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What is the most misunderstood aspect of power conditioning among audiophiles? My lights blink at my home or office. I’m in a busy city, or I’m in a rural area at the end of the power line; therefore, I must have poor power. What many people don’t realize is that the power issues that affect audio systems have to do with either low or high voltage, variable voltage, or the poor quality of the AC sinewave that reaches component power supplies. Audio-component power supplies typically adjust for (regulate) the incoming voltage and, most importantly, rectify the AC signal into DC (direct current). The sinewave from your utility is far from being a perfect sinewave, but the component power supply will eliminate that sinewave and most or all its harmonic distortion as…

WHEN RUSSIA’S VLADIMIR PUTIN BEGAN A MILITARY INVASION OF UKRAINE on February 24, 2022, it was widely assumed that Ukraine would surrender quickly. Instead, Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky—an actor-turned-politician famous for playing an actor-turned-politician in the TV comedy Servant of the People—refused to budge, withstood multiple assasination attempts and rallied his people to fight. He pleaded with the international community to implement sanctions on the Russians and to provide weapons and ammunition for the Ukrainians. How did Zelensky accomplish this transformation? Where did he first take Putin’s measure? Read about it in this exclusive advance look from Ukrainian journalist and political commentator Serheii Rudenko’s upcoming Zelensky: A BiogrAphy (Polity Books, July 18), in which he explores Zelensky’s life and governing style, from his childhood through the beginnings of the war. IN…

Mooring at the southern Spanish port of Sanlúcar de Barrameda on September 6, 1522, the Victoria’s hull was so rotten that it could only stay afloat by continually operating the pumps. Three years before, the ship had set out from port as part of a proud, five-ship flotilla under the command of captain-general Ferdinand Magellan. Since then, of the four other ships, three were lost and one had deserted. Of the 250 men that had formed the flotilla’s original crew, only 18 returned that September day. The man who had captained these survivors on their long journey home, however, was not Magellan—killed in the Philippines more than a year before—but a Basque seaman named Juan Sebastián Elcano. By steering the frail Victoria across the Indian Ocean and around Africa’s Cape of…

What is the most misunderstood aspect of power conditioning among audiophiles? It seems that most audiophiles have the preconception that a power-cleaning system can or will kill the dynamic range within the music. Thus, one must never put a power amplifier on a power-cleaning system. However, this is only the case if the power—cleaning system has not been designed correctly or with enough technical understanding. IsoTek delivers absolute power—unrestricted current delivery within what the power company can supply and regulations allow Generally, for power amplifiers or high-wattage electronics IsoTek provides output which offers extremely low impedance and low Direct Current Resistance (DCR). This eliminates any possibility of current restriction and enhances dynamic range. When power is contaminated, dynamic range is reduced. This is because the brain compares the softest and loudest sounds…

rom inscriptions on palace walls and incisions in cuneiform tablets, he was styled“Great King, the Mighty King, King of Assyria, King of Sumer and Akkad, the King of the World.” Those titles might seem exaggerated today, but for his time, they just might have been warranted. For almost 40 years, Ashurbanipal reigned over the Assyrian Empire and ruled over the largest kingdom of its time—and perhaps the greatest up to the seventh century b.c. When trying to discuss Ashurbanipal’s greatness as a world leader, understanding what his contemporaries, the Assyrians, meant by “world” is vital. Their world was Mesopotamia, but Assyria’s holdings extended farther than that—from the Mediterranean to the Persian Gulf, and from Egypt to the mountains of southeastern Turkey. The Assyrians were certainly aware that beyond lay other lands,…

Two years ago, my daughter, Samantha, graduated from university. She went on to start her first full-time job and go flat hunting with her best friend. These milestones, bittersweet for most parents, have felt monumental to me. As Sammie steps into her future, our family stands on the precipice of a life we didn’t dare contemplate before now. Because, until recently, I still believed I would outlive her. My daughter was almost two when we learned she had cystic fibrosis (CF), a progressive genetic disease that affects breathing, digestion, and other functions while slowly destroying the lungs. She had been dropping weight for months, her once plump arms reduced to sticks, her belly distended. A sweat test detected CF, which a blood test confirmed. “The good news is the life expectancy for…

Yes, you read that right. Hertz is going to rent a 900-plus-hp Mustang GT500 to just about anyone who can swing the rental fee. We took the first Hertz Ford Shelby Mustang GT500-H for a quick drive to find out whether that’s a good idea. There’s at least precedent for this. Hertz and Shelby first teamed up in 1966 with the GT350-H, which was tuned up to 306 hp instead of 271 hp, a 13 percent increase. When you think about it that way, the 18-ish percent increase in power between a stock 2022 GT500 and a Hertz Shelby GT500-H seems fairly reasonable … until you remember we’re talking about more than 900 horsepower. If we’re honest, the GT500 didn’t need more power, but that’s kind of Shelby’s thing. A massive 3.8-liter…

SOMETHING MOMENTOUS was in the air in the south of Britain about 4,500 years ago during the dying days of the Neolithic era, the final chapter of the Stone Age. Whatever it was—religious zeal, bravura, a sense of impending change—it cast a spell over the inhabitants and stirred them into a frenzy of monument building. In an astonishingly brief span of time—perhaps as little as a century—people who lacked metal tools, horsepower, and the wheel erected many of Britain’s huge stone circles, colossal wooden palisades, and grand avenues of standing stones. In the process they robbed forests of their biggest trees and moved millions of tons of earth. “It was like a mania sweeping the countryside, an obsession that drove them to build bigger and bigger, more and more, better and…

ON A WARM AND HUMID MORNING in the central Indian state of Madhya Pradesh last September, Chetan Singh Solanki stepped off a bus he’d been living in for the past 10 months and walked into a high school auditorium in the small town of Raisen, where 200 students, teachers, and officials had gathered to hear him speak. A solar energy professor at the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) in Mumbai, Solanki is a slender man in his mid-40s with a boyish appearance and a quick smile that are assets for the mission he’s on. In late 2020 he took a leave to make an 11-year road trip around India to inspire action to fight climate change. Solanki’s vehicle is a mobile demonstration of the utility of renewable energy: Solar panels generate…

A devastating earthquake rocked Port Royal, favorite hideout of the Caribbean’s most notorious pirates. Centuries later, archaeologists are exploring Jamaica’s coast and the town’s wellpreserved ruins. EDITORS OF NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC he 19th-century author Howard Pyle is responsible for a great many beliefs about 17th-century pirates, from their flamboyant costumes to their buried treasures. Published after his death, the 1921 Howard Pyle’s Book of Pirates contains vivid illustrations alongside rollicking stories of life on the high seas. Historians have dismissed much of it as romanticized exaggeration, but his depiction of Port Royal still rings true: [T]he town of Port Royal … in the year 1665 … came all the pirates and buccaneers … and men shouted and swore and gambled, and poured out money like water, and then maybe wound up their merrymaking by…

ILLUMINATING THE MYSTERIES—AND WONDERS—ALL AROUND US EVERY DAY ON A PICTURE-POSTCARD DAY IN 2021, Tenzing Gyalzen Sherpa crested the Balcony, a windswept rest spot high on Mount Everest’s Southeast Ridge. In front of his crampons, half buried in the hardened snow, were the remains of the world’s highest weather station. When the station was first assembled and bolted to the rock, it looked like an elaborate backyard antenna festooned with bird feeders and weather vanes. In reality it was $30,000 of precision instruments to measure wind, humidity, temperature, solar radiation, and barometric pressure. Now the mangled seven-foot-tall mast lay on its side, embedded in ice. Tenzing, a 31-year-old electrician and mountain guide, removed his phone from his down suit and began taking pictures of the scene. The Balcony Station had stopped transmitting on…

CHINESE LEADER XI JINPING APPEARED to revise his long-term economic outlook when he opened a major political event last month, hinting at modest growth that casts fresh doubt on China’s capacity to surpass the United States in the future. Beijing’s two-step plan to build what it calls a “great modern socialist country in all respects” by 2049, the centennial of the People’s Republic of China, involves first raising levels of public wealth and doubling the national economy by 2035. To achieve that, economists believed China would need to maintain annual gross domestic product growth of at least 5 percent, a once-realistic trajectory that might have seen it one day overtake the U.S. economy in GDP terms—valued at $23 trillion versus China’s $17.73 trillion in 2021, according to the World Bank’s records. This first…