Stereophile July 2018

THERE ARE AS MANY OPINIONS AS THERE ARE EXPERTS It’s not surprising that many people, like me, love nice cameras and good stereo gear. In my worse moments, I attribute this to mere consumerism: We love expensive stuff and the thrill of buying something new, whether for reproducing music or creating visual images. In my better moments, it’s clear to me that there’s more than that to this common taste for audio and photography, and more to the hobby of so-called perfectionist audio. One commonality: we like well-made machines. There’s beauty in finely wrought devices, whatever their intended use. We can’t claim artisanal credit—we didn’t make them—but there’s satisfaction in using them, pride in owning then, and real pleasure in collecting them. Of the visual arts, photography is the most objective, the most…

FEEDBACK TO THE EDITOR The world is changing Editor: I saw Jason Victor Serinus’s review of the LG V30 smartphone in May (p.105). I think the phone is a remarkable achievement. Some credit must go to the China market’s current interest in high-performance audio in phones. I have been told that the China market’s appetite for premium audio has driven a lot of unexpected decisions around premium audio. Even Qualcomm has developed a high-end DAC for their Snapdragon platform. Synaptics, a company that has focused on touchpads for laptops, has introduced new chips for USB audio and headphones. It seems that market conditions will bring the public into higher-performance audio whether they want it or not (except Apple …). You can use the LG phone to drive USB audio devices. You can also use the…

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 questions…

US: CHICAGO Jason Victor Serinus By any means and measurement, AXPONA 2018, held April 13–15, was a smashing success. JD Events had sold 8134 tickets—up 21% from 2017—and welcomed 5718 unique visitors to the largest consumer audio show in the United States, with 165 active exhibit rooms and an over-15,000 square-foot exhibit hall that hosted booths from 96 companies, half of which were part of the Ear Gear Expo. The number of tickets sold to students ages 15–25 increased by 27%. Despite some pre-show trepidation about the move to the Renaissance Hotel and Convention Center in Chicago suburb Schaumburg, the venue proved near-ideal for an audio show. Not only did the sprawling Convention Center have enough space to host the largest marketplace in memory, an impressive headphone display, plus a large number…

Bergmann Audio launched its first turntable—the Sindre, which featured an integrated tonearm—in 2008. The Sindre’s acrylic platter and tangential-tracking tonearm both floated on air bearings; it had an outboard motor controller, a separate air pump for the air bearings, and cost $21,000. Founder, designer, and mechanical engineer Johnnie Bergmann Rasmussen makes everything in-house in the small town of Hobro (pop. 11,000) in northern Denmark, on the Jutland Peninsula, at the head of the country’s longest fjord, the Mariager. He says that his first hi-fi system, which he bought in the 1980s as a teenager, included a Micro-Seiki turntable fitted with a Rega Research tonearm and Ortofon cartridge; an NAD preamplifier and power amplifier; and DALI 8 speakers. Even then, he felt that air bearings were the way to go, despite…

Shindo’s sole power-conditioning product is an isolation transformer. In the rural home in Cherry Valley, NY that my family and I inhabited from 2003 to 2017, we had dirty water but clean electricity. Evidence of the latter was seen in the results of tests performed by a technician from the local utility, National Grid—I told him I intended to do commercial sound recording on site, which was close enough to the truth that I considered my sin venal rather than mortal—and heard in the sound of my playback system, which rejected as superfluous or worse all of the AC-conditioning products I tried there. As for that, keep in mind that the purification of power, unlike the education of human beings, can be taken only so far before additional benefits cease to…