What’s better than spending thirty-minutes of your Monday afternoon to watch an outstanding new documentary from Chad Kassem that takes us deep behind the curtain of Acoustic Sounds (website). In this mini-documentary we get a […]
Tag Archives: analogue productions
It’s been twelve or thirteen years since I’ve had Balanced Audio Technology in for review. That previous time, the only real seat time I’ve had with BAT, was with a pair of all-tube separates that […]
In all my years of being an audiophile, of being a high-end audio importer and distributor, of being an audio reviewer, I had never seen a pair of loudspeakers get split up in a shipment […]
“Did you ever hear one back in the day?” Tim Stinson of Luminous Audio Technology (website) asked me. He was referring to his Arion phono preamplifier, the original version which created a lot of buzz […]
Do I really need a music server like the Innuos Zen Mini Mk. 3 at this point in my life? I’m still pretty old school when it comes to physical media. I have large CD and LP collections, and I’ve envisioned keeping them until the day I die—at least the LPs, anyway. The CD collection is starting to lose its charm because it has doubled or even tripled in size over the last few years thanks to my chores as a jazz reviewer. They’re all over the place. There is something incredibly appealing about putting my entire collection of digital music on a hard drive and accessing everything through an app on my iPhone. I think about it all the time, in fact. It goes back to my days as an import and distributor, when I’d see other exhibitors running the entire show from a seat in a corner in the back of the room. I was always the guy who had to float near the front of the room, next to the system and yet somehow out of the sound field to avoid distraction, swapping out CDs and LPs after nearly every track. No wonder my feet hurt so […]
The LFD NCSE Mk. 3 integrated amplifier (website) has no remote control. Nor does it have XLR inputs or outputs, a home theater bypass switch, 12V trigger operation, a built-in DAC, a wide range of connectivity options nor any of the standard features we usually find in a modern integrated that costs $7,350. I’ve reviewed plenty of integrated amplifiers that cost far less than that, and they have features such as inboard phono stages and headphone amplifiers and more. Heck, the LFD NCSE doesn’t even have a grounding lug on the back panel for the phono stage. In nearly every way, the LFD is a classic Brit-Fi integrated from twenty or thirty years ago: 70 watts per channel, about the size and weight of your average one-chassis preamp, a simple black box. (Or in this case, dark gray.) Three knobs on front—volume, selector, tape monitoring. A simple toggle switch serves as the power button and there’s only one very small LED on the faceplate that tells you the NCSE is on. I was raised on simple British integrated amplifiers like this–the British Fidelity A1 and Synthesis, Naim NAIT 2, Rega Brio3 and, most notably, the LFD Mistral. The Mistral was […]
When’s the last time you heard a new CD player and thought wow, this sounds terrific? I’m not talking about digital in general or a DAC, but a one-box CD transport/DAC playing just a redbook CD. That happened to me with the very first CD I listened to with the Audio Research CD6 SE. When we talk about advances in digital technology, in most cases we’re talking about DACs. We’ve seen plenty of innovative DACs over the last few years, usually employed in conjunction with high-resolution files and streaming from our favorite services. As far as “ordinary” CD players go, I feel like we hit the ceiling a few years ago. Most of the top-notch CD players over the last few years sound very similar, in my opinion—you play a disc and you think yeah, this sounds right. It’s been a long time since I bought a new CD player and thought it sounded much better than every player I’d heard before. I can probably go back close to 20 years ago, when I bought a Naim CDX2 and thought it couldn’t get any better. From those first few seconds with the Audio Research CD6 SE, I had that feeling […]
“Are you busy right now?” said the text from Von Schweikert Audio’s Leif Swanson. “Come back to the room when you can. We made a change.” This was back at the 2019 Capital Audiofest where Von Schweikert Audio and VAC were once again showing off what I call The System, approximately $1.5 million worth of high-end audio gear that usually snags Best Sound at Show Awards by an almost unfair margin. The loudspeakers that are used in The System most of the time are Von Schweikert’s own Ultra 11s, massive beasts that cost $325,000/pair. When I returned to the exhibit room, I discovered that Leif and VSA’s Damon Von Schweikert had replaced the Ultra 11s with the $25,000/pair ESEs (Endeavor Special Edition). Leif knew I would want to hear these much smaller speakers in The System because I had a pair of them at home for review. I’m not going to tell you that the ESEs were in the same ballpark as the Ultra 11s, because that would probably kill sales of the 11s overnight. No, that wasn’t the case at all. BUT. The Von Schweikert Audio ESEs were so good in The System that the show pair had sold […]