Stereophile Jun-12

Portland, Maine, my hometown for the better part of two decades, is a pretty hip place. We are not, for the most part, innovators in fashion, but we are early adopters of the more interesting recent styles. For years now, what I take to be a Brooklyn style has been prevalent among the local twentysomething crowd. The hipper restaurants are full of pretty young women and bearded men in plaid shirts who, on the one hand, seem ready for the woodlot but who, on the other hand, seem too skinny to lift a decent-size chainsaw. Likely as not, they arrived on single-speed racing bikes converted for commuter use. Nifty machines. One of the hipper local restaurants is Otto’s, a pizza joint on Congress Street, on the way up Munjoy Hill. At Otto’s…

What to do Editor: Art Dudley’s “A Brief History of the Lost” (February, p.3) was, in a word, excellent—a column that, in all honesty, should speak to beginner (are you listening, Stephen Mejias?) and snob (Mikey? Wake up!) alike, and everyone in between. I agree with Art Dudley in that Sousa was incorrect in his supposition, and would add that now it appears that nigh on everyone feels they can sing; while there is nothing wrong with that, I do not wish to listen to everyone or their choice of music. I do not always desire to hear music that was once unavailable to me, and yet, given the proliferation of iPods, car stereos, boom boxes (remember those?), and the like, I am quite often forced to listen to the soundtrack of someone…

THE CLOUD John Atkinson To kick off our celebration of Stereophile’s first half century—Vol.1 No.1 of the magazine was published in the Fall of 1962—we are making the complete “Recommended Components” listing from the April 2012 issue available as a free app in the iTunes Store. The listing includes equipment categories that had to be omitted from the print version due to lack of space, and each entry is linked back to the original review in the free on-line archives at www.stereophile.com. Enjoy. UK: BRISTOL Paul Messenger I doubt that many dealers would agree, but the healthy numbers of attendees at the 2012 editions of Sound & Vision: The Bristol Show (February 24–26) and the Tonbridge Audiojumble (February 12) are signs of the recovery of the hi-fi market. Sound & Vision has been the largest…

ATTENTION ALL AUDIO SOCIETIES: We have a page on the Stereophile website devoted to you: www.stereophile.com/audiophile-societies. If you’d like to have your audio-society information posted on the site, e-mail Chris Vogel at info@vcable.us. 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 • May–June: Lavish Hi-Fi (402 Moore Lane, Healdsburg) will hold a series of events in celebration of its new showroom. Featured gear will include the Wood Artistry Orion IV loudspeakers, designed by Siegfried Linkwitz. For more info, visit www.lavishtheaters.com. • Saturday, May 19, 4–8pm: The Los Angeles and Orange County Audio Society will hold its monthly meeting and the seventh annual Software Raffle at Brooks Berdan Ltd. (110 W. Olive Avenue, Monrovia). The…

“Most of us just can’t taste nuances in high-priced wines.” That flat statement headlined an online recap of a recent report by Allison Aubrey on NPR’s Morning Edition. (You wouldn’t want NPR to be elitist, would you?) You can read and listen for yourself at http://tinyurl.com/7skyszs. Aubrey introduced an academic who gets paid for going to wine tastings. He’s John Hayes, PhD, assistant professor of food science at Penn State and director of the university’s Sensory Evaluation Center. Penn State Live, “the university’s official news source,” summed up Dr. Hayes’s findings: “A wine expert’s acute sense of taste may mean that expert ratings and recommendations are irrelevant to wine consumers who were not born with the ability to discern small differences in a broad range of tastes. . . .” Dr. Hayes…

In the April “Letters,” reader Lenni B labeled me “prince of price no limit.” But in 2011 I reviewed some reasonably priced phono preamplifiers, including, in my October column, the PTE MMMC ($1600). I said that it sounded “flat, cardboardy, and glary” in moving-magnet mode, but had to cut short my review when, on deadline day, I received an e-mail from designer Jim Rush. He said he’d made numerous changes in the moving-magnet section, including switching from passive to active RIAA equalization, upping the power-supply voltage to increase overload margins, going to film coupling capacitors, and using low-tolerance film caps throughout. I returned the first sample and received an updated one, which has sat here way too long. I don’t have the space to repeat the entire product description (see http://tinyurl.com/7ebhyl3),…