For previous articles in this series of industry features, please refer to the archives.
June 2013 - Things I learnt this year... and it's only half over. Sometimes it's time. Stop. Take stock. The most recent cause came from the Vibex power filters which I'd bought in the wake of their reviews. One is solely a DC filter - one socket in, one socket out. The other is an 11-outlet version which adds standard AC filtering to its DC blocking. I placed the former ahead of my passive GigaWatt power block which feeds my power amps and Zu Submission sub. The big Vibex Three 11R replaced my active GigaWatt conditioner on all my front-end components. The only reason I even pursued DC filtering was a cyclical on/off buzz from the Submission's Hypex plate amp. Its self noise went from nada to mega and back in endless loops. It had me conjecture that ...
May 2013 - Job search - When within hours of posting a review the first reader emails come in and keep on coming, a writer wonders whether he's hit a nerve. That's how this fella felt after his writeup of Job's 225 amplifier. Priced at $1.495 and sold only to US customers only via Amazon, without any published company email for pre-sale assistance, Job's marketing strategy is different to put it mildly. What makes it so interesting is that the actual product performs way beyond its asking price...
May 2013 - Munich HighEnd 2013 - The annual trek to see the wizard of MOC promised a number of hardware surprises... and delivered. With 13 pages there should be something for everyone - and still we missed plenty!
April 2013 - Nagra's new Purity DAC - No, that's not its name. None has been decided yet. But the circuit is in the can and production anticipated later in the year. A prototype box is headed for the Munich show. Fully DSD capable, with a proprietary USB interface to support DSD128 and 384kHz PCM, there's a 1-bit custom FPGA-based converter, a very complex voltage-gain interstage transformer and trick triode stage with negative voltage gain, a dedicated 6.3mm headphone circuit, analog volume, remote control, RCA/XLR analog outputs and twin outboard power supplies for analog and digital (or the 4-output MPS can be used)...
March 2013 - bandcamp.com - Browse from 6.668.670 tracks and 830.771 albums of artists spanning 183 countries and buy your latest music directly from the performers...
January 2013 - Charisma Audio's new showroom - With the steady demise of traditional high-end audio shops, one growing counter trend are distributors who either deal direct or in some instances open up a brick-and-mortar location of their own. Bernard Li of Canadian distribution house Charisma Audio recently opened a by-appointment-only showroom in busy Richmond Hill just north of Toronto. As there isn’t a Charisma Audio dealer in the area, Bernard’s showroom doubles as retail location where he also carries products not distributed by Charisma plus a growing selection of recordings predominantly on vinyl some of which I understand aren’t available elsewhere in southern Ontario. Further on the vinyl subject, Bernard intends to focus heavily on analog gear as this...
January 2013 - Red Wine Audio renaissance - Vinnie Rossi is in upgrade/refinement mode across the line, with many new models, a choice of three different half-inch solid-wood faceplates and side panels, a full-metal remote, improved circuitry and more...
December 2012 - M&H do Warsaw - In its 16th round this year, the Polish Hifi show promised to be its biggest baddest self yet with 75 rooms spread over three hotels. Our Dutchies attended for the first time... click here to go directly to Part II if you've already seen the first two pages... and here for Part III.
December 2012 - Rethm's new Saadhana - "Here is our biggest and best. As you know I am not prone to superlatives. So I won't indulge in them this time either. All I can say is that if you thought the Maargas were good... you will be surprised by how much better the new Saadhana is. Even I was not sure how much better it would be if at all. Until I heard the final prototype. The 7" full-ranger is really really good. And the 3-driver bass module with the new active filters takes the bass performance up a notch too. There really is something to be said for the size of a full-range driver. If designed well, it does something the smaller units do not do."...
November 2012 - Laird of the valve. Fascinating is such an inventory—not just on sheer scale but variety—with its stacked crates of Telefunken double triodes or giant Siemens transmission tubes. Here you can find nearly anything including a whiff of antique charm permeating the aisles. That’s because BTB Elektronik who specialize in electron valves of all types already pack a solid 66 years in business and some of their glass bottles can claim even more... with 1.000.000 in stock, that's probably quite a bunch...
November 2012 - Paris 2012 - Parisian chaos has a tendency to affect all things, even audio shows. It’s hard to believe but this city hosts two annual exhibits which, get this, may take place on the same day or just one month removed. This year the schedule had the first one in early October, the second over the first days of November. More and more distributors boycott these shows to indicate their final dismissal of the madness that is organizing two small-scale regional shows in the same place at the same time. Who can blame ‘em? Regardless, here are a few impressions on certain exhibits of interest...
November 2012 - Blues Masters at the Crossroads N°.15 - If you don't associate the Blues with the small town of Salina, Kansas, you're missing out on a very unique annual event. For the last 15 years, each October Chad Kassem throws a Blues party called The Blues Masters at the Crossroads in a small church in downtown Salina. While it’s certainly not on the scale of the large city events, the festival is quite distinctive and also offers a special treat for record aficionados. Since I do not have the knowledge or experience of a music critic, I approached this photo essay as a Blues fan, offering some pictures with a little taste and feeling of an amazing weekend...
November 2012 - iFi - The launch of iFi's site as a separate company to Abbingdon Music Research which holds a majority share in it had me muse over buzzword compliance. It's a funky term I first spotted inside Schiit's irreverent verbiage. With $200-$400 micro components aimed at a very different audience than AMR's full-size components, I wondered how many potential iFi clients from the audiophile ranks might engage in a fun game of let's guess what it means. To get the ball rolling, I harvested a number of iFi buzzwords like SuperRegulator, IsoPower, IsoEarth, Full HD, ZeroJitter Lite, DirectDrive, 3D HolographicSound, TubeState amplification, Tri-brid and XBass...
October 2012 - Steve Marsh does Denver - This was my 4th consecutive RMAF and I plan on coming back each year. What sets this show apart is not just the quantity and quality of the systems on demo. It's the camaraderie that has developed amongst attendees. There's a more personal friendlier vibe. Everyone seems to be having a good time and people mingle with an informality that often lacks at other shows. After bumping into Art Dudley at the airport and having a fun exchange about vintage audio gear, I was off to the races. Covering this show with any semblance of completeness requires discipline. You have to watch that you don’t get caught in long conversations in the wrong rooms...
October 2012 - HighEnd Swiss with Srajan. Round up the usual suspects. By now in its 4th installment, the High End Swiss show organized by the same crack team responsible also for the Munich show has developed quite loyal support from the industry. Most manufacturers or domestic dealers book the same room year after year. This provides the returning visitor with a familiar walk-thru. With a nod to Marc Mickelson's website, my own audio beat this year was one of crass novelty. If I'd seen or covered it before, I moved on. This led swiftly to the following discoveries. Rounding up the unusual suspects...
October 2012 - A new driver. Swiss electronics brand Rowen have developed a new 5-octave mid/tweeter transducer which is claimed to improve over all pre-existing electrostats, magnetostats, ribbons, bending-wave drivers and air-motion transformers. Dubbed LMT or linear motion transformer, it works without mechanical suspension or any surface deformation of the diaphragm.
October 2012 - X-Fi show with Marja & Henk. Distributor X-Fi organized the third edition of an annual audio event now under its own name on the last weekend of September 2012. Previous editions had been side-show affairs, i.e. they had piggy backed on shows organized by the ‘official’ association of Dutch audio distributors. Such piggy backing by a bunch of what many viewed as young rascals was not always received open-armed. The reasons are obvious and about prestige and money. Side shows always seek venues which offer rooms for less and their organization is often more flexible - yet without glomming on to the main event’s traffic they wouldn’t exist...
October 2012 - TAVES 2012 with Frederic Beudot. I couldn’t believe it. There it was time already for the second edition of the Toronto Audio Show. So I had moved to Toronto over a year and half ago, eh? It certainly didn’t feel like it had been that long. Last year's show was a surprise to everybody. Low expectations were met with overall good sounding rooms—and a few exceptional ones—plus a far more important crowd than expected. This led to a promise to meet again in 2012 in the same luxurious Royal Meridien downtown Toronto. Unlike last year though...
October 2012 - TAVES 2012 with Glen Wagenknecht.. Our man returned with more than 700 photos from which we picked the best ones to give you a virtual tour of the event...
October 2012 - Sicphones updated!. You've got a matured audio circuit ready to go commercial. The enclosure design is in the can too. What ought to be the next steps? A recent email exchange suggested a potentially new approach. This is how I found out about it: "Hello Srajan, I got your name from Tyll Hertsens who has been listening to a headphone amplifier I have been working on and am launching on Kickstarter. He suggested you might be interested in listening to it as well. I would be delighted if this were true. The amplifier is a Zen-style class A amp sporting a new Silicon Carbide JFET from SemiSouth...
September 2012 - 88 is the magic number. That's what it took my friend Dan to finally meet his Marie. Amplifiers that is. 87 different amplifiers came before. Many of those were custom commissions. They explored exotic valves or configurations not commercially available. The last one had been Sasa Cokic's 75TL Vilobha monos which were previously showcased in these pages. That commission had given rise to the single-stage direct-heated triode preamp Tara. It runs a single 10Y for voltage gain per channel. Six small tubes handle rectification and stabilization. Dan was so smitten with the Tara—named after a Serbian river and not the Tibetan deity—that he now wanted Sasa's take on a 50 power amp. And he wanted a 10Y to drive it...
September 2012 - Contretemps Contremo. The sound of these monos is exactly like or better than the highest-quality SET. Except these do 250 watts of pure class A with 24 amperes of current capability and very high bandwidth. That's unique...
August 2012 - Everything matters. This seemingly harmless statement separates the boys from the men. But it's also how innocent enjoyment can devolve into obsessive never-happy fretting. Fundamentally our endeavor is no different from any other. Ask any French pastry chef. He'll say exactly the same. Everything matters. Change the grain size of the flour. The recipe will foul up. Change when exactly you add the salt. Things will go pear-shaped too. To him bits might just be bits. But flour definitely isn't flour. Our involvement with pastry likely limits itself to consumption. We just eat it. Such basic facts of the trade are nothing but momentary curiosities then. They quickly fade from consciousness as we take our next bite. And that's exactly how one should enjoy hifi too. Yum and all that...
July 2012 - The barrier of entry. Getting high-performance loudspeakers into the living room isn't merely a function of funds, elbow grease and space. The primary hurdle could be looks. Wherever living rooms double as sound rooms, objects allowed into this sanctuary for any length of time must blend and integrate. They need to be beautiful. With beauty in the eye of the beholder, the best solution of course is...

July 2012 - Confessions of a reviewer- The origin of music first took the form of simple auditory enjoyment. As the musical knowledge of listeners accumulated and their appreciation deepened, it traversed beyond auditory pleasure and became a soulful engagement and artful discernment, perhaps even intellectual interaction...
June 2012 - Vilner Sound System - From Bulgaria comes a very exclusive completely bespoke and quite unusual sound system... now with updated photos.
June 2012 - Valentina Lisitsa Live from Royal Albert Hall - When I checked my email it was already 3:00PM. I got the message from the Decca newsletter I signed up for: “Don’t forget! Valentina Lisitsa Live from Royal Albert Hall – Tonight 8PM GMT”. That’s 4PM EST. I still have a bit of time. I check my mail (the real thing at the door), brew some tea and sit back down at my computer. It’s 3:30PM but I turn on the YouTube channel anyway. The recital has already started. The audience couldn’t wait. Or I got the time conversion wrong...
May 2012 - Dome Phase - In the hubbub that is the sensory overload of Munich HighEnd 2012, one interesting contribution to the loudspeaker art found itself barely talked about in the follow-up show reports and blogs. I'm thinking of Dome Phase's unique 180mm dome-shaped dual-concentric driver demonstrated in their Posion I and II monitor/floorstanding models. Consider Amphion's new Ion+. Its tweeter loads into a waveguide of the same diameter as the matching 4.5" mid/woofer. Such acoustic impedance matching symmetrizes the radiation patterns of two drivers at their crossover point. KEF's new LS50 relocates the tweeter into the center of the mid/woofer, thereby rendering the latter's membrane an effective HF waveguide. Dome Phase reserves this coaxial driver geometry we know from KEF and Tannoy...
May 2012 - Munich High End - Joël’s highlights. This is my first show report. I generally don’t (like to) write about such events. I never know where to start or where to land. This time I was aware of landing in Munich and starting from hall C of the M.O.C. But then? After first reading Marja & Henk’s report, then Jörg & Ralph’s, I decided to focus on a short selection of rooms and brands which piqued my curiosity, showed interesting newcomers to Europe’s biggest hifi exhibition and which weren’t mentioned in our other reports already...
May 2012 - Elrog ER 845 - Do speaker designers have all the fun? They get to choose from dynamic drivers, ribbons, planar-magnetics, air-motion transformers, bending-wave drivers à la German Physics and Manger, ion tweeters and more. What scope of choices do transistor amp makers have by comparison? That's why the Nelson Pass launch of two new FirstWatt models with proprietary vertical power JFets aka static induction transistors in costly silicon carbide is so exciting. How about valve amp makers? They too must fancy variety. Occasionally more resourceful suppliers like KR Audio and Emission Labs author new valves, say the mondo KRT 1610 of the former or the 1605 of the latter. But factories still making valves aren't exactly mushrooming...
May 2012 - Munich High End - The dynamic range of the hifi/audio-gear market isn’t, to put it mildly, the highest under the sun. Even though computer & hifi caused somewhat of an energy injection into our sector, it’d be exaggeration to talk of growing pains. Against this status, how did the industry mosh of High End Munich 2012 do? Exhibitor numbers against two years ago were up a fat 40% and nearly 9% over last year. 366 firms attended, one for each day of the year, all vying for the attention of their captive audience. A good upswing?...
May 2012 - Munich High End - It seems that the more miles you rack up on your lifeline, the faster the pace becomes. The 350 days since the beginning of last year’s major European audio show have flown by. Just like last year booking the flight early paid off. Now we had to hand over €14 for a KLM ticket, up by €5 over last year. But wait, that’s just for the flight including a drink and snack. The government wanted ten times that in taxes. Since we’re fiddling with numbers, here are some official attendance stats provided after the show - or better the event since High End is more than a show. This year exhibitors accounted for 366 companies, an increase of 8.6% over last year. Visitor numbers under trade registrations were up by...
April 2012 - NYC Show - The first-ever New York Audio & AV show rolled into the Waldorf-Astoria hotel this past weekend (April 13th to 15th), entertaining a smallish but fervent crowd of music lovers and gear heads. Exceptional music reproduction in a handful of rooms raised the bar well past the ordinary, with a couple of vendors like MA Recordings and Liberty Trading selling LPs and CDs which only added to the pleasure factor. A standout in many rooms were turntables! If there was any doubt that the current high-end audio consumer is a vinyl aficionado, this show put it to rest. Sure there were CD players too—very expensive ones—but by and large they seemed hidden and out of the way. My personal bent for analog notwithstanding, turntables established a high presence on both floors of the show.
March 2012 - Mola-Mola - Marja & Henk recently reported on Bruno Putzeys' new Ncore platform. It's the most current expression of his class D thinking and thus also the latest generation Hypex module. At the time the story had it that DIY would have access to one version of Ncore, OEM to another. This led to much speculation about which established brands might later this year offer Ncore-based amplifiers. The launch of Mola-Mola now adds a third player to this mix - Bruno's new venture with old Hypex partner Jan-Peter van Amerongen...
March 2012 - Shamed into doing the right thing? Reader Gary M. wasn't amused. Upon the strength of reviews, ours included, he'd bought Raysonic's CD168. When the unit's laser reader gave up its ghost, his troubles began. The former US distributor and his service center no longer dealt with the brand. Contacting Raysonic directly, this is what he was told: Hi Gary, you bought CD168 from Q4S. It is Q4S to do the CD168 repair. You can change CD168 to another brand from Q4S. Raysonic cannot help you. You can see Q4S want to sell you a product but cannot keep up to his promise. Even other brand products (Q4S) may be having the same problem too. - Ronald
February 2012 - Hypex Ncore® - For a few decades we've been tube nutters inside and out. Even before the hifi bug bit and infected both of us with an incurable case of serious audio disease, things had to have tubes. No guitar amp was even considered if there were no tubes aglow... This changed when the Devialet D-Premier arrived on the scene. Not only is it an all-in-one phono stage, preamp and streamer but a hybrid class A/D power amp as well. Over the years we auditioned a number of class D-based designs and had mixed feelings. There always was something uncomfortable in the music reproduced...