Stereophile March 2016

THIS ISSUE: Is classical music on record heading for extinction? THERE ARE AS MANY OPINIONS AS THERE ARE EXPERTS One of the benefits of belonging to the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) is a subscription to their monthly magazine, IEEE Spectrum. Superbly written and edited, this journal keeps me up to date on emerging technology, and entertains me with things like reprints, on the final page, of vintage advertisements. Their January 2016 issue, for example, featured an ad from December 1920, promoting the Victor Talking Machine Company’s Victrola: “By all means get a Victrola this Christmas, but be sure it is a Victrola and not some other instrument made in imitation. $25 to $1500. Victor dealers everywhere.”1 In 1920, “$25 to $1500” was the equivalent of $300 to $18,000 today—which is…

TAKE HEED! Unless marked otherwise, all letters to the magazine and its writers are assumed to be for possible publication. In the spirit of vigorous debate implied by the First Amendment, and unless we are requested not to, we publish correspondents’ e-mail addresses. The Magnepan rating Editor: “Class C (Restricted LF)” for the Magnepan .7 (“Recommended Components,” October 2015, p.131)? Are you serious? —Francisco Claudio Barroso Botelho barrosobotelho@gmail.com Always.—John Atkinson Clam fishing Editor: In his review of the Questyle Audio QP1R (December 2015, p.139), John Atkinson reacts to Paul Desmond’s “clam,” as he calls it, in the second chorus of “Blue Rondo a la Turk.” His reaction is amusing and surprising. He asks why no one has ever previously mentioned this “mistake.” The answer is simple: it’s not important enough to even mention. I have been listening to this…

SUBMISSIONS: Those promoting audio-related seminars, shows, and meetings should e-mail the when, where, and who to JAtkinson@enthusiastnetwork.com at least eight weeks before the month of the event. The deadline for the May 2016 issue is February 20, 2016. US: YOUR LOCAL NEWSSTAND John Atkinson Audiophiles are often accused of being interested in the gear first, and in music a distant second. Yes, we all love our audio systems, but owning such a system would be pretty pointless if we didn’t have music to play on it. Something that Stereophile’s reviewers have in common is that, no matter how expensive their audio systems, their collections of recorded music are worth more. So at the beginning of each of the last 25 years, this magazine has celebrated its love of music by publishing “Records to…

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. ARIZONA Wednesday, February 24, 7–9pm: The Arizona Audio Video Club will hold its monthly meeting at Esoteric Audio, to celebrate the reopening of this storied audio store in its new location, in downtown Phoenix (111 W. Monroe Street, Suite 100, Zip 85003). Audio can be sampled from such superb brands as Aesthetix, Basis Audio, Boulder, Devialet, Focal, Rockport, VTL, and many more. You can visit Esoteric Audio’s website at www.esotericaudioaz.com, and you can…

THIS ISSUE: State-of-the-Art LP playback from Europe. Dr. Feickert Analogue’s top-ofthe line turntable, the Firebird ($12,500), is a generously sized record player designed to easily accommodate two 12" tonearms. Its three brushless, three-phase DC motors, arranged around the platter in an equilateral triangle, are connected to a proprietary controller in a phase-locked loop (PLL); according to the Firebird’s designer, Dr. Christian Feickert, a reference signal from just one of the motors drives all three— thus one motor is the master while the other two are slaves. (Man, today that is politically incorrect, however descriptively accurate.) Feickert says that the key to this drive system is the motor design, which was done in close consultation with its manufacturer, Pabst. The result is a feedback-based system in which the controller produces the very…

THIS ISSUE: Art Dudley listens to the Magnetic Adapters from High Fidelity Cables. No one likes to be fooled, least of all those of us whose job it is to sort the real from the imagined: a tightrope walk, the audience for which reliably contains one or two rustics who delight in the occasional splat. Such were my concerns in the days following last November’s New York Audio Show, where I first encountered High Fidelity Cables—an exhibitor that generated considerable (figurative) buzz by promoting the use of magnets in an audio system’s interconnects, speaker cables, and power cords. Indeed, by the end of the first day, more than one showgoer had asked me, “What did you think of the guy with the magnetic cables?” The guy with the magnetic cables was Rick Schultz,…