbps MP3s, please raise your hands. Yamaha was in a different league.1 Hence, when Jim Austin proposed that I review the brand-new, top-of-theline Yamaha A-S3200 integrated amplifier ($7499.95), I was eager to discover just how far the company’s designs had progressed since I was in my 30s. When I first saw the A-S3200’s retro, double-meter look and discovered that it has bass and treble tone controls and a front-panel headphone jack, l…

Apart from the Beatles and Hendrix I heard in my audiophile father’s basement, one of my earliest rock’n’roll memories involved a multipurpose record player at school. In third grade, six of us were moved as a separate group to a round table to watch a filmstrip in a darker part of a large, open-plan classroom. A clunky old record player in a selfcontained carrying case with a half-dozen headphone jacks sat on the table. We each plugged in a pair of headphones to hear the soundtrack for the filmstrip we were instructed to watch—unsupervised. Ben discreetly pulled out his older brother’s LP of Queen’s The Game and played it instead. I don’t remember the filmstrip, but “Another One Bites the Dust” is etched in my memory. In spite of that…

A much-touted benefit of an amplifier with a class-D output stage is that it can be smaller and much lighter than a conventional amplifier for a given power. I was surprised, therefore, when I unpacked LKV’s Veros PWR+ to find that it was both large and heavy. This is because the amplifier uses a linear power supply with three hefty transformers rather than a switchmode supply.1 I measured the Veros PWR+ using my Audio Precision SYS2722 system (see the January 2008 “As We See It”2). As the LKV has a class-D output stage, it wasn’t necessary to precondition the amplifier by using it to drive a 1kHz tone at one-third power into 8 ohms. Nevertheless, before doing any testing I ran it for an hour at a moderate power level,…

My first exposure to Manger Audio loudspeakers, which are based on the “bending-wave” technology invented years ago by the company, was to the Manger p2, their passive flagship speaker, at the 2019 AXPONA. I heard it again a month or so later at High End Munich. I was impressed both times, especially by its transient and spatial performance. I don’t remember what music I heard at AXPONA, but in Munich, I asked to hear Duke Ellington’s Jazz Party in Stereo, which (despite being first released in mono, as Duke Ellington Jazz Party) is one of the more profoundly stereo issues of its era. The album features no fewer than nine percussionists, not including drummer Sam Woodyard. Producer Irving Townsend, who wrote the liner notes, called it “the most exciting album…

Mother, motherThere’s too many of you cryingBrother, brother, brotherThere’s far too many of you dying I watched the TV with horror. George Floyd, an African-American man in Minneapolis, Minnesota, was being killed in front of the camera. I retreated to the listening room. In what couldn’t have been a coincidence, the Roon app’s “Discover” function had recommended I play What’s Going On, Marvin Gaye’s groundbreaking album, released in 1971 by Motown subsidiary Tamla. I first heard this album when, at the start of my professional career as a bass guitarist, I was driving to a gig in Wales, playing the cassette in my car. I have always found that listening to music alone in the car is an immersive experience. Despite the background noise and the lack of fidelity, you…

I used DRA Labs’ MLSSA system and a calibrated DPA 4006 microphone to measure the GoldenEar BRX’s frequency response in the farfield, and an Earthworks QTC-40 mike for the nearfield and in-room responses. GoldenEar specifies the BRX’s sensitivity as 90dB/W/m; my estimate was somewhat lower, at 87.5dB(B)/2.83V/m. The BRX’s impedance is specified as “compatible with 8 ohms.” However, the impedance magnitude (fig.1, solid trace) drops well below 8 ohms in the midrange and mid-treble region, with a minimum value of 3.24 ohms at 194Hz. There is also a combination of 5 ohms impedance magnitude with an electrical phase angle of –45° (dashed trace) at 120Hz. As the phase angle is relatively high in several regions, I used a result from a 1994 AES paper by Eric Benjamin to calculate what…

I tested the Yamaha A-S3200 with my Audio Precision SYS2722 system (see the January 2008 “As We See It”1). I first preconditioned the amplifier by following the CEA’s recommendation of operating it at one-eighth the specified power into 8 ohms for 30 minutes. At the end of that time, the top panel was warm, at 101.4°F (38.6°C). I subsequently performed my usual thermal stress test by running the amplifier at onethird power into 8 ohms for an hour. The Yamaha’s top panel was only a little warmer than before, at 109.8°F (43.3°C). The A-S3200 appears to operate its output devices with a relatively high amount of bias current, but it has sufficient heatsinking capacity for its power. Examined first at its single-ended line inputs, the V3 offered a high maximum…

An outburst of saxophone flurries sits you straight up in your chair. The tone is rich but with a cutting edge. It has to be Rudresh Mahanthappa. The riveting cry of his alto saxophone is one of the most recognizable sounds in jazz. But those darting runs coalesce into Charlie Parker’s “Red Cross.” So it can’t be Mahanthappa, can it? He has made 15 straight albums of original music. He doesn’t do covers, right? On his 16th recording, Hero Trio, Mahanthappa breaks through to the past—his and ours. He proudly proclaims Parker’s bebop—but then “Red Cross” flies apart, into free showers of 16th notes. It is startling to hear Mahanthappa playing songs you know, even lilting ones like Stevie Wonder’s “Overjoyed” and time-honored standards like “I Can’t Get Started.” Of…

It has been almost two decades since Norah Jones emerged shyly from obscurity into astonishing pop/jazz stardom, first with 2001’s First Sessions EP, her Blue Note launchpad, then with 2002’s Come Away With Me, which wowed the world. It has been surmised that Jones’s self-described “mellow piano music” salved the pain of 9/11—whatever the reason, the album won five Grammy Awards and is reported to have sold some 27 million copies: more than Eric Clapton’s Unplugged and slightly fewer than The Eminem Show. She followed that up with three more million-selling albums during the two-thousand-and-aughts. Along the way, she made lots of friends and collaborators: country icons Dolly Parton and Willie Nelson; rock/pop acts Danger Mouse and Foo Fighters; jazz icons Herbie Hancock and Wayne Shorter. After that remarkable first…