Table of contents for April 2021 in Stereophile

My heart did not attack me. My arteries aren’t clogged. I’m awaiting an electrical bypass to save my audio system’s life. As I reported last month, my audio system started choking on the house juice immediately upon power up after an emergency power generator was installed in my house. The system isn’t running on generator power, but the generator’s installation required installing some other hardware in the AC signal path: a switch that automatically transfers the house’s power system to the generator when the power goes out. It’s that new hardware that seems to be causing the problem. Before the generator was installed, the sound had been better—more intense and emotionally elevating—than any that I’ve heard in the almost 22 years I’ve been in this room. I’d leave the room…

The PA 3100 HV recreated all the pulsing, heartfelt vibrancy that Muñoz brings to Eduard Toldrà’s “Si anéssis tan lluny ….” I want to redo that painting,” the spouse declared. “It’s too dark.” “What’s wrong with dark?” I responded. “Rembrandt’s portraits are often dark. So are the paintings of Courbet and Hobbema. Your color palette represents how you were feeling at the moment. If it’s true to you and speaks strongly, why change it?” Granted, depending upon how dark a painting is, a lack of bright areas may translate into less detail, hazy backgrounds, and a lack of vibrancy. But that doesn’t mean that the painting will be less engaging or of less aesthetic value. It all depends upon what the artist is trying to achieve and how well they…

The VAC Sigma 170i iQ uses two pairs of Gold Lion KT88 tubes for its output stages and eight small-signal tubes. The tubes are identified with a number, this between the pins of the smallsignal tubes. The tube locations are clearly indicated in the manual and the top panel has each tube socket marked with the appropriate tube number. I carefully followed the numbering when installing the tubes before connecting the amplifier first to my Audio Precision SYS2722 (see the January 2008 “As We See It”1), then to the magazine’s higher-performance APx555 analyzer in order to repeat some of the tests. The condition-monitoring LEDs for the four KT88s remained dark throughout the testing, indicating that these tubes were operating correctly. The output transformer taps are marked “8–16,” “4–8,” and “2–4.”…

FALCON LS3/5A GOLD BADGE LOUDSPEAKER The BBC-designed LS3/5a monitor loudspeaker has been in continuous BBC-licensed production in various forms since 1975. During those 45 years, its popularity has never abated. I bought my first pair of LS3/5a’s as a Badger kit from an ad in the back of Speaker Builder magazine. I bought my next pair, used, from a CBS engineer, in 1989; they were rosewood-finished, 15 ohm Rogers that came stock with solid-hardwood rotating wall-mounts.1 Those now-antique Rogers were my daily-driver loudspeakers from 1989 until I reviewed the 15 ohm Falcon Acoustics version in the July 2015 issue of Stereophile.2 Since then, the Falcon version has been an important tool in my reviewing investigations. The Falcon LS3/5a’s primary virtues include: • They throw a wall-penetrating, precisely mapped, extraordinarily detailed…

Might this recording be too “out there” for some? I spent hours mulling alternative recommendations, my favorites being accordionist Ksenija Sidorova’s captivating Piazzolla Reflections and cellist Nicole Peña Comas and pianist Hugo Llanos Campos’s beautiful new recording of Latin American music, El Canto del Cisne Negro. Either would have been accessible in more obvious ways than Saudade, a collection of four recent orchestral and chamber works by Lithuanian composer Žibuoklė Martinaitytė. Yet, over time, as I returned again and again to this marvelously spacious and detailed album, recorded in the Grand Hall of the Lithuanian National Philharmonic Society in Vilnius during the first surge of the pandemic, I became convinced that music lovers of all stripes will enjoy exploring its haunting mystery. Before you listen, check out the first part…

At the end of Gramophone Dreams #46, I was lost in the pristine beauty of Decware’s 25th Anniversary Zen Triode amplifier driving the De-Vore Fidelity Orangutan O/93 speakers. That was an extremely enjoyable system, and I was hoping to keep it intact for another month. My plan was simply to morph into my long-postponed opus on tube rolling using the Zen Triode as well as Ampsandsound’s Bigger Ben headphone and loudspeaker amp. Both are single-ended triode, no-feedback designs and therefore perfectly suited for tube-swapping comparisons. Then, on December 17, at 6:37a.m., I was on the bed meditating, in the lotus position, when it hit me: I can’t do tube rolling yet. I must first cover Hana’s new flagship moving coil cartridge, the Umami Red, while it is still new news.…

I used DRA Labs’ MLSSA system and a calibrated DPA 4006 microphone to measure the Sonus Faber Lumina III’s frequency response in the farfield and an Earthworks QTC-40 mike to measure the nearfield and in-room responses. I measured the speaker’s impedance with MLSSA, checking the results with Dayton Audio’s DATS v2 system. Sonus Faber specifies the Lumina III’s sensitivity as a high 89dB/2.83V/m. My estimate was even higher, at 91dB(B)/2.83V/m. The Lumina III’s impedance is specified as 4 ohms. The impedance magnitude (fig.1, solid trace) remains between 4 ohms and 8 ohms in the midrange, with minimum values of 3.3 ohms at 123Hz and 3 ohms between 450Hz and 560Hz. The electrical phase angle (dashed trace) is occasionally high when the magnitude is low. For example, there is a combination…

I tested the T+A PA 3100 HV with my Audio Precision SYS2722 system (see the January 2008 “As We See It”1). The review sample did not have the Tone Control/Room Correction module fitted and neither did it have the optional PS 3000 HV auxiliary power supply. I looked first at its behavior via its line inputs, mostly with the volume control set to its maximum of “99,” and then at lower settings. (The volume control operates in accurate 0.5dB steps.) The front-panel meters are correctly calibrated, a power of 1W into 8 ohms being shown as “1W.” I preconditioned the amplifier by following the CEA’s recommendation of operating it at oneeighth the specified power into 8 ohms for 30 minutes. At the end of that time, the heatsinks were very…

The s88 lays out the contrasts between these two performance and recording aesthetics while making each of them easy to savor on their own terms. I have reported on exaSound DACs since the introduction of the e18 in 20131, but those reports were in my Music in the Round column. This is Stereophile’s first full review of an exaSound product and the first time one has spent time on JA’s test bench. ExaSound offered the first multichannel DAC that was intended for serious audiophiles and music lovers. I bought the e282 and have continued to use exaSound multichannel DACs. I use them just as much for stereo as for multichannel; stereo recordings still constitute about half my library. For stereo-only audiophiles, exaSound has made stereo DACs with each generation, starting…

US: GIG HARBOR, WASHINGTON Jason Victor Serinus Listening, an extraordinary video tribute to the late writer Art Dudley’s taste, vision, and devotion to music, premiers this month on Stereophile’s YouTube channel. The video follows the unusual path of Art’s beloved Altec Lansing Flamenco loudspeakers from their home in Upstate New York to their current residence, the listening room of deaf audiophile Bob Lichtenberg in Port Orchard, Washington. Lichtenberg, 64, who serves as senior court program analyst for the Washington Supreme Court Interpreter Commission, began to lose his hearing at age 5. By 8, he was completely deaf. Today, he’s a confirmed audiophile with a huge LP collection and a dedicated listening room that holds several systems. He began listening to music by mapping musical vibrations emanating from a small bookshelf…

Before returning home from the EISA convention in Antwerp two years ago, I spent a quiet, relaxing afternoon in The Loft, a luxurious shared space reserved for first- and business-class travelers, presented by Lexus and Brussels Airlines. In addition to surprisingly good food and free-flowing alcoholic beverages, some airport lounges contain some really useful traveler amenities, like private showers and beds. The Brussels/Lexus space went above and beyond. I thought I’d had too much to drink (which I had) when I peered into the room and saw a Mark Levinson audio system featuring the No.515 turntable that Harman introduced in 2017. It was Mark Levinson’s first turntable ever, and it cost $10,000 without cartridge. It is still in production. A turntable-equipped listening room is something I’d never seen before in…

All my earliest hi-fi memories involve tube amplification: as a young girl, staring at the tubes’ glowing filaments and listening to music with my audiophile father.1 I was mesmerized by the glow of those tubes, too hot to touch, but even more so by the music, which often was classical or opera. How those tubes worked was a mystery to me, but I knew they played a big part in the magic coming from the speakers Those early tube amps, however, were unrefined and often a maintenance challenge. Visually, they were more functional than luxurious, and even if you managed to avoid shocking yourself while setting the bias—or perhaps building a kit—they required more dedication than many modern audio consumers might wish to provide. Sarasota, Florida–based Valve Amplification Company (VAC)…

I measured the exaSound s88 with my Audio Precision SYS2722 system (see the January 2008 “As We See It”1) and the magazine’s top-of-the-line APx555 system. I used the exaSound’s single external power supply and followed the instructions in the manual to make sure that the optional external DAC power supply was deselected. I connected the exaSound to my network and opened the product’s “dashboard” by entering the address “s88.local” into my browser. The dashboard webpage allowed me to select inputs, check settings, view the manual, and access tutorials. The Roon app on my iPad recognized the s88, and by enabling the processor as a Roon endpoint, I could send audio data to it, sampled at rates up to 384kHz. (I don’t have files with higher sample rates in my library.)…