Tabla de contenidos para March 2026 en The Absolute Sound (DIGITAL)

Email the Editor: rharley@nextscreen.com or: TAS, 1801 Red Bud Lane, Suite B, P.O. Box 164, Round Rock, TX Vintage Gear Fan As a budget-constrained audiophile, I agree with Thomas Kiefer (Letters, Issue 367) that some restored vintage gear can provide access to truly high-end enjoyment. Although your advertisers would likely not favor this approach, advice and opinions from TAS experts about past high-end vintage gear would be welcomed by the subset of your readers who are not able to buy most of the cutting-edge new equipment that TAS reviews. Maybe the best place for this would be online with an occasional article in the magazine. Carl Espy There's Just Something About Those Horns I had not been to an audio show for over 10 years. So, when one of my audio…

Sensitivity:87dB Impedance: 5 ohms nominal Driver complement: 2 × 22cm (8.66") XPulse stiffened back-coated aluminum long-throw aluminum-coned woofers; (7”) XPulse lightweight, damped, ultra-stiff aluminum-coned midrange; beryllium dome tweeter Loading: Ported Crossover type: Symmetrical 3-way, >50dB/octave slopes Crossover frequencies: 130Hz, 3500Hz Power handling: 480W Dimensions: 11.81" × 49.61" × 16.93" Weight: 110 lbs. each Finishes: Piano lacquer high-gloss black, high-gloss white, or high-gloss Rosewood Price: $49,975 Gauder Akustik Merklingerstr. 67 DE – 71272 Renningen Germany gauderakustik.com AXISS Audio USA (U.S. Importer) 624 Grassmere Park, Suite 18 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 (×2), Studer A80VU MKII…

MUSIC SONICS John McLaughlin: Music for Abandoned Heights. Impex (LP). While 84-year-old guitar hero McLaughlin may have stopped touring, he is still creating new music, whether at his home studio in Monte Carlo or in more professional settings. This soundtrack album, recorded at London's Eastcote Studios in May of 2019 for an American film that has not yet come out, has been released on Impex. And it is a superb offering, from sonic quality to packaging to the extraordinary performances by McLaughlin and his crew, including his 4th Dimension bandmates Gary Husband on drums and keyboards and Etienne Mbappé on electric bass, along with the powerful UK saxophonist Julian Siegel. McLaughlin's character-driven tunes are based on atmospheres and detailed scenarios provided by director Jack Stallings. Pieces like the pensive “Curaçao…

For many years we've published our Editors' Choice Awards in the March issue and our Buyers' Guide in the November issue. These two features included many of the same products, leading to a good deal of duplication. I'm happy to report that we have now eliminated the Buyers' Guide issue and overhauled how we present the Editors' Choice Awards. I explained the reasoning behind this change in our November 2024 issue, but there's still some confusion, so I'll reiterate the new system. The Editors' Choice Awards are now divided into two parts. The first part, published in this issue, focuses on those products that are best suited for systems in a dedicated listening room. The other half of the Editors' Choice Awards, which will be published in our November issue,…

■ WITH CLASSICAL MUSIC and jazz, the function of most immersive mixes is to enhance the realism of a recording by providing spatial cues that are short-changed in a typical two-channel presentation. Rock and pop studio recordings are, by their very nature, synthetic, assembled from dozens of tracks (or a smaller number of multi-track “stems”) that can be revisited by an imaginative engineer to create a multichannel version—the greater the complexity of the original, the greater the opportunity for a surround version to amplify musical meaning. The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway is such a recording. The album was recorded over a three-month period in 1974 by David Hutchins, a young house engineer for Island Records, utilizing a mobile studio parked outside a manor house in a tiny village in…

MUSIC SONICS Walton: Cello Concerto; Symphony No. 1; Scapino. Sinfonia of London, John Wilson. Chandos. Chandos has released the second disc in what's shaping up to be a fine survey of the orchestral works of Sir William Walton featuring the Sinfonia of London led by John Wilson. The accounts here are briskly paced—Wilson proving a magisterial interpreter of this uneasy music—and vividly pointed by the orchestra (note the fugue in the final movement of the First Symphony), allowing voicings not heard in other recordings to come out. The results are tellingly captured by Chandos, with just a bit of glare from the church walls making the trumpets and high wind sound squealy on occasion and under-cutting the weight of the strings. Scapino, written to celebrate an anniversary of the Chicago…

Before this evaluation of the Gauder Akustik Elargo 200 loudspeaker ($49,975), I've had two other Gauder Akustik loudspeakers in for review. One of them was the Berlina RC 9, a reference-quality 4-way floorstander utilizing a ¾" pure-diamond tweeter, a 2" pure-diamond midrange driver, a 7" ceramic lower-midrange driver, and three 7" ceramic woofers in a bass-reflex enclosure. The other was Gauder Akustik's flagship of the DARC series (at the time of review), the DARC 250 MK II, another 4-way speaker system that utilizes a ¾" pure-diamond tweeter, a 2" pure-diamond high-midrange driver, a 7" ceramic lower-midrange driver, and two 9" back-coated aluminum woofers paralleled in a bass-reflex enclosure with a speaker cabinet using stacked aluminum rib construction. Both speakers incorporated impressive 60dB/octave crossovers on all drivers. producing sound that was…

MUSIC SONICS Wings: Wings. MPL/Capitol/UMe. The post-Beatles band Paul McCartney built around himself, wife Linda McCartney (vocals, keyboards, percussion), former Moody Blues member Denny Laine (vocals, guitar), and a rotating cast of others, Wings restored McCartney's reputation after a pair of poorly reviewed solo albums, and the group clearly holds a special place in McCartney's heart. This box set features 32 tracks curated by McCartney and culled from the most recent remasters. The limited-edition color vinyl version includes three LPs (pressed on 180-gram clear, green, or pink vinyl) with a 32-page booklet, a pair of posters, a litho print, and a sticker sheet. It's also available on black vinyl (including a single-LP version), Blu-ray (with Atmos), CD, and digitally. Wings focuses on the band's seven studio albums, including the Grammy-winning…