EarsNova

I interviewed Magico's Alon Wolf a few months ago when he visited his NYC dealer, EarsNova.

Like so many audio entrepreneurs I've talked with over the years, Wolf had started building speakers for himself years before he officially got into the business in 2005. Mastering engineer Paul Stubblebine was one of Wolf's first customers; he heard something in a Wolf speaker he couldn't get anywhere else.

Wolf was only interested in building the very best speakers he could without cost constraints, and that's his market niche. Thing is, it's also the most demanding market, … Read more

I recently dropped by EarsNova's spacious new high-end audio store, which has the best-looking showrooms I've seen in a long while. The vibe was relaxed, and the demo rooms' sound was pretty special, but it was the little Magico Q1 speaker that bowled me over.

Were my eyes deceiving me? How could this big sound come from such a small speaker? The sheer physicality and beauty of the sound required some recalibration of my senses to take it all in. Most bona fide high-end speakers are big, imposing things that dominate a room. They're so huge that … Read more

Editors' note, October 3, 2012: This is an update of a poll from May 16, 2009.

I recently visited EarsNova, a high-end store in NYC, and heard one of the best-sounding hi-fis in my experience. The store's big Rockport Technologies speakers, Constellation Audio amplifiers, and dCS Digital gear reached beyond merely reproducing music, and with my eyes closed, the music sounded as close to lifelike as I've heard. The sound floated free of the speakers; it was effortlessly clear. The illusion worked best with orchestral music, but a few purely acoustic singer-songwriter CDs were almost as palpably realistic. And that's the goal: blurring the line between hi-fi and real, live music; that's what great sound sounds like to me. Lifelike rock recordings are harder to pull off, mostly because they almost always are so heavily processed and compressed they can't sound realistic.

You don't need to be an audiophile to hear the difference between average-sounding and great-sounding recordings, but you do have to listen. Really listen.

First try this experiment and set a benchmark: Listen to someone playing an acoustic guitar, in your room. Then play a recording of an acoustic guitar. Notice any difference in the sound quality between the two? Yeah, it's not even close. If your real, live guitar player can sing, next compare the sound of that person's voice to the recording's vocal. The recording's singer will most likely sound small, tonally thin, like the voice is coming out of tiny boxes. It might be hard to tell the singer has a flesh-and-blood body connected to that voice. The live guitar sounds big and clear -- very clear -- without any edge or harshness. Few recordings of guitar sound like the real thing.

My point here is to first establish a standard of what good sound sounds like to me. I like recordings that sound realistic. After all, if the musician on the record is playing a Gretsch Synchromatic 400 Acoustic Archtop guitar, I'd like to hear its unique sound. But if the producer and engineer recorded the Gretsch through a pickup instead of a microphone, equalized its sound, compressed its dynamic range, added digital reverb, and processed it to death -- there won't be much left to the Gretsch's sound. Then it's just a generic guitar, which is why I would describe the sound of the recording as "bad." … Read more