The Absolute Sound July/August 2022

Email the Editor: rharley@nextscreen.com or: TAS, 2500 McHale Ct., Ste. A, Austin, Texas 78758 A New Vacuum Tube Factory In view of worldwide supply-chain issues due to COVID, war, civil unrest, sanctions, etc., many manufactured goods can’t be completed due to shortages of critical parts. The manufacture of cars is the obvious example, when almost-complete vehicles can’t be sold due to the lack of one vital computer chip. Which brings me to my point. Many tube-amplifier manufacturers rely heavily on either Russian- or Chinese-made tubes. Sanctions on Russian-made tubes and uncertainty on how China is going to behave in the future cast doubt on tube availability for tube amps made in the USA and most other countries. May I suggest that a consortium of tube-amp manufacturers band together with the aim of rekindling…

“After hearing Vantage Live, I don’t think that anyone would call it a “lifestyle” system.” I recently finished auditioning for review a most unusual product, one that invites an exploration of high-end audio values and the role of a music system in people’s lives. That product is the Vantage Live from YG Acoustics, a pair of self-powered loudspeakers with streaming capabilities. Just plug the speakers and a small control box into a wall outlet, run an Ethernet cable (or join a Wi-Fi network), connect a pair of tiny ST-type optical cables, and you’re ready to play music via a phone or tablet. Audiophiles have a natural suspicion of a system that is so easy to set up and use; such a system must prioritize “lifestyle” over sound quality, the conventional wisdom holds.…

Luxman LMC-5 Phono Cartridge After a 40-year absence from the phonocartridge market, Luxman introduces the LMC-5 moving-coil cartridge, featuring a one-body design using a Shibata-profile stylus fixed to a low-mass, 0.5mm aluminum-pipe cantilever— the preferred combination for sonics and high trackability. To secure the fulcrum of the vibrating system, the single-point support uses a high-precision piano wire some 80 micrometers in diameter, about the thickness of a human hair. The mc generator incorporates a cross-mounted iron core with the left and right coils wound symmetrically for superior channel separation. To achieve optimally consistent coil windings with minimum moving mass, the coils themselves are even thinner than piano wire. The precision-machined aluminum body is anodized to a deep red, Luxman’s corporate color, with a laser-etched Luxman “L” in front. Price: $2695. luxmanamerica.com Sonus faber Omnia…

MAX TOWNSHEND, designer and owner of Townshend Audio, has died. He passed away on December 31, 2021, aged 78. For decades, he was an inventive and invigorating presence in audio in the UK, with worldwide influence. He took a pioneering interest in many ideas that became widespread in audio later on—and in some that did not but should have. These included exotic stylus shapes for phono cartridges in his moving-coil cartridge with parabolic stylus; metal drivers and ultra-rigid enclosures in his Glastonbury speakers; curved driver arrays for exact time alignment of drivers in his curved line-source speaker; heavy, inert platters for belt-driven turntables in his Rock Reference; the damping trough on the front end of the tonearm (originally suggested by Jack Dinsdale but brought to production by Townshend) in the…

LOUDSPEAKERS $30K AND UP AFTER NEARLY THREE YEARS of self-imposed exile, it felt distinctly odd to go to a trade show—my first since Munich High End 2019. Being surrounded by thousands of people, most of them complete strangers, was both invigorating and unsettling—invigorating because it was something like a return to normal life, unsettling because so many show attendees were behaving as if COVID were ancient history. Which, of course, it isn’t. While the circumstances were decidedly different, some things hadn’t changed a bit. Statement loudspeakers were still being parked in ballrooms so large that even full symphony orchestras would have had trouble filling them with high-quality sound, while others were crammed into hotel rooms so small that Bluetooth speakers would have been overkill. Clothes may or may not make the man,…

Denon may be the oldest audio company in the world if you factor in its prehistory, which commences four years before the end of the nineteenth century in the person of one Frederick Whitney Horn, an American entrepreneur seeking his fortune in Japan. He began by importing tools in Yokohama, then moved on to selling gramophones, eventually producing discs, soon opening a recording studio the better to standardize and control the entire process from source material to playback. By 1910 he had formed the Japan Recorders Corporation. I have no intention of detailing the whole half century of swings, roundabouts, and mergers during which JRC developed into the entity we now know as Denon (a more detailed history is here: highfidelity.pl/!ev/artykuly/09_02_2007/ denon.html). I unearth its origins rather to draw attention…