High-End Audio

I have no idea why giant electronics companies like Sony, Panasonic, Sharp, or Samsung never really tried to enter the audiophile market in the U.S.

Sure, Sony's very first SACD player, the $5,000 SCD-1 was a spectacularly good-sounding component; Sharp made an exotic, very high-end digital amplifier a few years ago; and back in the 1970s Panasonic's Technics gear was pretty impressive. I'm sure those companies are still producing no-holds-barred audio for their home markets. So the know-how is there, but apparently little interest in sending it here.

The first-generation Marantz audio products were designed and built by Saul B. Marantz in his home in Kew Gardens, New York, in the 1950s. The company truly advanced the state of the art, and those early Marantz designs now fetch big bucks on eBay. By the 1960s Marantz started building gear in Japan, and the company was sold and resold over the intervening decades. But through good times and bad, Marantz stayed true to its roots and always made above-average-sounding products, bettering the offerings from larger companies like Sony and Panasonic sold in the U.S.

Robert J. Reina's enthusiastic Marantz PM5003 integrated amplifier review in the January 2010 issue of Stereophile started me thinking about affordable high-quality gear from mainstream manufacturers. Yes, it can happen.

The Marantz PM5003 ($450) is a stereo integrated amplifier; it puts out 40 watts per channel. It was designed in Japan and made in China.

Do you have a turntable? Great, you can plug it directly into the PM5003; it has a rather sophisticated moving-magnet phono stage that'll bring out the very best sound from your records. The PM5003 also has five line-level inputs, two record outputs, a balance control, a headphone amplifier, treble, bass, and loudness controls. … Read more

Plugging your headphones into your computer or receiver's headphone jack won't produce the best possible sound. Why? The embedded headphone "amp" is probably just a good-enough chip amp. It may sound acceptable, but nothing like what you'd hear from a properly designed dedicated headphone amplifier.

Sure, if you have a set of $50 or $100 headphones, it doesn't make a lot of sense to drop $400 on a dedicated headphone amplifier.

But if you have something closer to the sort of world-class headphones I write about from time to time, you'd be foolish not to take the plunge. You've already made a substantial investment in headphones, but you're not getting all the sound quality you paid for.

Head-Direct's EF5 Desktop Tube Hybrid Amp ($399) is a two-box affair; one chassis is the power supply, the other is the amp itself. Each unit is solidly built and fairly compact: just 4.33 inches wide, 1.97 inches high, and 10.63 inches deep.

The amp uses a single (RCA 12AU7) vacuum tube. The amp takes about a minute to come to life after turning it on, and when the top panel's blue LEDs light up you know it's ready to play. Plug the headphones into the 6.3mm jack, adjust the volume, and you're good to go.

I listened to the EF5 with a lot of headphones, everything from my Grado RS-1, Sennheiser HD-580, Monster Turbines, Jerry Harvey JH13s, and Head-Direct's very own HE-5.

The Drive-By Truckers' excellent "Live From Austin TX" CD had tremendous presence and impact. Patterson Hood's straight from the heart vocals really cut through, and ditto for the raucous guitars. Sweet!… Read more

Yes, it might seem reasonable to expect that a home theater system will automatically sound equally good with movies and music, but that's not easy to do. With speakers especially, the difference in performance requirements is significant.

And though there are some specific models from Klipsch and Dynaudio that are adept with both forms of entertainment, most speakers skew one way or another. For music, overall sound quality is the top priority, for home theater it's more about clarity and the ability to handle the extreme dynamic range of special effects such as explosions.

For maximum home theater thrills you'll need as much power as you can afford, a potent subwoofer, and speakers that perfectly blend with said sub. With home theater your attention is focused on the picture; sound plays a supportive role. As long as the receiver and speakers don't overtly distort when they're playing at the volume level you want, and there's enough subwoofer bass to make special effects come alive, it's mission-accomplished time. Achieving reasonably good home theater sound isn't all that demanding from an equipment point of view, but careful speaker setup and room placement are crucial for best results.… Read more

I occasionally get e-mails asking about cheap and easy ways to soundproof a listening room. Readers want to minimize the amount of bass and sound leaking into neighboring apartments or rooms in a house from their home theater.

Bona-fide soundproofing is neither cheap or easy. Anything short of building a "floating" (isolated) recording studio type listening room won't totally soundproof a room. You see, a floating room's ceiling, walls, and floor are acoustically and structurally isolated from its surroundings. Prices vary, but plan on investing at least $10,000 for a professionally installed floating room. After the floating room construction techniques, you can attain more limited success with double sheetrock on the walls. That is, install new double sheetrock walls with an air gap between them and the original walls. Double sheetrock can make a big difference, but it's still far from a cheap or easy solution.

A friend put a layer of lead sheeting under his apartment's finished wood floors to reduce bass transmission to the floor below. It worked, but I'm not so sure about the health concerns from living around that much lead.

But I do have a few tips to reduce sound leakage from one room to another, or between floors of a house or apartment that won't break the bank.

Before we go any further, let's define our goals: sound isolation isn't the same thing as improving room acoustics (I'll cover that in another blog).

Sound is transmitted from one room to another either through structure borne vibrations (wall, ceiling, or floor movement), or through the air. Thick carpets or wall pads won't do much in the way of soundproofing, but they may improve sound quality in the room.… Read more

Most of the tech products you buy are disposable.

According to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, the average cell phone life span is 18 months. One hundred and twenty five million phones are discarded every year, resulting in more than 65,000 tons of waste. A lot of folks get a new computer every few years.

Bought a new home theater receiver last year? Great, but its HDMI 1.3 connection is about to be superceded by HDMI 1.4. That won't reduce the receiver's usability, at least in the near term, but it's unlikely you'll want to keep it around for the long run.

Audio Research's CD8 Reference player was designed to last a long, long time. It's also one of the least "digital"-sounding CD players I've ever used. That sort of statement is usually followed by something like, "CDs now sound a lot more like LPs." That's not the case here, but the CD8 is considerably more musical than other state-of-the-art CD players. You can read my complete review on the Home Entertainment Web Site.

Audio Research's CD8 Reference player uses vacuum tubes to amplify the converted-to-analog signals. That's hardly a new idea, as designers started sticking tubes in CD players in the 1980s. But most of those players used just a pair of tubes, typically as a "buffer" output stage. The CD8's tubes are configured much as they are in Audio Research's very best stereo preamplifier, the Reference Pre ($12,000). Measuring an imposing 19 inches long by 5.25 inches high by 15.3 inches wide, the CD8 is the size of a pretty serious power amplifier.

The CD8 doesn't have a disc-loading drawer; the drive mechanism is located under a sliding door on the top panel. Disc loading involves placing a small magnetic clamp on the disc. I like the "hands-on" approach, maybe because it's more like playing an LP.… Read more

I read Geoffrey Morrison's review of the Olive 4HD music server on the Home Entertainment Web site with great interest, because I recently heard the 4HD at a friend's house. The review provides a lot of information that I'm not covering here.

It's a cool-looking device, and I really like that it can be used without being hooked up to a computer. It's more like a CD player with a built-in 2TB hard drive.

There's a Gigabit Ethernet port and a Wi-Fi module if you're into the home network thing, and a free … Read more

British speaker manufacturer Bowers & Wilkins doesn't revise its top-of-the-line 800 Series models often. It must have been a good five years ago when the company first introduced diamond tweeter equipped models.

The 800 Series speakers are not only highly regarded by serious audiophiles, but also they can be found in the best recording studios and mastering houses in the world including Abbey Road Studios in London, George Lucas' Skywalker Sound in California, and here in New York City at Sterling Sound. I've heard the 800 at Sterling, so I know it really deserves to be a benchmark design for audiophiles and professionals. Also, the 800 series is also drop-dead gorgeous.

The just announced diamond tweeter models are the sixth-generation 800 Series, but only the second with diamond tweeters. The new 800 line is also the first to feature diamond tweeters in every speaker in the seven-model range.

Why diamond? The vast majority of dome tweeters used in other speakers, including very high-end models, use either cloth or metal dome designs, but thanks to diamond's superior strength, the 800 Series tweeter produces less distortion and greater high frequency extension and resolution. The new diamond tweeter uses a quad-magnet design that offers superior efficiency, and greater dynamic range than the previous models' tweeters. Therefore, when the drummer whacks a cymbal or the trumpet player really wails, you'll hear it.

… Read more

I have to admit up front that I'm pretty clueless about computers and computer audio. I use a pair of Audioengine A2 speakers hooked up to my Mac Mini, and the combination sounds fine to me. For "serious" listening I have a pair of Magnepan 3.6 speakers hooked up to my hi-fi system on the other side of my loft apartment. Computer audio is a low priority.

But computer audio is coming on strong, even among serious audiophiles. Need proof? Stereophile magazine's editor, John Atkinson, has been using and occasionally reviewing the best-sounding computer audio gear for at least 10 years. Granted, most high-end audio is expensive, so I was pleased to see Atkinson was smitten by a $200 sound card.

The Asus Xonar Essence ST/STX PCI and PCI Express review appeared in the January 2010 issue of the print version of Stereophile and is now on the magazine's Web site.

Sure, you could get computer audio over S/PDIF, USB, FireWire, Wi-Fi, or Ethernet connections, but that's not what the Asus Xonar Essence ST/STX sound cards are for; they plug into your PC's motherboard. Old school, but audiophile quality to be sure. I'm leaving out most of the nuts and bolts computer stuff; read the actual review to get the detailed rundown. … Read more