Stereophile

At AXPONA, I saw teenage besties cruising rooms together. I saw fashion-conscious 20-somethings listening in sweet spots, and young parents with younger children. Yeah, there were a few gray boomers like me, but only a couple were wearing Hawaiian shirts. AXPONA 2023 vibed like a tribal conference at a sacred pilgrimage site, and I’ve never enjoyed an audio show this much before. I attended AXPONA this year not to write room reports or shore up industry connections. I went to find readers’ faces that I might remember as I sit at home alone writing in my cubby, as I am doing now. When I’ve covered shows in the past, I’ve always been in a hurry, stressed out, sleep-deprived, undernourished, bouncing room to room gathering data and impressions. If a reader approached me…

Biting the hand that feeds you Stereophile makes a genuine contribution to the audiophile world. The information is useful, and I feel engaged. I was enjoying the April issue until I came to the Re-Tales article, “Continuing Education,” which took away my smile. I’ll illustrate my feelings this way: Imagine you are in your late 60s, and, with money in hand, you walk into a Ferrari dealership. You amble over to a shiny 812 GTS, and a saleswoman immediately walks over to you. During the conversation, she says things like, “Ah, you’re a boomer. Yeah, your generation buys most of our cars, but you won’t be around forever. We need to bring new blood to the brand.” Still pumped up about a Ferrari? That’s how I felt when I read that “Boomers…

IS AUDIO RESEARCH IN TROUBLE? Jim Austin In late April, rumors began to swirl that Audio Research, one of the most storied brands in hi-fi, would soon be filing for bankruptcy. As is often true with rumors, this one was wrong but contained more than a shred of truth. Audio Research had, in fact, filed weeks before, but not for bankruptcy. The company had filed, rather, for an “assignment for the benefit of creditors,” which is similar to bankruptcy but not quite the same. I’m neither an accountant nor a corporate lawyer, so I defer to online sources that describe “assignment” as a form of “receivership.” As I understand it, in such an arrangement, company assets are signed over to a trust, which is overseen by a third party, in this case Lighthouse…

It was a cold March-in-Brooklyn morning. Clouds had been shedding wintery mix since daybreak. By 9am, birds were flash-mobbing my window, demanding suet. But I was frozen—unable to pull my mind loose from the grave flowings of American composer Ned Rorem’s Book of Hours, as performed by Les Connivences Sonores on the album Musikalische Perlen (24/48 FLAC, Ars Produktion/Qobuz). The sounds in my room were sensuous and mesmerizing, and I needed to float in their mysterious energy as long as I could. I was listening through the most compelling sound system I had assembled since I started writing for Stereophile. The dCS Bartók DAC/streamer was funneling the harmonic purity and hypnomagik of Odile Renault on flute and Elodie Reibaud on harp into HoloAudio’s appropriately named Serene preamp, which was feeding Elekit’s…

“New York is an ugly city, a dirty city,” John Steinbeck wrote in 1953. “But there is one thing about it—once you have lived in New York and it has become your home, no place else is good enough.” Decades later, the novelist’s insight about this appalling, incomparable city still feels true. New Yorkers love to complain about the summers, with their wafting miasma of hot garbage and urine; about the superannuated subway system, which only sometimes resembles a psilocybin trip gone really wrong; about the purgatorial agony of finding an apartment; about the affronts of existing shoulder-to-shoulder with the stupendously rich. New York will never make onto a “most livable cities” list, and it attracts a particular kind of person. Despite the influx of suburban corporate workers that has transformed…

In 1928, Swiss engineer and inventor Jean-Léon Reutter created a clock that could run for years without human interaction or any type of external power source. The Atmos Clock required no AC power, batteries, solar panels, or hand-winding. It was able to wind itself by leveraging subtle changes in atmospheric pressure and temperature. The design was so energy efficient that a single degree of temperature change provided enough power for two days of operation; it would take an incredible 60 million Atmos clocks to equal the power demands of a single 15W light bulb. 95 years later, the Atmos Clock is still being manufactured in Switzerland by Jaeger-LeCoultre, but like most high-precision, Swiss-made instruments, it isn’t cheap. Prices start around $7500. Ultrahigh precision combined with wallet-busting price tags has become kind of…