"Help!" —The Beatles In memory of Lee Weiland, the man who introduced me to the concept of a digital music server and whose Locus Design cables I still use All my audiophile friends have NAS clusters. There's tremendous peer pressure for me to have one, too, and I tried an inexpensive one to see how... Read More »
Sony Electronics is expanding the company’s High Resolution Audio line with a new Car Audio System, Turntable and Universal Disc Player which all support Double DSD (5.6 MHz) and PCM music files during 2016. The new products build upon the company’s High Resolution Audio line which started in 2013 and was timed to support the... Read More »
Not sure how this came about, but man do I have a lot of stuff here to review… the PS Audio BHK250 amplifier and their AC12 and AC5 power cables, the Aurender N100H streamer, the Entreq Poseidon Grounding box and cables, several items from Synergistic Research (Black Box, Atmosphere, MiG, and HFT), iFi Audio's new... Read More »
When I first encountered the vertical walls of houses and the hard, straight lines of streets I was still suffused with a memory of something altogether different. It's no easy task to describe this memory. I guess I knew it mostly by contrast to the new world into which I was suddenly dropped. After all, how... Read More »
Roger Sheker, left, Chief Engineer for Audience LLC, with President John McDonald. Born in Ft. Dodge, Iowa, on Christmas Day, 1942, Roger was a self-made man and a certified (Mensa card-carrying) genius. Though he never attended college, his diverse and comprehensive education came at the hands of both the U.S. Army and his time working at General... Read More »
Audeze Nails It Yet Again As I sit on the back porch bobbin' my head to A Tribe Called Quest's "Lyrics To Go" off Midnight Marauders via TIDAL through Audeze's new Titanium EL-8 closed-back planars, I'm feelin' the music like I do when I'm using one of my usual portable systems. The sound is full-bodied, engagingly... Read More »
So there is this controversy of sorts… well not really for many of us, but certainly for some of us. See, the argument is that USB cables cannot and will not change the sound since it is just passing along 1's and 0's from point A to point B. It is all digital and so there... Read More »
The $18,000 Challenge, or: "Where the heck was I just now?" The gods of inspiration picked the moment I was fishing out leaves from my pool to wallop me in the head with an idea so unassailably right and fair and potentially fun it felt like I'd been granted a power to make the average... Read More »
It's Still Good… Roger Skoff writes about buying and enjoying older gear My sister called me the other day and said that she and her husband (a no-kidding world famous junk sculptor) had fifty or a hundred old vinyl records; nearly that many tape cassettes; and "a bunch" (unspecified) of CDs that they wanted to... Read More »
Prism Sound, makers of recording studio and pro audio A/D and D/A converters and the SADiE digital workstation, has announced plans to enter the home audio market with their first product later this month. The announcement follows similar entries into the home audio market by a series of companies that started in the pro audio... Read More »
I know, Carol when are you going to give the perfect song idea a rest? Well, unlike a 'favorite' song, I think there can be many versions of a 'perfect' song. In fact, this edition of my perfect song series revisits a song from the first article. The difference here is the venue, and the... Read More »
"I know it's only rock 'n roll but I like it, like it, yes, I do" —The Rolling Stones Not that long ago, I was working under contract at a big software company in Silicon Valley. However, I had been having tremendous pain in my right knee, largely from a sports injury, and got the... Read More »
Phonostages. Or phono preamplifers. Same things. You know, the box or input on your preamp or whatever that takes what is coming from your turntable and makes it into something you can actually appreciate—like music. Right, so let me elaborate… it amplifies the signal and applies the required RIAA curve necessary for proper vinyl playback. Sounds easy,... Read More »
Analog is the thing now. Well for many it has always been the thing, but for many others… it is the new thing. Nice. Great stuff on vinyl and for sure, if done right, it can be quite different than digital. I say different, as better, all depends on the mastering, pressing, quality, etc. I... Read More »
And now for something really different, with a set of reflections that are short, sweet, and right to the point. Last May I was approached by a company I was unfamiliar with, Blue Microphones, to evaluate their new powered headphone, the Mo-Fi. (Yes, I found that name to be interesting, as well. Wonder if the... Read More »
Beginning at the end of 2003, PF established its first annual awards for fine audio. The Brutus Award was established for the best that David Robinson and Dave Clark had heard in their own listening rooms during that year. You can think of it as our equivalent of an "Editors' Choice" award. The Gizmo Award,... Read More »
I first met Merrill Wettasinghe at AXPONA 2014 where he was showing his Veritas monoblock amplifiers with Sadurni horn speakers. It was quite an incredible system, and to say I was impressed would be an understatement. After enjoying the Merrill Audio room once again at the 2015 show, Mr. Wettasinghe offered to send me his... Read More »
In this brief jotting, Dan Zimmerman, Contributing Artist to Positive Feedback, continues his meditations upon art, music, and creativity. Some of these will be longer…others, shorter. But all of these reflect the understanding of creativity, the arts (including the audio arts), and spirituality in our ongoing search for the transcendent in our lives. Selah. To... Read More »
So yeah… been a crazy year. Not as much reviewed as we had hoped for, but yes… a few items did pass through our doorway and into our system getting us all warm and fuzzy. For Carol and I, well, we like things we review to be not too pricey… more about reasonable and not... Read More »