Table of contents for November 2019 in Stereophile

IN SEARCH OF THE EXCEPTIONAL THIS ISSUE: Art Dudley says six things that audio reviewers aren’t supposed to say. Ever. “Let’s get real, real gone for a change.” —Elvis I. As Plato mentioned in The Sophist and thousands of art historians have noted in the years since, Greek sculptors distorted the human figure by enlarging the head and shoulders. They did it on purpose. If they didn’t, when viewed from below, it would look wrong. Poets—real ones, I mean—distort smaller truths in order to create larger ones. Every type of musical temperament is a means of distorting the relative sizes of sub-octave intervals—or, in fixed-pitch instruments, creating compromises—in order to create a pleasing result. Human interaction is all about distorting the truth: If you always told everyone what you’re really…

I used DRA Labs’ MLSSA system and a calibrated DPA 4006 microphone to measure the Vandersteen Quatro Wood CT’s frequency response in the farfield and an Earthworks QTC-40 mike for the nearfield responses. I left the loudspeaker’s grille in place for the measurements, as it provides the necessary acoustic boundary conditions for the drive-units. Vandersteen specifies the Quatro Wood CT’s sensitivity as 87dB/2.83V/m. My estimate was 83dB(B)/2.83V/m, which is lower than average but within experimental error of the 83.5dB/2.83V/m I measured for the earlier version of the Wood.1 The nominal impedance is specified as 8 ohms ± 3ohms. The original Wood’s impedance lay at or above 8 ohms for the entire audioband. By contrast, as shown by the solid trace in fig.1, the Wood CT’s impedance lies below 6 ohms…

I used DRA Labs’ MLSSA system and a calibrated DPA 4006 microphone to measure the JBL Stage A170’s frequency response in the farfield, and an Earthworks QTC-40 mike for the nearfield responses. I left off the loudspeaker’s grille for the measurements. JBL specifies the A170’s sensitivity as 89dB/2.83V/m, which is both higher than average and confirmed by my measurements. Props to JBL for an honest sensitivity specification. The impedance is specified as 6 ohms; while the solid trace in fig.1 shows that the impedance does drop below 6 ohms in the lower midrange and high treble, it is higher than that over much of the audioband. The minimum magnitude is 4.5 ohms between 190Hz and 210Hz, and though the electrical phase angle (dotted trace) is occasionally greater than 40°, the…

I used DRA Labs’ MLSSA system and a calibrated DPA 4006 microphone to measure the Trenner & Friedl Osiris’s frequency response in the farfield, and an Earthworks QTC-40 mike for the nearfield responses. As the speaker’s front baffle is angled back by approximately 10°, I wasn’t sure at first what would be the optimal axis on which to measure the Osiris’s farfield behavior. I usually place the microphone level with the tweeter. However, with the speaker supported by its rectangular feet, the center of the Osiris’s coaxial drive-unit is just 27" from the floor, which is 9" below the height of an average seated listener’s ears. For the farfield measurements, therefore, I placed the microphone perpendicular to the baffle on the tweeter axis, which will be the listening axis for…

The following measurements were made at a single mike position at ear height (for a seated listener) using the OmniMic measurement system from Parts Express. Averaging multiple readings around the listening position has not been shown to offer more revealing results in my room than a single reading point, apart from smoothing out some minor ripples in the graph. All the graphs here were smoothed to ⅙ th octave. While these results will not be as precise as those made with the tools used for our full suite of measurements (which dial out the effects of the room), they do provide a useful look into how the Monitor Audios performed in my listening space. All rooms act as a crude equalizer on the sound of any system, and the result…

The Soft Parade has long been the Doors’ most undervalued album. After the revolutionary impact of the band’s first two LPs, The Doors and Strange Days, and the commercial consolidation of the band’s popularity on the third, Waiting for the Sun, Soft Parade was perceived as a fall from grace. The charismatic Jim Morrison, famously dubbed “The Lizard King” by Crawdaddy! guru Paul Williams, had transitioned from perhaps the most sexually powerful rock’n’roll figure since Elvis Presley into a troubled frontman bent on self-destruction. For all the transformational impact of the band’s records, their live shows were increasingly marred by Morrison’s nightly jousts with local police. At the first provocation from Morrison, a phalanx of police would come on stage and form a circle around him, shielding the crowd from…

THIS ISSUE: In Kal’s closing column, he consigns a contemporary control contraption to a more consecrated calling. This is the 100th and—surprise!—final edition of Music in the Round. MitR began in mid-2003, shortly after SACD and DVD-A discs made high-quality multichannel music convenient and widely available. At the time, I was convinced that multichannel reproduction was superior to stereo because it was able to reproduce the full sound of the performance—not just the performers. Stereophile’s founder, J. Gordon Holt, had promoted this idea many times, but the appearance of the new media finally brought it to a wider audience. I recall that, when then-Editor John Atkinson and I floated the idea of a column on multichannel audio, we had to promise our publisher that it would not deal with anything…

Because of the darTZeel NHB-468’s bulk and weight, and also because the amplifiers needed to be picked up for photography as soon as Michael Fremer had finished his auditioning, I drove my Audio Precision SYS2722 system—see the January 2008 “As We See It”1—its host computer, my digital and analog oscilloscopes, cables, and all the rest of my test gear to his New Jersey home to perform the measurements. Prior to trekking to Mikey’s, I had received several emails from designer Hervé Delétraz about the new circuit topology he had incorporated in the NHB-468, which he calls CP2C (Constant Power to Current). Hervé explained to me that CP2C, which is patent pending, “is mimicking a current source with the output impedance of a voltage source,” which if you think about it…

I performed a full suite of measurements on one of the Vandersteen M5-HPA amplifiers (serial No.0138), using my Audio Precision SYS2722 system (see ap.com and the January 2008 “As We See It”1). I usually precondition a power amplifier by running it at one-third the specified power into 8 ohms for 60 minutes. However, the M5-HPA turned itself off after 30 minutes. At that time, the side panels next to the heatsinks were hot, at 118.2°F (48.2°C), while the top panel was only slightly cooler, at 110.9°F (43.9°C). I waited a few minutes then turned the amplifier back on to continue the testing. The Vandersteen’s voltage gain at 1kHz into 8 ohms was 24.3dB, and the amplifier preserved absolute polarity (ie, was noninverting). (The input XLR is wired with pin 2…

Why? That’s the question that many will ask about the new Grand Prix Monza equipment rack, prices for which start at $19,000 for a four-tier, 42"-tall rack and can even stretch to $29,500 for my review sample, which comprises a double-width, fourtier, 42"-tall rack (two side-by-side stacks of four shelves each) with two matching Monza amp stands. Why spend all that money when a solid oak table, built-in shelving, or Great Aunt Tillie’s antique cabinet might do the trick? Alvin Lloyd, owner/designer of Grand Prix Audio, has an answer for you. “Much like room acoustics, you need to have the fundamentals, and a good stand is a fundamental,” he said during an in-person interview after he had set up, in my dedicated music room, the support system described above. “If…

THIS ISSUE: A second listen to a single-ended amp from Air Tight. Nine months ago, while I was busy reviewing Axiss Audio’s Air Tight ATM-300R1 single-ended power amp ($16,995 with Electro-Harmonix output tubes), my new old house was still new to me, and I hadn’t succeeded at getting my 1966 Altec Flamenco loudspeakers to sound consistently good in its 11' by 16' living room. So before I made my listening notes on the Air Tight, I banished my Altecs to the garage—temporarily, of course, until such time as I knew how to get them to sing in their new setting—and relied instead on my DeVore O/93 loudspeakers, which took to my new living room like Unitarians to a vegan picnic. Not long after, I hired a contractor to remove a…

THIS ISSUE: Boulder, darTZeel, Grand Prix, Haniwa, Merging Technologies, and Trenner & Friedl respond to our reviews of their products. Haniwa HCTR-CO et al I would like to thank Stereophile and Michael Fremer for the excellent article on Haniwa’s Current Loop System (October 2019). Michael captured the essence of what Haniwa seeks to achieve with its systems approach to audio reproduction. As he comments in the review, Haniwa’s creator, Dr. Kubo, is a big fan of phase coherency, especially as it relates to reproducing two-mike recordings, because accurate timing can deliver the natural sound of instruments as heard in the original performance. Dr. Kubo has taken a systems approach, where every chain of the audio reproduction system, from cartridge to speaker, is accurately and tightly controlled in order to precisely…

Triton One.R $3299 each “Everything that earned Triton Reference Stereophile’s highest Class A Rating in a gorgeous, super sounding, more compact and even more affordable package!” “The powerful sense of atmosphere that the One.R speakers conveyed conjure up memories of my time with the Triton Reference. –Al Griffin, Sound & Vision GoldenEar Technology is pleased to announce the introduction of the new Triton One.R. This extraordinary new reference quality loudspeaker is a smaller, less expensive follow up to the Triton Reference. The T Ref has been compared with speakers selling for over ten times its surprisingly affordable cost. It has had a remarkable response from both music and hifi enthusiasts as well as press and reviewers from around the world, who have bestowed upon it innumerable Speaker-of-the-Year and Product-of-the-Year awards.…

THIS ISSUE: Mikey auditions SME’s almost plug’n’play record player and Boulder’s almost budget phono preamp. Since acquiring SME in late 2016, Ajay Shirke’s Cadence Group has moved cautiously. First, it revamped and cleaned up the company’s somewhat chaotic worldwide distribution. More recently, the new owners eliminated from the bottom of the line the SME Model 10 turntable, introduced in 2000. The Model 10 was the first SME turntable to not use the company’s familiar O-ring suspension, as well as the first to use the company’s M10 tonearm, which was not available separately. The M10 was said to be a derivative of the tapered armtube 309 and, according to SME, a superior performer—though it certainly didn’t look better (or even as good). That combo, which I reviewed 19 years ago,1 then…

Eicher doesn’t quite win the all-time prize for longevity. Edward Lewis started Decca (UK) in 1929 and owned it until 1980. David Sarnoff controlled RCA from 1919-70. William Paley did the same at Columbia from 1938-88. But unlike those other, financially heftier titans, who deferred to department heads and studio producers, Eicher has supervised every single one of ECM’s albums—more than 1,600 of them—signing the musicians, sometimes creating the band, ordering (sometimes suggesting) the tracks, almost always manning the sessions in person, even approving (in many cases, designing) the distinctive, minimalist covers—all while remaining an independent company. The closest parallel in jazz is Blue Note Records, which Alfred Lion founded in 1939 and ran with an iron fist, assembling a rotating roster of house musicians who played in a similar,…

I used DRA Labs’ MLSSA system and a calibrated DPA 4006 microphone to measure the Monitor Audio Gold 300’s frequency response in the farfield and an Earthworks QTC-40 mike for the nearfield responses. I left off the loudspeaker’s grille for the measurements. Although Monitor Audio specifies the Gold 300’s sensitivity as 90dB/W/m, my estimate was almost 3dB lower, at 87.3dB(B)/2.83V/m, perhaps due to the fact that the Gold 300’s impedance is specified as 4 ohms. (An input of 2.83V is equivalent to 2W into 4 ohms.) The impedance magnitude (fig.1, solid trace) does stay close to 4 ohms from the upper bass through to the mid-treble, with minimum values of 3.7 ohms at 117Hz and 3.57 ohms at 1kHz. There is a current-hungry combination of 5 ohms and –39° electrical…

Every year, the Expert Imaging and Sound Association (EISA) hands out awards for the best products in each of 19 hi-fi categories, as determined by a panel of judges from the world’s leading hi-fi magazines. (EISA, once a European organization, has gone global, with members from Japan, Hong Kong, Australia—and the United States, where Stereophile is the only member of the Hi-Fi Expert group. Stereophile’s partner publications, Shutterbug and Sound & Vision, are also EISA members, in the Photography and A/V categories, respectively.) This year’s awardees survived a regimen of presentations and reviewer auditions over a long weekend in Antwerp, Belgium, last May; EISA hi-fi members—editors of high-end audio magazines from around the world—voted at another meeting in Slovenia in June. The winners, listed below, received their awards at the…