Tabla de contenidos para February 2022 en Stereophile

I’m deep into audio power amplifiers because they remind me of race car engines. Both power sources are wildly inefficient, converting only a small percentage of their stored energy into work while dissipating the rest as heat and vibration. Mainly though, I love how race car engines sound. How they shake the air. Just like amps and speakers. Audio-frequency power amplifiers take a small input signal—usually less than 1V—apply it to an input impedance of (typically) no less than 10k ohms, and make this tiny eyeblink of power (0.0001W) into a waveform that’s many times more powerful, capable in some cases of doing hundreds of watts of speaker-moving work. To grasp the magnitude of this chore, and what I am about to describe, it might be useful to imagine power…

I measured the Monitor Audio Silver 500 7G’s farfield behavior with DRA Labs’ MLSSA system, an Earthworks microphone preamplifier, and a calibrated DPA 4006 microphone. I used an Earthworks QTC-40 mike, with its small 1/4"-diameter capsule, to measure the nearfield responses of the loudspeaker drive units and ports. The Silver 500 7G’s sensitivity is specified as a high 90.5dB/2.83V/m, which was confirmed by my estimate. Monitor Audio specifies the Silver 500 7G’s impedance as 8 ohms, with a minimum magnitude of 4.1 ohms at 150Hz. Measured with Dayton Audio’s DATS V2 system, the impedance magnitude (fig.1, solid trace) remained above 4 ohms for the entire audioband, with a minimum value of 4.23 ohms at 153Hz. The EPDR1 drops below 3 ohms between 81Hz and 135Hz, a region where music can…

I measured the Topping Pre90’s performance with my Audio Precision SYS2722 system (see the January 2008 As We See It1), repeating some tests with the magazine’s higher-performance APx555 system. The Pre90’s volume control operated in accurate 0.5dB steps. The maximum gain at the unbalanced outputs was the specified 10dB for both the balanced and unbalanced inputs; the maximum gain at the balanced outputs was the specified 16dB for both types of inputs. The preamplifier preserved absolute polarity (ie, was noninverting) with both balanced and unbalanced inputs and outputs. (Its XLR jacks are wired with pin 2 hot, the AES convention.) The Pre90’s unbalanced input impedance was 9.9k ohms at 20Hz and 1kHz and 9.6k ohms at 20kHz. The balanced input impedance was low, at 2k ohms from 20Hz to 20kHz,…

DARTZEEL NHB-18NS MK.2 PREAMPLIFIER After Michael Fremer reviewed the darTZeel NHB-18NS full-function preamplifier in the June 2006 issue of Stereophile,1 he bought the review sample. He subsequently replaced it with the NHB-18NS Mk.2, which he wrote about in June 2017.2 It has been his reference preamplifier ever since. Although I performed a complete set of measurements on the original NHB-18NS, I never did so on the newer version, officially known as v.2014. As darTZeel had sent a new sample along with the NHB-108 Model Two power amplifier that Jason Victor Serinus will review in a forthcoming issue, I took advantage of this opportunity to do so. I examined the darTZeel NHB-18NS v.2014’s measured performance with my Audio Precision 2722 system,3 repeating some of the tests with the magazine’s higher-performance Audio…

Soloists, Women of Wiener Singakademie, ORF Vienna Radio Symphony, Marin Alsop, cond. Naxos 8.574283 (CD). 2021. Erich Hofmann, prod.; Robert Pavlecka, Friedrich Trondl, engs. PERFORMANCE SONICS Imaginative programming brings music from two of Hindemith’s controversial one-act operas together with his popular symphony. The “dances” from Das Nusch-Nuschi don’t sound particularly dancey, save in the shimmying at the start of the second one and in some parts of the third. The brief opening is mostly busy-busy buzzing, only occasionally settling into a lilt. The deftly wrought, rambunctious tuttis make even the dancing bits feel severely symphonic. Alsop has everything well in hand and gauges the crescendos well. The clear, tranquil opening of Sancta Susanna belies the psychosexual drama that gradually unfolds. Angular melodic contours add a disturbed undertone to otherwise humdrum…

Wycliffe Gordon, trombone, vocals; Nicholas Payton, Wynton Marsalis, trumpet; Reginald Veal, bass; Herlin Riley, drums, vocal; Common, guest vocal; others Verve (CD, LP). 2021. Gordon, Payton, Jackie Harris, prods.; Misha Kachkachishvili, Mack Mayor, Jesse Snyder, engs. PERFORMANCE SONICS Rarely has such a troubled recording project yielded such a delightful record. In 2018, a group of musicians performed a Louis Armstrong tribute at the Joy of Jazz Festival in South Africa. Jackie Harris of the Armstrong estate, who organized the concert, proposed an album; they all agreed. Trumpeter Nicholas Payton volunteered to produce it, and the troubles began. He chose a studio run by a friend, who wasn’t up to the task. A couple of newly hired musicians turned out to be ill suited. No one much liked the results. Harris…

So, what’s this all about? Most of you already know—after all, we’ve been doing it since 1991, and it’s one of our most popular features. But if you’re new to Stereophile, here it is: Originally, the light-hearted conceit was, these are the records you’d be willing to lay down your life for. (This foie gras is to die for!) But, let’s be real: That ain’t gonna happen, or so I hope. My favorite formulation was laid down by music critic John Swenson in March 2021 in a My Back Pages essay. He called them death-row discs: These are the records that, at the end of your life, you’d want—you’d need—to hear one last time. Maybe these records—and that desire—would even keep you alive a little longer. If that weren’t so…

I remember, around the time I started at Stereophile, telling Art Dudley that I wanted to review “a lot of power amplifiers” because amplifiers are the “blood-pumping heart machines” that “reanimate the artistry” of musicians: Horowitz, Björk, Bill Monroe. Whereupon he looked over his glasses and spied me with bare eyes like a stern parent and said, “Just be sure to not review any amplifiers that weigh more than 65 pounds.” I warned Art that this could be a problem because I only like class-A amplifiers, “and they all weigh more than that.” Art rolled his eyes, turned his head toward the next room, and scolded his barking dog, Chatter. As usual, everything I mock I become: Since confessing my allegiance to class-A, I have reviewed class-D and class-AB integrated…

I used DRA Labs’ MLSSA system, an Earthworks microphone preamplifier, and a calibrated DPA 4006 microphone to measure the Fyne Audio F500SP’s farfield behavior, and an Earthworks QTC-40 mike for its nearfield responses. I left off the grille for the measurements. I used Dayton Audio’s DATS V2 system to measure the impedance magnitude and electrical phase angle. Fyne Audio specifies the F500SP’s sensitivity as a high 90dB/2.83/m. My estimate was 87dB(B)/2.83V/m. The F500SP’s impedance is specified as 8 ohms; I found that the impedance magnitude (fig.1, solid trace) remained above 6 ohms for almost all the audioband, with a minimum value of 5 ohms between 157Hz and 203Hz. The electrical phase angle (dashed trace) is occasionally high, and the EPDR1 drops to 3 ohms between 111Hz and 161Hz, with a…

The Doors flew like a comet across the rock/pop universe, running only four and a half years and six studio albums with lead singer/poet/shaman Jim Morrison. L.A. Woman, their last album, marked a hard turn back to the rock and blues basics from whence they sprang in 1966 as a hot bar band on Sunset Strip. It is a masterpiece, a hit out of the gate that has grown in stature over time. Morrison took a sabbatical shortly before its release, decamped to Paris, and died there as this record climbed the charts. Like most turns on the Doors’ career path, the album started out with drama. The band and producer Paul Rothchild arrived at Sunset Sound, where they had recorded their first two albums with engineer Bruce Botnick. Tensions…

Transgressive TRANSS55IX (vinyl). 2021. Damon Albarn, Samuel Egglenton, prods.; Stephen Sedgwick, eng. PERFORMANCE SONICS Since the breakup of Blur, Damon Albarn has been a restless traveler, continually seeking new musical lands to explore. Those explorations led him to lead the supergroup “project” The Good, the Bad, and the Queen, with drummer Tony Allen, Paul Simonon of The Clash, and Simon Tong of the Verve. This, his second solo album, follows the first in eschewing catchy choruses; if you’re looking for those, you can find them in his other, more commercially successful project, Gorillaz. This album is one of reflection and contemplation. It began life as a set of instrumentals composed and recorded with a group of talented Icelandic musicians at his home just outside Reykjavik. When COVID came, he returned…

R. Strauss, Respighi, Schoenberg Appassionato, Mathieu Herzog, cond.; Adèle Charvet, mezzo Naïve V 7423 (CD). 2021. Ken Yoshida, prod. and eng. PERFORMANCE SONICS I’m surprised no one else thought to combine these string-based works on disc. They work well together, though none of these performances quite nails it. Tagging the Metamorphosen as for “twenty-three solo strings” is misleading: Strauss combined them into varied sectional groupings, with few exposed solos. Herzog paces the slow sections patiently while maintaining the flow; when he impetuously steps up the tempi, they’re just right, despite a few bits of confused scansion. The sonority is full and vibrantly “sung” without achieving Karajanesque saturation; the overall motion is good, though the big, biting downward leap arrives underprepared, and the pulsing afterbeats leading into it are buried. (Those…

Hersch, piano; Drew Gress, bass; Jochen Rueckert, drums; Rogerio Boccato, percussion (one track); Joyce Hammann, Laura Seaton, violins; Lois Martin, viola; Jody Redhage Ferber, cello Palmetto PM2198 (CD, available as download). 2022. Franky Rousseau, Fred Hersch, prods.; James Farber, David Stoller, engs. PERFORMANCE SONICS Fred Hersch has reached a level of eminence among jazz pianists that makes everything he does important. Breath by Breath is his first recording with piano trio and string quartet. The trio includes a longtime collaborator, bassist Drew Gress, and a new drummer, Jochen Rueckert. Hersch says the project was inspired by his meditation practice, which provided a “refuge” during the pandemic. The album does not sound meditative. It sounds measured, graceful, meticulously detailed, and melodic. But if one purpose of meditation is to transcend distraction…

Forget about the sound of the recording. Hello, and Happy New Year! I’m greeting you in October 2021—just before Halloween, in anticipation of Stereophile’s publication deadline—but by the time this magazine arrives in your mailbox, it’ll be after the holidays. If I hadn’t told you, you wouldn’t have known when I wrote this essay—and you still don’t know where I was when I wrote it: my office? In an airplane 36,000 feet up? Similarly, I don’t know where you’ll be when you read it, or when: Maybe in early 2022 in your listening chair; maybe you’ll find it in a box in an attic many years hence and read it then. What I’m getting at goes much deeper than the when and the where. It’s also about the what: While…

When I unpacked the Riviera Levante amplifier and lifted it onto the test bench, it struck me that this is actually eight amplifiers in one. It has balanced and single-ended line-level inputs. Its output stage can be operated in class-A or class-AB. It was supplied with two choices for the two input stage ECC81/12AT7 tubes: vintage Mullards or modern JJs. Add to those variations that the Levante has a headphone output and an optional phono stage (not fitted to the review sample), and it became clear that I had a lot of testing ahead of me. I decided to focus on the Riviera amplifier’s behavior with the Mullard tubes and the unbalanced inputs, performing every test in both of the output-stage modes. I then repeated some of the tests with…

There has not been a conventional preamplifier in my main audio system for quite a while, because no multichannel preamp is available that’s of high enough quality. Instead, I use the high-precision digital volume controls in my players and DACs and choose sources with a relay-based multichannel analog switch. Plus, I tell myself that no preamp can be more accurate and transparent than no preamp. However, I recently installed DiracLive3, which effectively reduces the available system gain by almost 20dB! In my salad days, I would have designed and built a balanced driver with gain for each channel; today, I require an off-the-shelf solution. After weeks of research, I found one: the Topping Pre90 ($599). The Pre90 offers [this music] up with great depth and detail, approaching what I hear…

I measured the Questyle M12 with my Audio Precision SYS2722 system (see the January 2008 As We See It1). I performed a full set of tests with WAV and AIFF test-tone files played with Pure Music 3.0 and Adobe Audition on my MacBook Pro running on battery power, and on my iPad mini using the Lightning-to-USB-A–to–USB-C cable combination. Apple’s USB Prober utility identified the M12 as “M12” from “Questyle” with the serial number “0.” The USB port operated in the optimal isochronous asynchronous mode, and Apple’s AudioMIDI utility revealed that the M12 accepted 16-, 24-, and 32-bit integer data sampled at all rates from 44.1 to 768kHz rather than the 384kHz specified by Questyle. A Drok USB tester indicated that with no signal being passed, the M12 drew 40mA of…

In the annals of jazz, Charles Mingus—bassist, pianist, composer, bandleader, unique, headstrong, and deeply influential in every category—occupies the transit point between Duke Ellington and the post-’60s avant-garde, a station he carved out deliberately. He venerated Ellington—his sophisticated rhythms and tonal colors, but also his attention to melody, harmony, and structure—and went beyond him (careened down a different path) in expressing emotion, chaos, and anger; it’s these elements that the avant-gardists took from him, while abandoning (to a degree that intrigued but also discomforted Mingus) Ellingtonian form. Critic Gary Giddins described Mingus as the “most persistently apocalyptic voice” in jazz—“the best example we have of disciplined turmoil.” As part of its collaborative series with Chad Kassem’s Analogue Productions, the Universal Music Group has released fine vinyl pressings of two classic…

International Anthem IARC0051 (CD, LP, download). 2021. Ben LaMar Gay, Dave Vettraino, prods.; Dave Vettraino, eng. PERFORMANCE SONICS Ben LaMar Gay draws from experience, and plenty of it. He has dueted with the DuSable Bridge in downtown Chicago (check YouTube) and is a member of that city’s fertile Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians. He lived and worked in Brazil for three years, and last year was commissioned to compose a piece for New York City’s Wet Ink Ensemble. His musical mind goes to many places, and fortunately he’s got the intellect to hold it all together. At the core of the vivid new Open Arms to Open Us is Gay’s cornet, synthesizer, and soulful voice and the steady, intricate drumming of Tommaso Moretti. The build is guest players…

Beethoven, Mozart, Myslivecek, and Haydn Cecilia Bartoli, mezzo-soprano; Kammerorchester Basel, Muhai Tang, cond. DG 4852093 (24/96 WAV). 2021. Arend Prohmann, prod.; Philip Siney, eng. PERFORMANCE SONICS Any concerns that artistic shortcomings might have been the reason that Cecilia Bartoli held back release of this 2013 collection of concert arias and extended vocal scenas are dispelled immediately once you listen. It may be difficult to imagine Bartoli’s light mezzo-soprano undertaking Beethoven’s dramatic scena “Ah! perfido” in a major opera house, but her limpid and impassioned vocalism, wisely supported by a chamber orchestra, hits the mark. In a voice that recalls Mozart’s Donna Elvira about to fly off the handle, Bartoli awes with smooth, perfectly defined downward runs, multi-octave leaps, and the strength of her convictions. She’s equally fabulous when she pulls…

Simon, piano Ridgeway RRCD017 (CD, available as download). 2021. Edward Simon, prod.; Norman Landsberg, eng. PERFORMANCE SONICS Edward Simon is in the second echelon of jazz pianists. He is firmly established, widely respected, and not quite a star. He was born in Venezuela but came to the United States at 16, 36 years ago. His impressive list of credits includes Greg Osby, Terence Blanchard, and the SFJAZZ Collective. Solo Live is his 15th album as a leader, but his first unaccompanied and only his second live recording. It comes from a performance at the Piedmont Piano Company in Oakland, California, a piano store that puts on regular concerts in a space with excellent acoustics. Engineer Norman Landsberg’s recording renders Simon’s Yamaha instrument as an existential presence. Simon’s playing retains rhythmic…