Stereophile June 2018

“No one thing turned more people into audiophiles than the ’60s counterculture,” said Bruno, arm flung over his cash register. “It opened up the doors of sonic perception. Even the great audio designers of the day were countercultural mavericks!” Bruno is the lanky, braided-beard, thirtysomething owner of a small, well-stocked record shop in Montreal, and we stood facing each other on either side of a glass case filled with vinyl paraphernalia. Bruno has made the most of his limited space. Every foot of each wall supports a shelf crammed with music-related merchandise: rock and jazz memorabilia, album covers, refurbished turntables. There’s even a rack in the back for music and audio magazines, including Stereophile. Bruno owns a record shop, but he’s also a raging conspiracy theorist who can provide a sordid, controversial…

Reichert on Villchur Editor: Reading the conclusion of Herb Reichert’s review of Harbeth’s 30.2 speaker (April, p.155) was positively enthralling. But his opening paragraph was wrong, false, and offensive. Edgar Villchur brought a substantial advancement to domestic audio with the dome tweeter and the acoustic-suspension woofer. The AR tweeters never sounded the way Herb said. Where the Villchur speakers stopped developing was in the “system voicing.” The BBC took Villchur’s invention to endearing realism by voicing it! The LS3/5a is the prime example of such voicing for decades, until this very day. Harbeth’s Alan Shaw voices Villchur’s invention to endearing realism, too, through engineering development, choice of materials, and judicious listening. But it’s still Villchur’s idea of the dome tweeter. —Carlos E. Bauza bauzace50@yahoo.com My glib point about EV was that two-way boxes sound mostly like two-way…

UK/US John Atkinson On Thursday, March 22, the news broke that AVTech Media Ltd (UK) had purchased the Home Tech Network from TEN: The Enthusiast Network. The Home Tech Network’s six brands—Stereophile, Sound & Vision, Shutterbug, AnalogPlanet, AudioStream, and InnerFidelity—will join AVTech Media’s Hi-Fi News, Hi-Fi Choice, Home Cinema Choice, and the Hi-Fi Show Live. According to the press release, the new company “creates a global powerhouse delivering the largest single specialized A/V group of publications on the planet, reaching more than three million enthusiasts and consumer-electronics consumers through print, digital, social, video, and events.” “The synergy between these iconic magazines and websites from both the UK and USA is clear, as are the distinctive brand propositions and target markets of each property. With an ambition to leverage these unique qualities, particularly in…

ATTENTION ALL AUDIO SOCIETIES: We have a page on the Stereophile website dedicated solely 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@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 Thursday–Sunday, June 7–10: The Los Angeles Audio Show (LAAS), sponsored by the Los Angeles & Orange County Audio Society, takes place at the Hilton Irvine/Orange County Airport (18800 MacArthur Boulevard, Irvine 92612). On-site registration begins at 3pm on Thursday and 9am on Friday, Saturday, and Sunday; Thursday afternoon will be a half-price preview day. The Ribbon Cutting and Opening Ceremony will be at 10am on Friday, June 8, in the hotel…

Why am I once again falling down the rabbit hole of alternating current? A while back, I committed to listening to SMc Audio’s AC Nexus power conditioner, designed by SMc founder Steve McCormack and distributed by dealer Hi Fi One. If his name sounds familiar, in the early 1980s Steve McCormack, while at the helm of his first audio company, The Mod Squad, invented the Tiptoe. As far as I know, the Tiptoe was the first conical aftermarket footer for audio components. Everyone else since then has copied it. In an interview in this magazine, McCormack admitted, “To this day no one has really demonstrated how they operate or has graphs, charts, measurements, spectral analyses, etc., to show literally what is going on with Tiptoes.” Nonetheless, he and most of us…

In the early 1960s, young people who were anxious see the Beatles on The Ed Sullivan Show had to first sit through a seeming eternity of bad comedians, bad puppet shows, and acrobats spinning dinner plates to the tune of Khachaturian’s Sabre Dance. So it is here: Before I can get to the Miyajima Saboten L phono cartridge, I have to report on something I left out of my April 2018 column, which was devoted to Zu Audio’s modification of the classic Denon DL-103 cartridge. And since this is information I’ve been holding on to for almost a year, I suppose I also left it out of my August 2017 column, which was devoted to the MusiKraft Audio’s own modification of the Denon DL-103. Famously, or perhaps infamously, the DL-103 is…