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Attack of the PODs! No they are not from Mars! They are from London: Designed, constructed, and shipped from London, England by the brilliant Max Townshend to American audiophiles like us, for the best replacement of the air filled bladder sinks of old. The PODs isolate your gear like it was suspended in outer space.... Read More »

The AURALiC VEGA DSD DAC (top) and TAURUS headphone amp (bottom) in tandem, on one of our reference Stillpoints ESS Grid Racks… lovely, lovely! Once, and not so long ago (A year? Two?), I maintained a list of DSD DACs. After the establishment of the DSD-over-PCM (DoP) open standard, and the polishing of ASIO drivers... Read More »

More than once this writer has been accused of having a single-track mind when it comes to talking audio. This view I must heartily confute: in fact he has three tracks. But the one that attracts attention foremost does concern polarity, also known as acoustic polarity, also under proper circumstances known as Absolute Polarity. On... Read More »

I had the distinct pleasure of attending a press briefing the other night to announce the release of a special limited edition box set of recordings to honor the 75th anniversary of Blue Note Records. Our hosts were Owen Kwon, VP of Product and Business for Astell & Kern, and Don Was, President of Blue Note... Read More »

George Klissarov, exaSound (left) and Jared Sacks, NativeDSD.Com (right) Listening to Multichannel DSD Music at RMAF 2013 Pushing the Boundaries of High Resolution Audio Many Positive Feedback readers and audiophiles are familiar with exaSound Audio Design based in Toronto, Canada. For those of you who are new to the world of high resolution stereo and multichannel music... Read More »

"Say it ain't so, I will not go, Turn the lights off, Carry me home" —"All the Small Things", Blink 182 So this all started with a big argument that my girlfriend and I had, the resolution of which was to move in together up in San Francisco, where she already lived. The problem was... Read More »

John (Fritz) Heiler has been designing his Fritz Speakers loudspeakers for over thirty years. His credo is always consistent: He uses the same premium parts as speakers costing much more, and works hard to make affordable speakers that deliver exceptional sound. I've met Fritz many times over the years. He's a really likable, down-to-earth guy,... Read More »

Another summer gone. Although nothing could beat the summer of Luxman for exquisite sound quality here at the shack (see HERE and HERE), recent experience with the Audioengine B1 proves once again that audio fun can be simple and inexpensive, if you know what to look for. The Audioengine B1 Premium Bluetooth Music Receiver "My world is perfect!"... Read More »

Chad Kassem and Marc Sheforgan of SuperHirez.com Chad Kassem is well known in music circles and among Positive Feedback readers as the CEO of Acoustic Sounds, Super HiRez music downloads site, Analogue Productions record label and Quality Record Pressings—a high quality Vinyl LP pressing plant. This has put Kassem at the forefront of many major breakthroughs in... Read More »

That's right, HiFi is a scam, and you, I, and every other audiophile, music lover, and HiFi Crazy have all been laboring under a misapprehension for all these many years. To make it even worse, even those people I've been maligning for so long by, in my innocent ignorance, calling them fools, trolls, "flat-earthers," troglodytes,... Read More »

The 2014 Rocky Mountain Audio Fest is fast approaching. Running from October 10-12, this event has been one of the great regional high-end audio events for years now. For the past few years I have been moderating a series of seminars on DSD audio developments. These have featured many of the leading persons in the... Read More »

During The Show in Newport Beach in May, I was walking in the parking lot between the two hotels that host the event when I spotted Cookie Marenco from Blue Coast Records. Readers of Positive Feedback know that Cookie and her company are among the pioneers in releasing DSD downloads. Earlier this year, she was interviewed by... Read More »

Thank goodness for Michael Mercer. While other Positive Feedback writers cover headphones, DACs, and amps (Warren Chi, Bob Levi, and our editors spring to mind), nobody proselytizes from the headphone pulpit with as much relentless enthusiasm as monsieur Mercer does for this publication and on his website, Audio360.org. And there's a need to keep the momentum going, judging... Read More »

When I saw the promotional material announcing this book project from The Absolute Sound and learned that it was first going to be available in limited, numbered copies at CES 2014, I was distraught. For the first time in 15 years, circumstances prevented me from attending the 2014 annual industry event. That meant that not only was... Read More »

Some things take a long time to write. Some things come easy.  And not everything is War and Peace.  So this is not going to be a typical review. I'm not going to spend much time with the usual sort of hardware sling, other than a quick summary of the basics. No, this will be more... Read More »

Lukasz Fikus of Lampizator One of the newer companies making Digital to Analog Converters (DACs) in the audio world is Lampizator. The name comes from a nickname given to company founder Lukasz Fikus, who designs and manufactures his DACs in Poland. "Lampa" is the polish word for vacuum tube, and "The Terminator," well, everyone knows... Read More »

The Duelund Coherent Audio/Tannoy Westminster Royal Special Edition Project article I wrote for Issue 70 of Positive Feedback was the most fun I've had writing about audio ever!  In that amazing project we took a 'no holds barred' approach to building ultra-high performance external crossovers for my Westminster Royal SE loudspeakers using the exotic, hand-crafted-in-Denmark, Duelund CAST capacitors, inductors,... Read More »

Admittedly I wasn't interested in high resolution files until I could bring that music with me. Having amazing-sounding music stuck on my hard-drive would've been the worst possible tease! As a confessed music addict, I need the ability to grab whatever music I choose from my digital library and take it with me. If I... Read More »

The amazing Astell&Kern AK240… native DSD in the palm of my hand! The DSD revolution continues… Just about everywhere you turn in the world of fine audio, you find DSD in the news and views of a growing number of companies and audiophiles. It's no longer mainly underground, the turf of determined die-hards fighting for... Read More »