The Absolute Sound May/June 2022

Musical Discoveries My husband subscribes to The Absolute Sound, and when each issue arrives, we carefully study the articles and the reviews. We also swoon at some of the equipment featured in the magazine (my husband is an audiophile), and I suppose I am fortunate to be one with him. We took the recent issue to the music room, and I read the feature article “Thirteen Female Jazz Vocalists You Need to Hear” [Issue 325] and listened to each vocalist via Tidal. We enjoyed each of the singers very much. It was great to discover some artists new (to me, at least) and become instant fans of artists such as Kari Kirkland. Bravo! Karin Plato Oops! I’m sure we all appreciate factual corrections such as those from readers in the February TAS. However, in…

“The designer must not only possess the imagination to envision the product, but also the technical chops to turn the concept into a working circuit.” It’s easy to take for granted the existence of products that push forward the state of the art in music reproduction. Whether you have an antipathy toward mega-priced components or revere them, you probably don’t think twice about the fact that someone had to conceptualize and then create them, but create them someone most assuredly did. And it’s this path from concept to realization that we tend to gloss over without considering the highly unlikely set of circumstances, and combination of talents, required for the product to come into the world. Every cutting-edge audio product started out as an idea, a conception, an aspiration in the mind…

Luxman M-10X Amplifier An uncompromising new power amplifier from Luxman, the M-10X embodies advanced design methods to combine sonic nuance with formidable power. Connoisseurs of Luxman will immediately recognize the massively overbuilt heat-sink stacks, giant power transformer, supersized 80,000µF filter capacitors, and quadruple-parallel push-pull output stage with 16 transistors per channel. The result is prodigious power into just about any conceivable load: not only 150Wpc into 8 ohms, but also an instantaneous 1200Wpc into 1 ohm. The front panel is understated in white-finished aluminum, with small-diameter function switches and generous, needle-type analog level meters, illuminated by incandescent LEDs. The left-channel power-output meter is located in the front-panel’s center, recognizing that the amplifier can be converted to BTL (balanced transformerless) mono operation. In this mode, the M-10X can output 300W. All circuit…

YEARS HAVE GONE BY now since the start of the COVID pandemic, and in those years people have dropped away without us being able to offer them comfort face to face, or even to say goodbye. One of those people is my dear friend Lloyd Walker, founder of Walker Audio, who after a brief illness died on Tuesday, March 15th, 2022, at the age of 78. Unless you knew Lloyd, his charm will be hard to describe in words. He was not a sophisticated man nor a highly educated one. He was born in the foothills of Texas and in some ways, he never left them. He spoke in a reedy, high-pitched, countrified tenor voice, used a half dozen profanities in virtually every sentence (at least he did before he was…

ALAN TAFFEL AND ANDREW QUINT RETURNING TO THE FLORIDA AUDIO EXPO, often referred to as FLAX, provided a much-needed sense of relief. The February 2020 edition was the last major audio show to be held before the pandemic shut down so much of the planet’s commerce and congregation. Now, walking the crowded halls, one could be forgiven for thinking nothing had happened in the intervening two years. The venue, an Embassy Suites hotel near Tampa airport, was the same. As in past years, the hotel spread out exhibitors—this year, 140 manufacturers in 40 rooms—across 12 floors, dramatically reducing sonic bleed-through. Only a handful of would-be exhibitors got cold feet and didn’t make the trip. The crowd of audiophiles who gleefully thronged the show— so many they broke the elevators early on Day One—seemed…

Of the many articles and reviews that Harry Pearson wrote for The Absolute Sound, his annual Super LP List (aka Super-Disc List) may have been the most eagerly anticipated. The issue in which it was published was the one that everyone had to buy, borrow, or copy. Why? Because whether you were rich or poor, active in the high-end audio market or just kicking tires, it was the one issue of TAS you could make daily practical use of—it was your road map to the absolute sound. It is our aim here to preserve and expand upon what Harry created. While it may not ignite the frenzy that it once did, TAS’ new Super LP List contains every LP that HP recommended when the list was last published by him. It…