Tabla de contenidos para May/June 2024 en The Absolute Sound

Feature Is Atmos for Audiophiles? If you've spent much time visiting online audiophile sites lately, you could get the impression that immersive audio is the future of the hobby. Exactly what's meant by “immersive audio” isn't always clear. In 2018, the AES sponsored a textbook called Immersive Sound with expert-authored, mathheavy chapters on topics that included binaural audio, surround sound, wave-field synthesis, and object-based audio. It's the last of these that, in enthusiast circles, has become synonymous with immersive audio and, although there are other formats that are object-based—Auro-3D, MPEG-H, DTS-X, Sony 360 Reality, and others—it's Dolby Atmos that's been dominant when it comes to yet another attempt to represent the spatial aspects of recorded sound. “Yet another attempt?” Well, this is an area of audio engineering with a rich…

During World War II, the Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin established a grouping of communists called the Lublin Committee. They formed the counterpoint to the London-based Polish government in exile. Once Stalin's Red Army expelled the Nazis and occupied Poland, it installed the Lublin Poles in power, purging any democratic elements in Poland. It wasn't until 1989, with the triumph of the Solidarity movement, that the communists were toppled from power and Poland freed from the Soviet yoke. Since then, Poland has experienced a dramatic comeback. Its economy is poised to become the 20th largest in the world and its military the biggest in Europe. A small but hardly negligible part of Poland's resurgence has been—you guessed it—the emergence of a local high-end audio industry. Today, the annual Warsaw Audio-Video Show…

Electronics Focus Zesto Audio Eros 500 Select Monoblock Amplifier IT MUST HAVE BEEN 1978. I WAS VISITING GARLAND AUDIO in San José, California, at the time one of the Bay Area's first—and sharpest cutting-edge—high-end audio salons. Sure, I'd poked around the Pacific Stereos and a few of the region's independent retailers and heard the best of the day from Bose, JBL, and Klipsch, seen and heard the latest from Thorens, Shure, McIntosh, and others, but discovering Garland was an entirely new, exotic, and thrillingly intoxicating experience. In its heyday Garland was a veritable pleasure palace for wellheeled audiophiles, as well as a place friendly to far-from-flush dreamers like me—passionate young music lovers who'd gotten hooked on fine sound, with an eagerness to devour as much knowledge as we could, dreaming dreams…

Audio has a long history of abandoning certain technologies in the name of progress only to have those “antiquated” technologies find a following decades later. Vacuum tubes, LP records, belt-drive turntables, loudspeakers with paper-pulp cones—these are just a few examples of older technologies that have enjoyed a renaissance years after their putative obsolescence. To that list we can add the R/2R ladder DAC. I explain this technology in the sidebar, but know that the R/2R DAC is the first and simplest conversion architecture. The R/2R DAC, which dates to the initial CD players of the early-to-mid 1980s, was abandoned decades ago as a technological dead end. But some listeners find that the technique has sonic merit, perhaps due to its simplicity. Consequently, R/2R DACs are being reimagined with modern sophisticated…

Among new releases for this year's centenary of Gabriel Fauré's death, maverick French pianist Lucas Debargue's Fauré: Complete Music for Solo Piano stands out. Debargue's program commands attention for several reasons. First is the music itself. Fauré's brilliant output for piano has received only a handful of complete traversals. This is the first, to my knowledge, to present it largely in order of composition rather than in sets by formal genre (nocturnes, barcarolles, preludes, etc.) with single pieces arbitrarily interspersed. Furthermore, Debargue has chosen a striking and unique instrument to realize his sonic vision. But it's the quality of his pianism and the scope of his readings that animate and ratify these choices. Jean-Michel Nectoux subtitled his biography of Gabriel Fauré les voix du clair-obscur (the voices of chiaroscuro). Applied…

Every great band faces an idenity crisis at some point. Often, when a founding member leaves, the remaining bandmates must reconfigure their sound anew. This can lead to amazing results and a new direction for a group—or, more often, disaster. To their credit, when R.E.M. recorded their 11th album, 1998's Up, in spite of a personnel change, the band was able to radically reshape their sound and deliver one of the best records of their iconic career. Recently Craft Recordings released a two-disc boxset treatment of Up that features the remastered original 14-song track list plus a second disc of an intimate live rehearsal/concert recorded for the 90s TV show Party of Five as well as extensive liner notes by Josh Modell, lyrics, and a poster. The expanded boxset deepens…

SHHH. DON'T TELL ANYONE, but Florida has quietly become the go-to audio show for couples. There were couples everywhere, music lovers all. And if you made the natural assumption about which member was the die-hard audiophile, you could well have been proven wrong. These were very pleasant surprises, to say the least. Further, it was nice to see chivalry on constant display, as men offered the prime seat to their significant others—at least temporarily. As if that weren't enough, there were also plenty of college-age attendees. None of this happened by accident. Show organizer Bart Andeer had seen firsthand the varied demographics of shows like Munich and Warsaw and mourned the lack of such a show in the U.S. He couldn't see any reason why there shouldn't be such a…

Absolute Analog Gold Note PH-1000 Phonostage One of the more intriguing developments in vinyl playback is the passel of features that are now often included in phonostages. Adjustments for gain, loading, and equalization curves can be accessed at the flick of a switch. Simplicity is out. Complexity is in. The Gold Note PH-1000 phonostage may be the premier example of this trend. It hails from Italy, can be had with a separate optional PSU-1250 power supply and coupled with a special Tube-1012 buffer stage for a total of three pieces of gear. To my mind, the sleek two-piece set from Gold Note is more than ample; if you're looking for an even lusher sound—and, quite frankly, there is no reason you should, as the solid-state set is already plenty lush—you can…

Electronics Focus WestminsterLab Rei Monoblock Power Amplifiers SAY THE WORDS “CLASS A MONOBLOCK AMPLIFIER” TO ANY audiophile, and he will undoubtedly conjure up an image of a massive dreadnought of an amplifier delivered by forklift that can perform double duty as a room heater. That description applies to just about every Class A monoblock amplifier except one—the Rei from WestminsterLab. The 100-watt Rei is housed in a compact chassis that runs cool to the touch and weighs just 35 pounds. What's more, this amplifier can double its power output into 4 ohms, double it again into 2 ohms, and is stable driving a 1-ohm load. As icing on the cake, full warm-up takes only 30 minutes. How is this possible? We'll get into that, but first the basics. WestminsterLab is a…

Electronics Focus Hegel H600 Streaming Integrated Amplifier IF YOU ARE CONSIDERING THE PURCHASE OF THE FLAGSHIP HEGEL H600 integrated amplifier ($12,500), there is a very high chance you already know what it is, what it can do, and how many published reviews already out there have raved about its prowess, sonic attributes, and phenomenal flexibility. A virtual Swiss Army knife of features and capabilities has been incorporated into Hegel's top-tier integrated. Yes, this review is a bit late to the game. No, I have not read any of the other reviews. Yes, I do enjoy being the last to the podium; it worked well for Mark Anthony! First off, let's just say it: The H600 doesn't have a phonostage. Something, somewhere had to give, and clearly someone at Hegel put his…

Driver complement: ¾” pure-diamond tweeter, 2” pure-diamond upper midrange; 7” black ceramic lower midrange; 2x 9” black back-coated aluminum woofers Crossover type: Symmetrical 4-way Crossover frequencies: 148/1200/4000Hz Crossover slope: 60dB/octave Impedance: 4 ohms nominal Power handling: 810 Watt Dimensions: 11.81” x 57.08” x 17.71” Weight: 264.5 lbs., each Price: $249,975 (add VU meter: $4995; add MusicLight: $4995) GAUDER AKUSTIK Merklingerstr. 67 DE – 71272 Renningen Germany gauderakustik.com AXISS AUDIO USA (U.S. Importer) 2190 Nolensville Pike, Suite C Nashville, TN 37211 (866) 295-4133 axissaudio.com sales@axissaudio.com Reference System Analog tape: Otari MTR-10 Studio Mastering (¼” 2-track) tape deck with custom Flux Magnetic Mastering Series repro head and secondary custom tube output stage, Studer A820 Studio Mastering (¼” 2-track) tape deck (x2), Studer A80VU MKII Studio Mastering (¼” 2-track) tape deck, ReVox A700…

Sleater-Kinney: Little Rope. Loma Vista. With Sleater-Kinney guitarists and vocalists Carrie Brownstein and Corin Tucker at the helm, Little Rope finds the esteemed punk and indie outfit of 30 years returning to a massive, distorted sound reminiscent of their early 2000s records such as The Woods (2005), while continuing synth elements that were introduced on The Center Won't Hold (2019). The album's standout tracks are those which harken back to their signature angularity, such as “Hunt You Down.” Starting with swaggering riffs equally matched by Brownstein's verse vocals, the track evolves into a perfect combination of catchy melodies, sinuous electronics, and layers of windy counterpoint. The center tracks of the record are the strongest stretch, with “Hunt You Down” followed by the jittery “Small Finds” that's driven by Tucker's slinky…

Linn Klimax Solo 800 Amplifier Linn's latest high-performance monoblock amplifier can drive virtually any speaker optimally under any conditions. Power output is 800W into 4 ohms, (400W into 8 ohms). It sports Adaptive Bias Control technology, which establishes the ideal bias current for each of the amp's 16 output transistors by measuring, sampling, and digitizing the supplied current. The Utopik switch-mode power supply boasts precision-regulated power rails generating 2kW maximum power output while retaining speed and efficiency. Klimax Solo 800 also features superior heat management, driving the most difficult loads without compromising linearity or resorting to an internal fan. The cool-running design is achieved by mounting the amplifier and power-supply circuitry directly to the critically efficient, large-surface-area heatsinks. Further, Utopik minimizes switching noise and improves efficiency using a technique called…

“They're not accessories, they're tools”: thus said J. R. Boisclair, principal owner of WAM Engineering, politely but firmly, when I asked him if I might include the WallySkater and WallyTractor analog set-up devices in a piece I was writing about accessories. I believe his distinction far from factitious. My Meriam-Webster defines accessory as “an object or device that is not essential in itself but adds to the beauty, convenience, or effectiveness of something else.” This definition surely applies to the Wally, Hagerman, and Riverstone Audio devices under consideration here, but they obscure an important difference. What we commonly think of as audiophile accessories are things that play an active (by active, I don't mean electronically active only) role in the reproduction of sound, whether they're tips, spikes, pods, stands, pads,…

I reviewed the original dCS Bartók Network DAC in Issue 300. Its performance proved revelatory to my ears and my soul—so much so that when it came time for the return of my review sample, I took a deep breath and sprang for the purchase. But little did I know what was in store. True, I was already aware that dCS stands behind its creations like few companies out there, that it mandates long product cycles, and that through periodic over-the-air software updates wards off the endemic obsolescence that dogs digital hardware. But then, last year, dCS announced Apex—a collection of major firmware and hardware advancements (necessitating a return to the U.S. distributor) that first appeared in dCS flagship DAC, Rossini, and hyperflagship Vivaldi. It's really no exaggeration to state…

Equipment Report Silent Angel Bonn NX Pro Ethernet Switch A good deal of gloating has accompanied the rise and fall of the compact disc, whose sales have been surpassed by LPs. But even as vinyl lovers keep it old school, digital streaming has come on strong, as well. These days I find myself listening to a wide variety of new recordings through my Roon Nucleus, ranging from classical to pop. The convenience factor is just too great to deny. Plus, it sounds great. No matter how much the tribunes of vinyl may protest, the blunt fact remains that the noise floor of digital is lower—and not by a small margin—than anything you're going to attain on an LP. These days, I find myself listening to as much digital as vinyl. So,…

In the summer of 1959, Sonny Rollins began his legendary first sabbatical from public performance. Through the fall of 1961 he practiced his tenor saxophone playing on the Williamsburg Bridge, which he could walk to from his residence on Manhattan's Lower East Side. Backtrack a few months from the start of that self-imposed hiatus and Rollins could be found on his first European tour, which ran from February 21 through March 18. Several concerts and radio and TV broadcasts in Sweden, Switzerland, the Netherlands, Germany, and France were committed to tape, but until they fell into the hands of reissue maven Zev Feldman, they were available only as bootlegs. Now, with sound restoration by George Klabin and Fran Gala, those recordings have been collected as Freedom Weaver: The 1959 European…

The experimental musician and independent scholar talked with me about his most recent record, the threads between his music, climate change activism, and Virginia's folk history, and the current folk recording preservation landscape. The second we hopped on a call, the first aspect of Daniel Bachman's personality I noticed was his passion and sincerity. He immediately thanked me for taking the time to discuss his most recent album, When the Roses Come Again (2023). I told Bachman that he took the words right out of my mouth. Daniel Bachman is a musician, artist, and independent scholar of Virginia's folk histories. He has been releasing solo studio albums under his name since 2011, with When the Roses Come Again, out on Three Lobed Recordings, marking his 17th release. Bachman's albums are…

Béla Fleck: Rhapsody in Blue. Thirty Tigers. Banjo virtuoso Béla Fleck has spent his career defying all the stereotypes associated with his instrument. The breadth of his recorded output over the years has been staggering, ranging from contemporary jazz with his band the Flecktones to duets with Chick Corea, and collaborations with tabla master Zakir Hussain, Malian kora master Toumani Diabate, gospel's Blind Boys of Alabama, and funkateer Bootsy Collins. Fleck once again boldly takes the banjo well beyond the realms of bluegrass in tackling George Gershwin's enduringly popular Rhapsody Blue. And the results are pulse-quickening. Since Gershwin's masterwork logs in at just under 19 minutes, the wily banjoist augmented his faithful rendition of Rhapsody, performed with the Virginia Symphony Orchestra (under the direction of Eric Jacobsen), with clever variations…