Tabla de contenidos para June 2022 en Stereophile

National pride is the damnedest thing. When I was growing up in the Netherlands, schoolchildren were taught that the inventor of the printing press was a Dutchman named Laurens Janszoon Coster. Germany’s Johannes Gutenberg was waved away as an also-ran, if he was mentioned at all. Since then, the Dutch have claimed other engineering and technology triumphs that aren’t quite so dicey. Take the world of audio. Dutch innovators at Philips gave us the audio cassette (for which I beg your forgiveness). Two decades later, they and their Sony colleagues upped the game with the Compact Disc—and randomly decided on the diameter of the center hole by making it exactly the size of the pre-Euro Dutch dime. A Dutchman came up with Bluetooth. Top high-end brands like Mola Mola and…

Old-school audiophiles like me cling to our vinyl records and CDs. We spin them on turntables and slide them into transports, which send electric signals through wires to solid state or tubed amplifiers—a string of hardware devices. But, despite our object-attached ways, we’re quite aware that we are living in a software-enabled, Bluetooth-connected, Wi-Fi–facilitated world. Even our Milky Way galaxy is wireless; as that pontificator of everything galactic, scientist Neil DeGrasse Tyson, has proclaimed, “We’re all connected.” “Connected,” though, can mean different things. For some, it means stumbling down the street staring at a smartphone screen and bumping into strangers as life rushes by. For others, it’s a way to carry their office wherever they go—a curse if you ask me. But for still others, including the multitude of music…

WHEN AN ICON drops her first album in six years, you sit up and take notice. Bonnie Raitt made her earliest record a half-century and more ago, in August 1971. She was 21 and could easily have been carded; the face on the cover of Bonnie Raitt—that first album—has yet to shed all its baby fat. Eighteen albums followed, through 2016’s Dig in Deep, before Raitt took time off to rest, take stock, then wait out the pandemic. In summer 2021, she put the call out to her longtime band, and work commenced on her 20th album. Like its predecessors, Just Like That is roots-inflected pop of the highest order. The arc of Bonnie Raitt’s life is common knowledge: daughter of a not-quite-toptier star of the golden age of the Broadway…

EDITOR’S PICK RECORDING OF THE MONTH RICHARD STRAUSS Strauss: Andris Nelsons Boston Symphony Orchestra, Gewandhausorchester Leipzig, Andris Nelsons, cond.; Yuja Wang, piano; Yo-Yo Ma, cello Deutsche Grammophon 486 2049 (7 CDs, auditioned as 24/96 WAV), 2022. Various prods. and engs. PERFORMANCE SONICS At last, a box set of the orchestral works of Richard Strauss to rival the classic analog traversal from German conductor Rudolf Kempe and the Staatskapelle Dresden: a heaping helping of orchestral blockbusters, 93 tracks of music that, for color, splash, dynamic impact, fantasy, romance, wonder, and thrill, are without peer in the classical canon. Till Eulenspiegel’s Merry Pranks, Dons Juan and Quixote, Ein Heldenleben (A Hero’s Journey), Death and Transfiguration, Salome’s sensational “Dance of the Seven Veils,” and Also sprach Zarathustra—Stanley Kubrick’s journey to another galaxy, here…

THIS ISSUE: Mikey conducts a zenith-error test and auditions Channel D’s latest Lino C phono preamplifier. Plus, a pretty and pretty effective record weight. The stylus that cuts the grooves in your favorite records is best described, in simple terms, as “chisel-shaped.” The most accurate playback styli—the “extreme” ones that extract the maximum amount of information from the grooves—have a similar shape, with sharper and more severe contact edges than a standard elliptical stylus, itself an advance over spherical styli. These extreme shapes, with names like Line Contact, Fine Line, Gyger, Replicant, Shibata, and van den Hul, have complex geometries with long, narrow vertical contact patches that sit deep within the groove, can better trace the deepest lateral modulation crevices, and beat the fastest, most efficient path up and down…

Music lovers (and reviewers) long for those listening moments when their entire being lights up with joy. For me, that divine spark surfaced unexpectedly one February afternoon when, late for an appointment, I dashed into the music room, searching for my keys. That’s when I heard a bit of the 24/96 WAV files of this issue’s Recording of the Month, conductor Andris Nelsons’s mammoth survey of the complete orchestral works of Richard Strauss, which I’d cued up on repeat to help Meitner’s MA3 integrated D/A converter ($10,500) settle in. I didn’t know which of Nelsons’s two orchestras, the Boston Symphony Orchestra or the Gewandhausorchester Leipzig, was playing—what was clear, even from the hallway, was the glorious, silken smoothness of the strings. Those strings sounded so heavenly, so right, and so…

Melco, the Japanese maker of the N50 Music Library featured in this review, is not a household name among US audiophiles. Veterans may recall the Melco 3560 turntable, which was considered extravagant at its 1978 launch, in part because it supported three tonearms. Confusingly, several subsidiaries of the giant keiretsu Mitsubishi are called MELCO (for “Mitsubishi Electric Corporation”), but the maker of the N50 is not one of those MELCOs. This “Melco” is, rather, short for “Maki Engineering Laboratory Company,” and though it got its start in hi-fi, these days its best-known products are network-attached RAID arrays made by Melco’s American division, Buffalo Americas. Melco’s audio division, known as Melco Syncrets, sells products similar to those produced by Buffalo Americas but tuned for hi-fi, including servers that incorporate all the…

THIS ISSUE: Ken Micallef listens to the Mola Mola Tambaqui D/A processor, and Jim Austin trades out one Pass Laboratories preamplifier for another. MOLA MOLA TAMBAQUI D/A PROCESSOR When Herb Reichert reviewed the Mola Mola Tambaqui DAC ($13,400) in his December 2021 Gramophone Dreams column,1 his praise for the Bruno Putzeys–designed processor was effusive. “Mola Mola’s Tambaqui did not whisper—it declares loudly: ‘See! The truth is more beautiful than you thought it would be!’” “The Tambaqui seemed to expose the core, or body, of recorded sound in a way that upped the intensity of my listening experience.” “Transparency, detail, and purity were off the charts.” “I heard—and saw—previously invisible molecules of live, reverberant energy.” John Atkinson’s measurements of the Tambaqui were also impressive.2 “The Tambaqui offers almost 22 bits of…

“…extraordinarily cohesive…”–Andre Jennings, The Absolute Sound The original Model 5 debuted in 1995. While other brands turned over their lines many times, the Model 5 saw many upgrades that left no customers behind in its unprecedented run of nearly 25 years. Richard and Nathan Vandersteen knew they had to deliver another AMAZING Speaker to replace the Model 5. Rather than simply update the 5, they focused on delivering as much of the Model Seven Mk.II’s technological advancements and performance as possible in the KĒNTO Carbon. In addition to Carbon Drivers derived from the Model Seven Mk.II, the KĒNTO Carbon introduces Vandersteen’s ALL-NEW Powered Counterforce Bass. By placing the 9” (400-Watt) powered subwoofer drivers on opposite sides of the enclosure vibrations cancel each other completely. The result is not just cleaner…

SUBMISSIONS: Those promoting audio-related seminars, shows, and meetings should email the when, where, and who to stletters@stereophile.com at least eight weeks before the month of the event. The deadline for the September 2022 issue is June 20, 2022. US: BROOKLYN, NEW YORK Jim Austin On March 28, longtime Stereophile contributor (and one of my favorite music writers) John Swenson died from cancer. John’s death came about a year after we published, in the My Back Pages space, John’s essay “Death Row Discs.” For me, his essay is an eloquent goodbye, one without a trace of self-pity. It starts with the sentence, “My music is keeping me alive.” If you missed it the first time ’round, give it a read.1 In the same issue’s As We See It, I wrote my…

THIS ISSUE: Herb expounds on the importance of good cabling in high-quality audio systems, tries the AudioQuest ThunderBird interconnect, and auditions a preamplifier from HoloAudio. I have this friend, a smart, good-looking young physicist from Argentina. Naturally, I call him “Gaucho.” He lives in a glistening-white steel-and-glass apartment overlooking lower Manhattan. I visit him regularly, usually with a group of audio friends, mainly to compare recordings, drink wine, and talk hi-fi. One day, unexpectedly, Gaucho invited me over to listen to his system—just me—so that I could tell him what I “really think” of his system’s sound. His digital source is Roon into a dCS Rossini DAC and Master Clock. His record player is the latest SME 20/3 turntable with an SME V arm and a Dynavector XV-1s moving coil cartridge,…

I recently replaced my two-box Pass Laboratories XP-22 with the three-box XP-323 from the same company. I had been quite happy with the XP-22, but when JA1 reviewed the XP-32 very favorably, I decided that the review sample should not leave New York City without a listen in my own system. Pass Laboratories was happy to let me hang onto it for a while. As I already wrote, I’ve been happy with the XP-22. If you’d asked me to describe its deficiencies, I wouldn’t have been able to answer. It’s a transparent, very literal preamp that lets all the music through (or anyway, I thought it was letting through all the music—more on this momentarily) while adding that special something that a good preamp adds. It gets out of the…

THIS ISSUE: An expensive, unobtainium reissue of a John Coltrane masterpiece, probably in the best sound ever. I have never written about the ultraboutique reissues from the London-based Electric Recording Company. Pressed in quantities of 300 or so, each title sells out within days (or hours) of its release, despite a price tag of $400 or more. Why review what can’t be had? But now ERC has put out a meticulous mono pressing of Giant Steps, John Coltrane’s first auteur masterpiece, so it’s a good time to step in and say something about the company in general and this album in particular. Many eyeballs have popped about this label’s eccentricities: its obsession with replicating the vintage pressings as precisely as possible, down to mastering the original analog tapes on Lyrec/EMI…

THIS ISSUE: Representatives of EJ Jordan, Paradox, Channel D, Massif Audio Design, Meitner Audio, and Chario Audio respond to our reviews of their products. EJ Jordan Marlow Thanks for the opportunity to reply to John’s detailed technical measurements of the Jordan Marlow loudspeakers in the May 2022 issue of Stereophile. We’ve aimed for as natural a sound as possible with these loudspeakers so that they will work well with a wide range of music. All loudspeaker design is a balance of compromises, and in our case imaging, speed, and as natural a midrange as possible are high on our list of priorities, reflecting Ted Jordan’s own engineering aims with the Eikona driver. It is possible to add frequency equalization to a crossover-free loudspeaker, and in fact we experimented with this…