Stereophile August 2018

I remember the Tuesday night that music broke free of my hi-fi. The sound stirred my soul—everything was so right that I was tempted to call over my audiophile pals to earwitness its magnificence. But I didn’t, fearing that sharing the sound might break the spell cast first by the Allman Brothers Band’s At Fillmore East (2 LPs, Capricorn ST-CAP 712223 VSRP), then by Jimi Hendrix’s Live at the Fillmore East (CD, MCA MCAD2 11931). By the time Hendrix got to “Machine Gun,” I could almost smell the pot wafting up to the Fillmore’s top balconies. Next came John Mayall’s unplugged album The Turning Point (CD, Polydor 314 549 432-2)—the best-sounding Fillmore recording, in my opinion—and capping that Tuesday night was the Incredible String Band’s Live at the Fillmore 1968…

Everything is relative Editor: I recently found myself in the midst of a Web-forum thread that started out innocently enough, then devolved into a pissing match. It involved the terms value and budget, which often get conflated. The former is subjective; the latter, when used as a noun, is objective. The use of budget as an adjective causes all sorts of consternation. If $1000 is all that one has to spend for whatever reason—nothing wrong with that—then one rightfully wants the most bang for the dollar, as would just about anyone working with a higher budget. No one wants to feel as if they overpaid or, worse, were cheated in a transaction. Everything is relative. It should not come down to pissing matches. No one needs that. Well, most don’t, especially online. As…

GERMANY: MUNICH Paul Messenger Wandering the vastness of Munich’s MOC events center and the exhibits of High End 2018 (held May 10–13), I found myself suspecting that highend audio had begun to leave the UK behind. British brands might still be strong, but more and more of them are owned by companies outside Great Britain. One hot news item that broke during the show was that Antony Michaelson, founder and CEO of Musical Fidelity, had decided to retire, and that his company has been bought by Pro-Ject’s Heinz Lichtenegger, which has led to redundancies at Musical Fidelity’s headquarters, in Wembley, North London. Although I spent a couple of days at High End, mainly focusing on brands available in the UK, I found time to grab a shuttle down to HiFi Deluxe 2018, held…

ATTENTION ALL AUDIO SOCIETIES: We have a page on the Stereophile website dedicated solely to you: www.stereophile.com/audiophilesocieties. If you’d like to have your audio-society information posted on the site, e-mail Chris Vogel at info@XLinkAudio.com. Please note that it is inappropriate for a retailer to promote a new product line in “Calendar” unless this is associated with a seminar or similar event. CALIFORNIA ▪ Sunday, July 29, 1–4pm: The Los Angeles & Orange County Audio Society will hold its monthly meeting at Common Wave, in downtown Los Angeles. State-of-the-art systems will be presented, including the latest components from DeVore Fidelity, E.A.R., Kimber Kable, Marten, NAD, Nagra, Shunyata Research, and Totem Acoustic. Analog sources from Dr. Feickert Analogue, Koetsu, Kuzma, Rega Research, and Soundsmith will also be showcased. Manufacturers’ representatives will be available to answer…

Among the electrically connected, the phrase short circuit induces panic and horrific images of tripped breakers, blown fuses, acrid blue smoke, and melted circuit boards. Nonetheless, near short circuits are becoming popular among the analog set. Moving-coil cartridges of an inductance and impedance so low they’re nearly short circuits are now more common, thanks to powerful neodymium magnets that help produce more and more electrical output from fewer and fewer turns of coil wire. Perhaps the most extreme example of this is the Haniwa HCTR01 Mk.II cartridge, which has an internal impedance of 0.4 ohm and an inductance of 0.3μH. These new, high-efficiency circuits also permit the use of nonferrous formers that allow freedom from back-EMF, and thus wider dynamic range. Low-noise, high-gain phono preamplifiers, and those that use stepup transformers,…

The Emitter II Exclusive integrated amplifier, from German manufacturer ASR Audio, challenged my idea of what I could expect from a solid-state amplifier and my thoughts of what might be the best amp for driving a pair of Quad ESL loudspeakers—revelations that were more or less inseparable. After hearing my friend and former neighbor Neal Newman drive his own ESLs with a ca 1975 sample of the Quad 303—a solid-state amplifier rated at 45Wpc into 8 ohms—and after my experiences, in 2016, driving my ESLs with a borrowed sample of the 18Wpc, solid-state Naim Nait 2, I began to think that Quad-friendly transistor amps are easier to find than their tubed counterparts. The ASR turned supposition into certainty: Of the many tubed amps I’ve tried with my Quad ESLs, only the…