Table of contents for October 2020 in Stereophile

I used DRA Labs’ MLSSA system and a calibrated DPA 4006 microphone to measure the Göbel Divin Marquis’s frequency response in the farfield, and an Earthworks QTC-40 mike for the nearfield and in-room responses. Usually, I measure loudspeakers in our backyard, weather permitting, or in our living room with the furniture pushed to the sides. This eliminates or moves back in time the reflections of the speaker’s output. However, as this 330lb loudspeaker was too massive for me to move outside, I had to do the quasi-anechoic measurements in my listening room. I slid one of the speakers forward so that it was aimed across the room’s diagonal and was as distant as possible from the nearest sidewall. However, the proximity of room boundaries, the floor in particular, meant that…

Summer! COVID-19 notwithstanding, summer—warmth, flowers, leaves on trees—has descended on Greenwich Village, my New York City home for the past 30 years. What hasn’t descended are tourists, belching motorcycles, behemoth sports cars, beer drinkers, and the usual summer hell-raisers, the sort that would’ve sent legendary Village bohemians Kerouac, Ginsberg, and Burroughs running back to their cold-water flats. With these absences comes something unique to my downtown experience: peace and quiet. As I write this, in early June, the streets are mostly empty, birdsong seems pleasantly amplified, and my neighbors seem more relaxed and convivial. The famous 93-year-old Caffe Reggio, whose customers have been moved out to the street in obeyance of the city’s Phase 3 reopening rules, can breathe. This diminution of noise and increase in quiet makes highfidelity listening…

Once upon a time, reviews of Musical Fidelity components frequently filled pages in Stereophile. But in all my years covering audio shows, I can’t recall blogging about any of the company’s products, not even once. So, when my editor offered a review of the new M8xi ($6490), a hefty 101lb dualmono integrated amplifier that includes a DAC, I seized the opportunity to fill a black hole in my consciousness. (Kindly cast aside thoughts that it would take more than a hunk of audio equipment to fill the black hole in my brain.) As long as I didn’t break my back lifting the M8xi, solo, to the top shelf of my rack—for this I humbly beg assistance from spouses, neighbors, and friends—new vistas were in store. “This is very natural and…

Tea for the Tillerman 2 UMe CD 0888689 Yusuf, Paul Samwell-Smith, prods.; David Hefti, eng.; David Hefti, mixing; Mazen Murad, mastering PERFORMANCE SONICS November marks the 50th anniversary of Cat Stevens’s classic, multiplatinum album Tea for the Tillerman, which ushered in a decade of baby boomer reflection on ecological issues, romanticizing the past, and yearning for a new spirituality. A track-by-track reworking of the original album, Tea for the Tillerman 2 could have been a cheap nostalgia trick; happily, it’s more. T4TT2 has Yusuf tilling left turns, as on the tune “Longer Boats,” which now includes a funk groove, guest-rapper Brother Ali, and a new verse. Yusuf’s new take on “Wild World” seems inspired by ragtime and tango. “Miles from Nowhere” starts acoustic and develops into a full-tilt rocker, Yusuf…

Love Letter Heath, tenor and soprano sax; Kenny Barron, piano; Russell Malone, guitar; David Wong, bass; Lewis Nash, drums; plus Cécile McLorin Salvant and Gregory Porter, vocals; Wynton Marsalis, trumpet; Monte Craft, vibes. Verve B0032217-01 (LP; 24/96 download). Brian Bacchus, Carol Friedman, prods.; Owen Mulholland, Ken Gregory, engs. PERFORMANCE SONICS Love Letter was recorded just a few months—some tracks a few weeks—before Jimmy Heath died in January at age 93, but this is no wisp of nostalgia. It’s a full-blooded tour de force, an inventive excursion through a suite of originals and standards by a veteran saxophonist and composer who sounds barely a hair past his prime. Heath was one of the last surviving jazzmen to play with Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie (as well as with Coltrane, pre-“Trane”). He…

Voices KiKi Layne, narrator; Grace Davidson, soprano; Mari Samuelsen, violin; Max Richter, piano, organ, synthesizer Decca Records B003238302 (CD). B003247501 (LP), 2020. Max Richter, prod.; John Prestage, Ashley Andrew-Jones, engs. PERFORMANCE SONICS It’s sad that even these troubled times aren’t more fitting than other recent times for a musical setting of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Any year during the last decade, which composer Max Richter spent developing this musical setting of that landmark document, would have been appropriate. But here we are, and here it is: an elaborate, crowd-sourced choral setting of what should just be common decency. In the decade since Richter conceived the project that would become Voices, he created two of his most artistically and commercially successful works: a revamping of a baroque classic (Recomposed…

GOOD AND BAD, I DEFINE THESE TERMS QUITE CLEAR…—BOB DYLAN A musical inheritance When I was a child, my father was a dealer in black-market records. We lived on what was then the outskirts of Moscow, in what was then the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. It was the 1970s, and our nation’s record stores only sold discs of domestic manufacture, most of them wooly-sounding classical recordings on the Melodiya label. This meant that a healthy contingent of Muscovites valued records smuggled from what they referred to in hushed tones as “The West” more than just about anything else their rubles could buy. My father sold a single American record by Black Sabbath or Ornette Coleman for what amounted to a doctor’s monthly salary, a commerce that made him a…

25 years and counting I was planning to ignore the big three oh oh—my 300th Analog Corner column—and go about my normal business of covering an assortment of new analog gear and accessories. There’s an abundance of those today, 25 years after the publication of my first column.1 Back then, there was far less to write about: Vinyl was on life support and headed for the obsolete-music-format trash heap atop a pile of Elcasets and 8-track tapes. As I commenced writing that more conventional column, second thoughts took hold. Three hundred is just a number, but it’s a big one: one column per month for a quarter-century. This is, I decided, an opportune time to pause, look back, reflect, and consider the way forward. If you find this self-indulgent, I…

I measured NAD’s Masters Series M33 using my Audio Precision SYS2722 system (see the January 2008 “As We See It”1). Usually, before I test an amplifier, I precondition it with both channels driving a 1kHz tone at one-third power into 8 ohms for an hour. This thermally stresses an amplifier with a conventional class-AB output stage, but as the NAD is a class-D design, this wasn’t necessary. However, before doing any testing I ran the M33 for an hour to ensure that it was fully warmed up. At the end of that time, the top panel was slightly warm, at 100.7°F/38.2°C. Because class-D amplifiers emit relatively high levels of ultrasonic noise that would drive my analyzer’s input into slew-rate limiting, all measurements other than the frequency response and squarewave tests…

The fog hung ominously thick as I climbed the 194 steps leading up to Red Rocks Amphitheatre. I’d been in Denver for the 2018 Rocky Mountain Audio Fest, and the weather had suddenly turned damp and cold—unusually so for early October. Due to dense fog and possible ice, my drive in from another Colorado city had been slowed. Though I’m in good shape, I was unaccustomed to the altitude, which also slowed my pace. So, I was arriving shortly after the opening act had started. But when I heard the heavy synth swells and somber vocals of Sharon Van Etten performing “Jupiter 4” (named for the Roland synthesizer) emerging through the dense mist, I forgot about these mild physical discomforts. Amid the hypnotic swirls and rhythms and eerie atmosphere, my…

Bill Evans’s best late album The late pianist Bill Evans may be the most reissued jazz musician in the catalogs of audiophile record labels. There are reasons for that: He played standards, mainly ballads (many audiophiles shun the avantgarde), almost never in groups larger than trios (stereo systems often do best with small-scale ensembles). Whether by design or chance, his best recordings were miked by superb engineers. Perhaps because of that, proprietors of high-end labels have cherished Evans’s music with heightened passion. Chad Kassem’s Analogue Productions has reissued most of Evans’s albums, some more than once. The pièce de résistance is Riverside Recordings, a limited-edition boxed set of all 11 albums Evans made from 1956–62, each mastered at 45rpm and spread out on two slabs of 200gm virgin vinyl—22 slabs…

Lindé World Circuit WCD 095 (CD). 2020. Paul Chandler, Mark Mulholland, prods.; Mark Mulholland, Maurice Kabré, Stephen Sedgwick, Sonny Johns, Guy Davie, engs. PERFORMANCE SONICS A protégé of Ali Farka Touré, who embodied the African connection to the blues, Bocoum makes music that is similarly bluesy but smoother and sweeter. Singing here with a responsive chorus over a combination of Western and traditional African instruments, he fashions a vamping, hook-heavy blend from blueslike, pentatonic modes. Recorded in Bocoum’s native Mali, the album has a rich, clean sound. If it seems as if the Songhai-language chorus, on the opening “Penda Djiga,” is about Michigan, that’s because it is: It is named for Bocoum’s friend’s daughter, who emigrated to that state. Jamaican trombonist Vin Gordon’s riffs help propel “Dakamana,” a catchy plea…

Totem Romano, bass; Ralph Alessi, trumpet; five others Losen LOS 242-2 (CD). 2020. Romano, prod.; Stefano Amerio, eng. PERFORMANCE SONICS Italy is now the leading jazz scene in Europe. Totem makes that case, not because the six young Italians here are famous but because they are not. Only the strongest jazz scenes have badasses like these guys lurking in the shadows. Totem is the debut recording of Ferdinando Romano, a poetic bassist, inspired composer, and intriguing arranger. Every piece here is a meticulously detailed design. Some are restless with subtle tension, like “The Gecko,” and some float in a dream state, like “Curly.” All the songs set melodies into motion with shifting instrumental blends and evolving contexts of harmony. Solos are deeply interwoven into the counterpoint, yet every soloist changes…

Just Constellations Roomful of Teeth New Amsterdam Records NWAM134 (vinyl, download). 2020. Jesse Lewis, prod.; Jesse Lewis, Bruce Odland, engs. PERFORMANCE SONICS Composer Michael Harrison is best known for writing for piano and alternate tuning systems. Influenced by Indian master vocalist Pandit Pran Nath and minimalist composers Philip Glass and La Monte Young, Harrison writes and performs works in just intonation, a harmonic system that predates conventional Western tunings. He also devised a piano with a second set of strings, allowing multiple tunings at the same instrument. While he has written for a variety of instruments in just intonation, he has not often employed voice, which might seem the most logical setting for his music. With a pair of commissions from vocal ensemble Roomful of Teeth, resulting in premieres in…

George Vatchnadze’s newest gig Access to musical information isn’t guaranteed, whether it’s limited by the resolution of a recording, your audio system, or an oppressive political regime. George Vatchnadze, concert pianist and dealer in highend audio equipment, has experience with all three. Vatchnadze’s main early influence was his father, at their home in Georgia—the Eurasian country, not the US state—which was then part of the Soviet Union. “My father was a huge music lover, and very knowledgeable, and I grew up with records,” he told me in an interview by Skype. “In the Soviet Union, it was very difficult to get musical information because of the Iron Curtain. So, my father would chase American records on the black market.1 … Each record would cost 40 Soviet rubles, whereas the average…

Communing with immortals “Future generations will be able to condense into the brief space of twenty minutes the tone pictures of a lifetime—five minutes of childish prattle, five moments embalming the last feeble utterances from the death-bed. Will this not seem like holding veritable communion with immortality?” —BERLINER GRAMOPHONE COMPANY CA. 18771 Patented by German-American inventor Emile Berliner in 1887, the Gramophone,2 which later became, generically, the small-g gramophone, is a device for making permanent, direct-to-flat-disc3 recordings—of the human voice, musical instruments, or other sounds, and for playing back those stylus-inscribed discs, enjoyably, with sounds that resemble those of the original event. Today, more than 120 years after that invention, people around the world still listen to voices and musical instruments reproduced via radially inscribed flat discs. The vividness of…

On the cold and sunny morning of February 19, 2020, a dozen or so audio critics and writers gathered at Gilmore’s Sound Advice on New York’s far West Side to see some new NAD and DALI products that had been unveiled the prior month at CES. It was a friendly group, and we kibitzed over coffee before clustering in the arranged seats for presentations and auditions. I doubt any of us realized that it would be the last time for the foreseeable future that we would experience this familiar rite. I vividly recall walking back to Times Square with John Atkinson while talking about amplifiers and expressing how impressed I was with the NAD M33 from its specs and the demo. He had reviewed the M32,1 with its optional MDC…

I used DRA Labs’ MLSSA system and a calibrated DPA 4006 microphone to measure the Polk Legend L100’s frequency response in the farfield, and an Earthworks QTC-40 mike for the nearfield responses. Polk specifies the L100’s sensitivity as 85.5dB/2.83V/m; my estimate was actually a little higher, at 87dB(B)/2.83V/m. The L100’s impedance is specified in the manual as 4 ohms, with a minimum magnitude of 3 ohms, though on Polk’s website it is specified as 3–4 ohms. The solid trace in fig.1 shows that the impedance magnitude remains above 4 ohms from the bass through to the low treble but does drop to just below 3 ohms between 4kHz and 7kHz. The electrical phase angle (dashed trace) is occasionally high, and I used the formula in a 1994 JAES paper by…

I tested the Musical Fidelity M8xi with my Audio Precision SYS2722 system (see the January 2008 “As We See It”1). I first preconditioned the amplifier by following the CEA’s recommendation of operating it at one-eighth the specified power into 8 ohms for 30 minutes. At the end of that time, the top panel was very warm, at 109.6°F (43.1°C) and the heatsinks were too hot to touch, at 162.1°F (72.3°C). I then started performing my usual thermal stress test by running the amplifier at one-third power into 8 ohms for an hour. However, I cut the test short after 20 minutes, as the top panel’s temperature was already 118.1°F (47.8°C) and that of the heatsinks 172.7°F (78.2°C) and I was concerned that I would damage the amplifier. Despite the massive…

In his review of this very expensive, very heavy, American-made, two-box phono preamplifier in the August issue,1 Michael Fremer enthused over its sound. “The 2108 produces both a sense of soaring exultation in the upper registers and gritty drama in the lowest one,” he wrote, adding “Boulder detractors who think their products are too analytical, sounding dry and bleached, ought to give the 2108 a listen.” Intrigued, and remembering how well Boulder’s previous flagship phono preamp, the 2008, measured back in 2002,2 I suggested to Stereophile’s editor-in-chief, Jim Austin, that I measure the 2108 and write a follow-up review. I measured the Boulder 2108 phono preamplifier (serial number 12213) with my Audio Precision SYS2722 system (see the January 2008 “As We See It”3). As the 2108 has balanced inputs, I…

The stats alone are impressive—or, as we at Stereophile like to say, the measurements. 79-year-old Bob Dylan’s 39th studio album is his first album of original material since 2012. Rough and Rowdy Ways times out at more than 70 minutes of music, due in part to the inclusion of Dylan’s lengthiest studio song to date, “Murder Most Foul,” which runs 16 minutes, 54 seconds. The LP version requires 2 discs. His tour was supposed to be Never Ending—but it did end, temporarily, because of COVID-19, just as Dylan and the band were set to play Japan. Instead, Bob has apparently been keeping himself busy, making whiskey, music in the studio, and art: If you visit the website for his Heaven’s Door Spirits, at heavensdoor.com, you will find examples of his…

Return Trip Matt Moran, vibraphone; Gary Versace, organ; Tom Rainey, drums Diskonife 006 (CD). 2020. Matt Moran, prod.; Michael Brorby, eng. PERFORMANCE SONICS Ever heard of a vibes/organ/drums trio? Me neither. In the right hands, it is a very cool format. Matt Moran, Gary Versace, and Tom Rainey are A-list sidemen, Moran and Rainey in diverse left-of-center projects and Versace with everybody from Lee Konitz to Maria Schneider. On their own, under the leadership of Moran, they create a unique three-man symphony. Moran’s vibes are thick, lush, and suspenseful. Versace’s Hammond B3 commands a vast sonic palette: shuddering bass drones; looming dark swells; streams of gleaming treble melodies. In the midst of the orchestra is Rainey, the most subtle of avant-garde drummers with his cryptic displaced accents and insidious, slanting…

Fountain of Time The Grossman Ensemble and the Spektral Quartet. CCCC20182020 (CD, auditioned in 16/44.1 WAV). 2020. Augusta Reed Thomas, exec. prod.; Christopher L. Willis, eng PERFORMANCE SONICS For your adventure of the month, take a ride on Fountain of Time’s five world premieres from the first two seasons of the Chicago Center for Contemporary Composition’s Grossman Ensemble. Founded by composer/director Augusta Read Thomas, the ensemble includes 13 of Chicago’s top contemporary music players on instruments ranging from the Spektral Quartet’s traditional four strings to flute, harp, sax, horn, and batteries of percussion. Although the release, available through CD Baby and download and streaming outlets, is limited to 16/44.1, Willis’s superb 24/96 master demonstrates exceptional attention to color, dimensionality, and precise placement within an expansive soundstage—essential for music that capitalizes…