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Stirling Broadcast BBC LS3/6 loudspeaker
They've had their day, of course—especially such smaller monitors as the BBC-designed LS3/5a. But today, one wonders if their relatively spartan, homely cosmetics have augured against the domestic acceptance of pro-audio speakers. Or perhaps it's the genre's resistance to faddism, kookyism, and Emir-of-Qatar levels of opulence and excess that keeps them on the sidelines of the high-end audio marketplace.
Thus it was with the utmost interest that I received an invitation, from distributor Fidelis Home Audio, to review the LS3/6 loudspeaker ($4590/pair), made in Somerset, England, by Stirling Broadcast, themselves the latest in a line of firms authorized to manufacture the BBC's proprietary designs. Although not an entirely new model—the LS3/6 designation appears to have been used by the BBC as long ago as 1970—this new incarnation was recently designed by Derek Hughes, who has created many successful designs for Harbeth and, of course, Spendor, whose name is derived from those of his late parents, Spencer and Dorothy. But that's another story.
Description
I'll tell it anyway: Just as every Cracker Jack box comes with a prize, and inside every chicken in your grocer's case is a little bag of giblets, so should every review of a BBC-designed monitor loudspeaker come with a history lesson. For it was in 1969 that Spencer Hughes, then working as a BBC laboratory technician, designed and manufactured one of the first practical plastic woofer cones—made, astonishingly, not during the workday at his BBC lab, but in his spare time, at the Hugheses' small house, using an electric room heater and a bedpost. Soon after that, Spencer Hughes mated to his woofer a very nice Celestion phenolic-dome tweeter, and designed around that pair of drivers an entire loudspeaker, intended for both professional and domestic use.
Two distinct things then happened with Hughes's loudspeaker design. First and most famously, it turned into something called the BC1 (footnote 1) which became the premier product of the nascent Spendor company. Second, the BBC forged with Spencer Hughes an arrangement in which the BBC was allowed to distill, from the BC1 design, a very similar loudspeaker for its own use. It is also from the BC1 that two somewhat more contemporary loudspeakers were derived: the Spendor SP1/2, a pair of which I owned and enjoyed during the late 1990s, and the Stirling LS3/6.
The Stirling LS3/6 does not appear, at first glance, terribly different from the Spendor SP1/2—or, for that matter, from late-production samples of the fondly remembered BC1. The LS3/6 is a three-way dynamic loudspeaker in a 25"-tall reflex-loaded cabinet of square cross-section, intended for stand mounting; 17"-tall open-frame hardwood stands, made by Resonant Woods, of Manchester, New Hampshire, cost an additional $399/pair. Each speaker is fitted with a black fabric grille that is the very devil to remove, yet to succeed is to discover and appreciate that the LS3/6's front baffle is as beautifully veneered as every other surface of its enclosure.
All of the LS3/6's drivers are manufactured in Norway (footnote 2) by SEAS, presumably to Stirling Broadcast's specifications. The smaller and uppermost of the two tweeters has a 0.75" (19mm) Sonomex dome, while the larger has a 1" (27mm) coated-fabric dome; each has a ferrofluid-cooled voice-coil and a protective mesh outer cover. The 8.6" woofer has, as you'd expect, a polymer cone 6.5" in diameter, along with a compliant half-roll surround, a ferrite magnet, a very nice cast-alloy frame, and a dustcap made not of stiff plastic but of the softest, most pliable rubber I've ever encountered. Interesting. The two high-frequency drivers are rabbeted into the front baffle; a recess is also made for the woofer's mounting rim, but from behind the baffle, in the manner of recent Harbeth speakers. The front-mounted reflex port is formed by a plastic tube 2.9" (75mm) long and 2.7" (70mm) in diameter.
The Stirling's enclosure is built from three different thicknesses of board: 5/8"-thick MDF for the rear panel, 3/8"-thick MDF for the front baffle, and 3/8"-thick birch plywood for the rets of the cabinet. All panels are veneered inside and out, to prevent warping, and all but the front are covered, on virtually every available surface, with thin sheets of damping material stapled and glued into place. The same inner surfaces are also padded with thick sheets of acoustical foam. The front baffle and rear panel are both removable—a vestige, one assumes, of the breed's history of field use, wherein frenzied techies require quick access to damaged drivers—and are held in place with 12 wood screws each. The screws are secured not with threaded inserts but are screwed directly into furring strips mounted within the enclosure: an eyebrow-raising economy in a $4590/pair loudspeaker that is otherwise exceptionally well crafted.
The Stirling LS3/6 speaks to the world courtesy of two pairs of gold-plated brass terminals, with gold-plated links that can be removed for biwiring. A 6" by 9" circuit board, fastened to the inside rear panel, holds the crossover components: six chokes of varying size (two of them quite large), six film capacitors, and six resistors. I also spotted two sets of miniature jumper switches, both marked "+0.6dB." Interesting.
A word about the packaging: brilliant. The carton and packing for the Stirling Broadcast LS3/6 appear to have been designed by someone with an understanding of physics, some practical experience in sending and receiving large consumer goods, and a distaste for overkill. The carton is spare but sturdy, the packing simple and smart. It works—and it appears as though it could withstand repeated use. Support literature, on the other hand, appears to be nonexistent.
Installation and setup
Perhaps it was good design, good luck, good instincts, or some combination of all three—whatever the cause, the time I spent setting up the Stirling LS3/6s was brief and untroubled. Blessedly, their stands required no assembly, apart from screwing optional spiked feet in the threaded inserts at the bottoms of their feet. (I ultimately uninserted them and settled instead on the comparatively unfussy sound of the wood stands resting directly on my wood floor.) And because thin rubber pads were pre-installed on the top surfaces of the stands, I didn't ever have to subject myself to the drudgery of rolling little bits of Blu-Tak into pea-size balls, as one must do with virtually every other stand of this sort.
Footnote 1: I have been told that the C in the model designation BC1 stands for Celestion; I have no idea what the B stands for, but I would like to think that it's bedpost.
Footnote 2: After opening the cabinet and making note of the labels on the drivers, I began my research by Googling the words Norway and tweeter; my first several hits pointed to a November 25, 2013 article in The Local: Norway's News in English, with the headline "POLICE IN NORWAY ARREST RACIST TWEETER." Interesting.
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Source : stereophile[dot]com
Audeze LCD-X headphones
And in those early days of recording rock music in stereo, engineers were doing crazy things like panning instruments from side to side, and more—toward the end of "For Haven's Sake," from Richie Havens's 1969 album Richard P. Havens, 1983 (UK LP, Verve Forecast 2317 027), the entire soundstage was repeatedly panned from left to right and then from right to left with additional reverb, the idea being that the musicians are rotating in a lateral circle around the singer and bass guitar. Through headphones, the effect was mind-blowing! (And still is—check out this needle drop.)
Headphones have been a regular part of my music listening ever since, though the reliably unreliable Kosses were replaced by Sennheiser HD420s in the early 1980s, then by Sennheiser HD580s and Sony MDR7506s in the 1990s, Sennheiser HD600s in the early 2000s, and finally Sennheiser HD650s (footnote 1). My headphone experience changed, however, when, following the purchase of my first iPod in 2003, I began using in-ear monitors, culminating in Ultimate Ears 18 Pros and JH Audio JH16 Pros, both of which have bodies molded to fit the dimensions of my ear canals. But I've kept an eye on the world of traditional headphones, and noticed the rave reviews being received by models from Audeze (supposed to be pronounced odyssey, though I tend to say ord-ease).
Stephen Mejias mentioned, in his December 2013 "The Entry Level," that even mainstream music commentator Bob Lefsetz had enthused about Audeze headphones—so I felt it was time I auditioned a pair. I asked for a sample of the new Audeze LCD-X ($1699), a model premiered at last fall's Can Jam/Rocky Mountain Audio Fest.
The LCD-X
These large headphones have planar-magnetic drive-units (footnote 2), 2with a thin-film diaphragm energized by an array of powerful neodymium magnets on both sides. They employ Audeze-patented "Fazor" elements that are said to guide and manage the flow of sound in the headphone. The circular drivers, measure 6.17 square inches, are housed in polished, black-anodized aluminum earpieces, with generously sized pads made either from lambskin (as were mine) or leather-free, "microsuede," filled with foam. These pads are large enough to fit entirely around the pinnae—even mine, which are on the large side—and are very comfortable. Adjustment is via notched, chromed metal rods attached to each earpiece, which fit into the sprung, leather-covered headband.
Electrical connection is via a mini-XLR/Micro-dot XLR for each channel, these very subtly marked L or R. The connecting wire keeps the two channels' signal and ground wires separate up to the ¼" stereo jack plug. An adapter is provided for use with 3.5mm stereo jacks, as is an alternate cable fitted with a four-pin XLR plug. The headphones and accessories come in a small SKB case, and the total feel is one of luxury, as is appropriate for a pair of headphones costing a dollar short of $1700.
Listening
During the auditioning period, I was belatedly mixing the May 2013 concert by Bob Reina's jazz ensemble Attention Screen, using Adobe Audition running on a Windows 7 PC fitted with a Lynx soundcard to feed an AES/EBU digital datastream to my Benchmark DAC1. I always do the first mixes of my recordings using headphones, though the perceived relationship between the loudnesses of sounds at the sides and those in the center is different from what I hear through speakers. I always start a rock or jazz mix with just the drums and bass guitar or double bass. The spatial spread of the drums is the canvas on which I will paint my picture, and the bass is literally the music's fundamental instrument.
Using the Audeze LCD-Xes, the basic drum mix was straightforward. I had my usual four mikes on Mark Flynn's kit: an AKG D112 in front of the kick drum, a Shure Beta 98 close to the snare drum's top skin, and a pair of Shure SM81s in an ORTF pair over the cymbals and toms. I also had a distant ORTF pair of DPA 4011 cardioids in front of the church's altar platform, on which the musicians were playing, and through the LCD-Xes, this pair gave me an unambiguously stable picture of the drums, which were positioned to the audience's left. I could therefore pan the close drum mikes to the correct places in the soundstage.
It was more complicated with Chris Jones's double bass. Chris was standing audience right, in front of his Trace Elliott amp, from which I had taken a direct feed. Again I had the reference for its position in the soundstage from the distant pair of DPA mikes, but now I had to deal with significant writer/180bleedthrough of the bass into the DPA 4003 omnis I was using to pick up the sound of the pipe organ. But with the accuracy of the Audeze LCD-Xes' imaging, I could readily distinguish among the sounds of the five mike channels that contributed to the sound of the double bass. I could therefore play with the panpotting and levels of those five channels to construct a realistic-sounding, correctly positioned image of the bass. Only then did I add Liam Sillery's trumpet or flugelhorn and Bob Reina's pipe organ, the resolution of these instruments aided by the Audezes' lack of coloration in the midrange and treble.
Once the mixes were finished, for my regular music listening I retrieved from storage the sample of the HeadRoom BlockHead headphone amplifier I'd bought following Jonathan Scull's rave review in July 2002. The dual-mono, fully balanced BlockHead uses a three-pin XLR jack for each channel's input; fortunately, Audeze sells a balanced adapter cable ($60) with a four-pin XLR on one end and dual three-pin XLRs on the other. I used the BlockHead without its proprietary crossfeed processing bypassed, and with its high-frequency equalization set to None.
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Source : stereophile[dot]com
A Unique KEF Event
All photographs by Lily Szabo Photography and used with permission
Thursday February 13 was a day most of us in New York would have preferred to stay inside. With 10” of snow falling since the night before, the Stereophile office closed, the roads in my neighborhood impassable, and public transport iffy at best, I really didn’t want to make the trek into Manhattan. But I did and was glad to have done so. English loudspeaker manufacturer KEF, represented by a team led by the brand’s international ambassador Johan Coorg (above right), were promoting a unique event for the press at MSR Studios on 48th Street featuring legendary engineer and producer Ken Scott (above left).
KEF had flown in a young band from Nashville, Staying for the Weekend, and the plan was for the band to play two songs live in the studio, with the recording produced by Ken Scott and co-produced and engineered by Derik Lee. The assembled press would hear the band live (minus the vocals, which were not amplified, but just laid down in ProTools), then crowd into the control room to hear the mix on KEF LS50s mounted on top of the console’s meter bridge. A CD would be burned for each journalist and we would all listen to it on the red KEF Blade speakers, driven by Bryston amplification, that flank Scott and Coorg in the photo.
Stereophile’s Product of 2013, the KEF LS50 was used for monitoring the recording of Nashville-based Stay for the Weekend.
The idea was to educate the press in how the recordings are made, how what is heard live is translated into recorded form, and how even a typical rock recording benefits from being played back on a true high-end audio system
Ken Scott had the audience of mainly mainstream press enthralled.
After Johan Coorg’s opening remarks, Ken Scott took the floor. Ken dropped out of high school in the 1960s to start work at London’s famed Abbey Road Studio. Among his first sessions as a lowly assistant were the Beatles’ Magical Mystery Tour and the White album—he had us laughing at his stories of those golden days; he was asked what is was like to record Eric Clapton in George Harrison’s “While My Guitar Gently Weeps” and he had to admit that he just couldn’t remember, such was the atmosphere in the studio—but most importantly, he told us how he had learned what was important in those days of recorders with a limited number of tracks. For example, you couldn’t lay down several guitar solos and decide later which to use in the mix. You had to get it right on the fly, with perhaps only a subsequent punch-in to correct something—the opposite of these modern times, where there may be 59 different solos available to use in ProTools but no-one can decide which is the keeper.
Ken is a vocal critic of “The Loudness Wars”—see my recently posted essay on the subject—and he admitted to being known as GOM—for Grumpy Old Man—on some of the pro-audio Usenet groups. To make his point, he played us a WAV file of David Bowie’s “Suffragette City,” which he co-produced. Except that he had spliced between the original mix and a version that he had asked a colleague to mix as though it were being released today. The difference was jarring. Despite the "modern" over-compressed mix initially sounding impressive, when the original version cut in, the soundstage opened up, there was space around the instruments and Bowie’s voice sounded more natural, yet without the track losing anything. Ken played the file three times, after which there was general agreement among the mainstream press present that something had gone horribly wrong in the way recordings were made in the 40 years since Ziggy Stardust was released.
Staying for the Weekend played live in the studio, monitoring their performance with KEF M500 headphones.
Following Ken Scott’s presentation, Staying for the Weekend took the stage and KEF’s Stephanie Scola handed out earplugs, which the oldsters in the audience, like me, found very welcome.
The session was engineered by MSR’s Derik Lee (left), who has just won a Grammy for the musical Kinky Boots.
Listening to the mixes of the two songs on the KEF LS50s that were bring used as monitors in the control room, I was impressed by how much of the band’s live dynamics a) had been captured in the recording and b) how much of those dynamics were being reproduced by the little LS50s. We then all trooped back into the studio and listened to the evening’s work on the KEF Blades. Oh my! These no-compromise speakers allowed the great white magic of rock’n’roll to flow freely!
Ken Scott’s book, Abbey Road, NW8, to Ziggy Stardust, is well worth reading for anyone fascinated, as I am, by how the recordings we love are made.
KEF’s own report on this very successful evening can be found here. It joins some excellent essays on both music and audio technology that I recommend highly.
Source : stereophile[dot]com
Unity Audio Signature 3
When I saw the Unity Audio Signature 3 speakers ($1895/pair) arrive in one box, I was happy. Not just because it meant there would be that much more space left in my basement. No, because it means that Unity is saving money on packaging costs. That means they can spend more money on things like super-nice crossover components. That means...well, I think you know what that means. After all, any piece of audio gear is only as good as the parts it's made from. To get these overgrown bookends to stand up, you slide little black boards into the slots in their bottoms. Each board is held in place by two set screws, and sticks out to support the speaker with two of the four spikes. The board also tilts the speaker back a little. How do they get sufficient bass out of such slim cabinets? Unity Audio is glad you asked. They call it "Inverse Force Vector Coupling," and are very proud of their development, isolated through "extensive physics research." Basically it consists of one woofer pushing while the other woofer pulls. They can tune this system by varying the dimensions of the tube that runs through the middle of the cabinet. Unlike an acoustic suspension system or a ported system, this type of bass alignment is said to be able to work with an extremely small internal volume.
The Signature 3 has a 7" polypropylene-cone, cast-basket woofer mounted at the top of the front baffle, and a second one mounted at the bottom of the speaker's back wall. This rear woofer puts out midrange as well as bass, so whatever is behind the speaker will affect the sound more than with an ordinary front-firing speaker. It also has a 1" silk-dome tweeter. My first samples were old enough to not have the ceramic coating on the tweeters, and they looked like the same units as in the Swans Baton reviewed in this issue, but without the Marigo dots. Unity Audio apparently has done quite a bit of resonance-structure research for the development of their new tweeter, investigating different ways of getting the best transient speed from the dome while trying to avoid ringing. They found a lightweight ceramic material more than 10 times as rigid as aluminum, and which can be deposited in very thin layers. Multiple layers of this are used on the dome, alternating with thin layers of a very effective damping material. All recent production of the speaker has featured the new tweeter.
Remember what I said about packaging costs? The crossovers of these beauties feature copper-foil air-core inductors, Kimber Kap polypropylene capacitors, and pure silver wire. The cabinets are internally braced, and small enough to not want to resonate much anyway. They did seem a little wobbleriffic, though, so I placed some disks on them. Was it those neato bingo thingos? No, these were 2kg of cast concrete (with calcium!) encapsulated in a luxurious no-scratch plastic casing and delightfully contoured for maximum domestic appeal. That's right, kids, it's Orbatron! I bet, like me, you have some hiding in your basement that you can fetch if you need it for resonance damping. Just remember to ask your parents first. (By the way, I put the weights on the speakers' bottom braces.)
The Way the Signature 3 Used to Sound
When I was taking a look at the first pair, I saw a little bump on the woofer surround. It felt hard. I removed the woofer and found some nice things inside. The input wires are soldered directly to the woofer terminals, eliminating crossover components. The woofer crossover is accomplished mechanically, by mass loading the cone with a coating of hot glue.
Which brings me back to the bump. It was a stray piece of glue that had accidentally splashed onto the surround and stuck there. By reducing the elasticity of that side of the surround this could theoretically be bad for the sound. In my listening, though, I had difficulty detecting any difference between the sounds of the two speakers. At least this little defect proves that Unity Audio doesn't give preferential treatment to speakers that will be sent to reviewers, which is nice to know. I only found such bumps on two out of the eight woofers of the two review samples; they don't seem to affect the sound much, but Unity's glue people should be more careful.
I substituted the Signature 3s after listening to the Swans Batons for a week. It was immediately obvious that the Unity Audio reproduced well-recorded music in a more neutral fashion than the Canadian design, and this impression continued throughout my listening. I listened with the grilles off, mostly with the speakers in the same positions as the Batons. I found the bottom of the woofer to be a good listening axis—though this is a low 27" from the floor—and preferred a slight toe-in.
With Steve Tibbetts' The Fall of Us All, I got the sense that the Signature 3 was well-balanced, with better top-octave air and a much more spacious presentation than the Swans. The only part of their presentation that seemed to be substandard was the midbass: there wasn't much. True, the upper bass was of high quality and at a good level, but a certain visceral push was missing. The bass-frequency tones on Stereophile's Test CD 3 (STPH006-2) went missing in action below about 60Hz.
Despite being endowed with what looked like the same tweeter as in the Batons, this pair of Signature 3s had a brighter presentation. Instrumental timbres were more natural with source material of the trustworthy, unequalized type. They also had more treble detail to offer the listener, although I felt they couldn't quite equal the Thiel CS1.5 and B&W 804 in this department. Partly because of their nice top end, they provided a large sense of space from their reproduction of the reverberation info on the recording. Their spaciousness was also augmented by the rear firing mid-woofer. While this was a bit too much to be strictly realistic, it was very pleasing, and certainly closer to reality than the Batons' persistent tendency to reduce soundstages to the equivalent of a Sonexed bedroom.
This first pair of Signature 3s had a good midrange: fairly smooth in terms of tonal balance, but with a few small departures from linearity. The really cool thing about their midrange, though, was the amazing transient speed. With no crossover to get in the way, the Signature 3 reproduced all the mid detail that the amp could feed it. After all of my mod madness, and other listening escapades, I know how well simplicity can take me closer to the original event of the performance. With this setup there were only two resistors, two capacitors, one MOSFET, and four mechanical connections between the CD player's output and the midrange's voice-coil. I was a happy little pew-wrist.
The Sound of the Current Signature 3
Towards the end of the review period, Unity submitted a revised pair of Signature 3s (footnote 1), these featuring the revised ceramic-coated tweeters.
These new tweeters were great. They seemed to do well with transient details such as twinkly little sounds. Maybe they were a little too twinkly, but not much. Because the woofer has no electrical crossover, the upper end of its range invades the tweeter's territory. Nevertheless, the crossover region sounded quite smooth with the speakers arranged for only a small amount of toe-in. I felt the top octave was a little clearer with the new tweeter. Timbres sounded a bit too bright and steely, but this was to a very slight degree. Overall, the Unity Audio crusaders seem to have succeeded in their quest to lower the excess tweeter-dome ringing.
Footnote 1: This was basically Stereophile's fault in that we took such a long time reviewing the Signature 3s. By the time the original writer commissioned to perform the review, Guy Lemcoe, ultimately recused himself, we had already had the first samples of the speaker for quite a long while before we sent them to Muse Kastanovich.— John Atkinson
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Source : stereophile[dot]com
Squeezing the Music...
I write these words mere hours after returning home from Home Entertainment 2005, the Show cosponsored by Stereophile magazine that took place from April 28 through May 1 at the Manhattan Hilton. A full report will appear in the August 2005 issue of the magazine.
HE2005 was an upbeat affair, the majority of exhibitors presenting good sound at levels that, in general, were nowhere near deafening—a welcome trend. But for me, an essential aspect of the Show that had been relatively neglected at our 2004 event was the inclusion of live music. Not only did XM Satellite Radio sponsor a well-attended concert Friday night featuring that quintessential jam band, Medeski Martin + Wood, but there was a superb support act as well: torch singer Holly Palmer backed up by Mojo Mancini, a band that includes that most tastefully powerful of rock guitarists, John Leventhal (Shawn Colvin, Rosanne Cash). And there was a continuous program of live performances throughout the Show's three public days.
My thanks to: the jazz trio led by guitarist Tony Ormond; blues singer Deanna Bogart and her band; folk singer Kevin Mileski; the band led by singer Pamela Lewis and guitarist John Hurley; Hip Hop & Classical ensemble Nuttin But Stringz; jazz singer-pianist Tony DeSare (courtesy Telarc International); my colleagues in my jazz trio, pianist Bob Reina and drummer Allen Perkins; and, most important for me as his producer, Canadian pianist Robert Silverman, who previewed his forthcoming Stereophile CD with a blistering Saturday-afternoon performance of Beethoven's monumental Diabelli Variations.
An important function of the live music program is to allow Showgoers to recalibrate their ears with the real thing. But the emerging paradox is that, even as playback equipment reaches new heights of transparency and musical accuracy, the recordings we play on our equipment are increasingly compromised in sound quality. I first wrote several years ago about the sonic disaster resulting from heavy-handed compression. Things are now, if anything, worse.
I hasten to add that I refer to rock and popular music—classical recording, led by companies such as Channel Classics, ECM, Pentatone, and Hyperion, is currently enjoying a quietly underpromoted golden age of sound quality. But as one of the judges for the CEA's new Demmy Awards, a scheme intended to recognize the technical excellence of the audio and video recordings used to demonstrate gear, I grew increasingly depressed as I auditioned the contenders in all categories that had been nominated by attendees at the 2005 Consumer Electronics Show last January. (The Demmy Awards ceremony, where the winners will be announced, took place May 14 at the Professional Audio/Video Retailers Conference, now organized in conjunction with the CEA.)
Yes, there were superb examples of the modern recording art—the Tony Faulkner/Andrew Keener collaboration on the Florestan Trio's recording of French music for piano trio, for example (Hyperion SACDA67114)—but many of the nominees dated from an earlier, pre-digital age: tracks from Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon, John Coltrane's A Love Supreme, Derek & the Dominos' Layla, Elton John's Goodbye Yellow Brick Road, Muddy Waters' The Folksinger, Frank Sinatra's Live at the Sands 1966, and the Grateful Dead's American Beauty. I mean, come on.
Yes, these are all great recordings (other than the remastered Dark Side...) but they were all laid down on analog tape before Stereophile writer Stephen Mejias was even born. And when I listened to a modern recording that had been nominated, the aggressively compressed and equalized "Lose My Breath," from Destiny's Child's Destiny Fulfilled—which CES attendee nominated this piece of sonic excrement?—I felt like shutting down the system, going outdoors, and listening to some silence.
Again perhaps paradoxically, it was the DVD Music Video/Concert category that provided the best examples of modern recorded sound. "Narrow Daylight," from Diana Krall's Live at the Montreal Jazz Festival, and "Lido," from Boz Scaggs' Greatest Hits Live, both have excellent dynamics and clean, natural balances. In fact, the recording I've been listening to most over the past few weeks is not an SACD, not a DVD-Audio, not a Dual-Disc, not a CD, and not even an LP—it's the live double DVD-Video of Eric Clapton's Crossroads Guitar Festival (Reprise R2 70378). Great music, great sound, great atmosphere, great musicians—dammit, I love ZZ Top—and as far as I could tell on the 15" LCD monitor set up between and behind my speakers, great video. As I wrote last November, the true replacement for the CD medium is not a hi-rez audio-only medium but the live concert DVD. Now that's a medium worth an award in itself.
2014 Postscript: There are signs of improvment nine years after I wrote the words above and returned to the subject in The Spaces Between the Notes in November 2009. The bestselling album of 2013, Daft Punk's Random Access Memories, has excellent dynamic range without losing its get-up-and-dance quality and Rush are remastering some of their catalog, admitting that a heavy hand on the compressor during the original mastering had made the CDs unlistenable. But there is a long way still to go before popular recordings are fit to play on audiophile systems. As Steve Guttenberg wrote last June, "compression doesn't sound so great for audiophiles craving maximum dynamic contrast, but we're just a tiny minority of music buyers."—John Atkinson
Footnote 1: Compression of the analog signal during mastering should not be confused with lossy digital compression processes like MP3 and AAC, which concerns the throwing away of audio data to reduce file size.
Source : stereophile[dot]com
You Really Can Help Save the Stereo
As White explains on the website's "About Us" page, he alternates his time between publishing Truck Camper magazine, whose avid readership includes Gene Rubin of Gene Rubin Audio, and heading to his basement, where he listens to LPs and digital files of everything from Vivaldi to Daft Punk through "tubes, tubes, and more tubes." He developed Save the Stereo's website with the assistance of his music-loving wife, Truck Camper magazine editor, web developer and "social media expert" Angela White. Given that Angela is "not an audiophile," Gordon has worked hard to develop a project that speaks to the entire music loving community.
"I've been a music lover and passionate audiophile since my early '20s," he explained during one of two intense phone chats. "Based on everything I've read in Stereophile and other publications since 1992, including your recent essay, 'As We Listen, So We Are,' I realized something has to be done to reach the next generation of music lovers. I'm doing this for fun. I love the challenge, and I want to give back to a hobby that has been an important part of my life ever since I was a teenager."
Before launching Save the Stereo, Gordon devoted three months to researching challenges to the survival of high performance, component-based stereo. While asking what the solutions might be, he constantly confronted the questions, "Why is high-end audio important? Why not let it die? Why is it relevant to music lovers who are not currently audiophiles?" These concerns and more he attempts to address on the page, "Why Save the Stereo?" While his rationales for the importance of music mostly emphasize the practical and merely hint at its spiritual import, there is no question that White hits much of the nail on its head.
Nor does he pretend he has all the answers. "I'm asking people to take a look and give me their feedback," he says. "I know the site isn't perfect, and I really want to hear from everybody with ideas. I want to get everyone on a single page so we can move forward collectively."
Gordon White's goal is to receive enough responses and suggestions from community and industry members alike to put together an action plan. After that, Gordon and his friend, electrical engineer and Lancaster Audio Club founder Rob Czetli, hope to move the ideas forward.
"First we need to figure out if everybody thinks Save the Stereo is a good idea," he says. "Then, we need to integrate new ideas and feedback. This is why we must gather ideas from as many people as possible before proceeding. Finally, after an action plan evolves and we vote on it, it will be up to the industry to fund the project.
"The biggest challenge I think we face is that most music lovers who have been walking around with Beats headphones have never experienced great sound, and don't have a lot of opportunities to access that experience," he laments. "The $4 million ads for Beats and Sonos during the SuperBowl show that interest in music has not diminished. But it seems these companies are the only ones reaching out to music lovers."
The next step is up to you. There are no dues involved. White asks that you simply take the Save the Stereo survey and spread the word. As he writes, "Somewhere out there are young music lovers starving for a deeper connection to recorded music . . . We need to do what we can to reach these young music lovers and share our incredible hobby with them. They are looking for us, even if they don't know it yet. Let's give them the opportunity to experience the magic of recorded music on a component-based high-fidelity stereo system . . . Component-based high-fidelity stereo is important and worth fighting for."
Source : stereophile[dot]com
In Praise of a Classic: the BBC LS3/5A
Such factors as the mathematical modeling of woofer tuning by Neville Thiele and Richard Small, FFT-based testing pioneered by Laurie Fincham of KEF in the 1970s, the introduction of PC-based measurement equipment such as DRA Labs' MLSSA system, and such computerized tools as Finite Element Analysis, as well as great leaps forward in materials science, mean that typical 21st-century speakers such as the Dynaudio Special 25 or the Paradigm Signature S2, which I reviewed in June 2005 and July 2005, respectively, are better in almost every way than a typical design from even 20 years ago, let alone 40.
As is my usual practice, around the time I was measuring the Bozak I dragged out my longtime reference speaker, a 1978 sample of a BBC LS3/5a, manufactured by Rogers, to perform a set of acoustic measurements. I do this to ensure that a systematic error has not crept into my speaker measurements. If the LS3/5a continues to measure identically, then I can be sure that nothing has gone wrong with my test gear—microphone, mike preamp, power amplifier, etc.
This latest set of measurements checked out, so I returned the LS3/5a to the closet. But then it struck me: this British speaker will celebrate its 40th anniversary in 2015, yet in many ways it is still competitive with modern designs. (You can find Stereophile's complete review coverage of the loudspeaker, starting with J. Gordon Holt's March 1977 review and continuing through to my review of the 1993 version manufactured by Harbeth and my 2007 review of the Stirling LS3.5A v.2, at www.stereophile.com/standloudspeakers/361/index.html.) Yes, there's a touch of nasality in the upper midrange, the treble is less smooth than, say, the Paradigm or Dynaudio, and the upper bass is less well defined than audiophiles now expect from even inexpensive speakers. But when it comes to accuracy and stability of stereo imaging and sheer purity of midrange reproduction, the tiny BBC-designed speaker is still a contender.
How could this be? A touch of history is in order, courtesy the LS3/5a Enthusiasts website:
Back in the early 1970s, the BBC in the UK needed a small location monitor that would provide consistent reproduction in small, suboptimal environments, such as a recording truck. A team led by T. Sommerville and D.E. Shorter, of the BBC's Research Department, developed the LS3/5, based on a small monitor they had designed for acoustic scaling experiments. That monitor used a B110 woofer with a doped Bextrene cone and a T27 SP1032 Mylar-dome tweeter, both sourced from British manufacturer KEF. The speaker showed much promise, but problems with the drive-units led to a detailed redesign carried out by H.D. (Dudley) Harwood of the BBC's Research Department, and Maurice E. Whatton and R.W. Mills of the Designs Department. (I was surprised to learn that one change was to move the tweeter to the top of the baffle.)
The design was licensed to a number of commercial manufacturers: Rogers and Chartwell at first, then Harbeth (formed by Dudley Harwood), Spendor (formed by ex-BBC engineer Spencer Hughes, who had been the chief engineer on the acoustic scaling speaker), Goodmans, and Audiomaster (whose chief engineer, Robin Marshall, had also worked in the BBC's Research Department before going on to form Epos and eventually ending up at Harman). Since then it has seen just two reworkings. The first, in 1988, was to bring the speaker back in line with its original specifications—there had been inevitable drifts in the drive-unit parameters since 1976—and the most recent, as reported by Ken Kessler in our April 2005 e-newsletter, performed by Stirling Broadcast, was because the original KEF drive-units were long out of production. Stirling's v2 LS3/5a costs from $1410/pair to $1542/pair, a far but inevitable cry from the mid-1970s price of 52 pounds each! More than 60,000 pairs of LS3/5as were manufactured up to 1988, 43,000 by Rogers alone (footnote 1).
So why is that almost all speakers from the 1960s and 1970s sound as dated as you'd expect, whereas the LS3/5a remains a competitive design? Perhaps it was the fact that the LS3/5a was intended to be a monitor (though many professional monitors are even more colored than good domestic designs). Perhaps it was the unique assembly of speaker engineering talent at the BBC in the early 1970s, which I don't think has been matched since. Perhaps it was the fact that the design was thoroughly and unusally worked out—a BBC white paper by Harwood, Whatton, and Mills, "The design of the miniature monitoring loudspeaker type LS3/5a," report RD 1976-29, is available at the BBC's website. Perhaps it was just serendipity.
But whatever the reason, I thought it worth recognizing the LS3/5a's longevity. —John Atkinson
Footnote 1: A comparison between the on-axis responses of the Stirling variant, the 1996 KEF example, and my original 1978 sample can be found in fig.3 here.
Source : stereophile[dot]com
A Day in the Life (#gradolabs)
Interestingly, more and more audio manufacturers are showing up on Instagram. I follow several, including Meridian, Sonos, Sony, Skullcandy, Cambridge Audio, VPI, and Grado. This week, We Shop American, another account I follow (@weshopamerican), posted a series of images detailing a day in the life of the Brooklyn headphone manufacturer’s VP of marketing, Jon Grado. Followers get to learn a bit about the manufacturing process; read about the classic line of Grado headphones; and see the company’s listening room, complete with an unreleased 32-driver Grado loudspeaker.
Right now, We Shop American is featuring an interview with Jon Grado, who, like VPI’s Matthew Weisfeld, is part of the exciting next generation of hi-fi enthusiasts aiming to bring the hobby to a wider and younger audience. Here’s an excerpt from the interview:
We Shop American: What’s your goal for the company in the next 5 years…10 years?Jon Grado: We haven’t advertised since 1964. That’s a very long time. Being VP of marketing and not advertising forces me to get creative and find ways to help get the name out there without commercials, billboards, skywriting messages in the sky, etc. . . . Although, that last one . . . Gonna have to run that by my dad later! My main focus is getting the Grado name out there and strengthening the Grado community. We’ve had 60 years to perfect the sound, and now I’d like for more people to know about it.
Seems to me like Jon and Grado are well on their way. (InnerFidelity.com readers are also aware that Grado recently collaborated with hi-fi enthusiast Elijah Wood and Bushmill's Irish whiskey to design the company's first closed-back headphone. The limited-edition design sold out almost immediately, according to the excellent NYC-based retailer Turntable Lab. I know that because I follow Turntable Lab on Instagram.)
Visit We Shop American to read the rest of the interview with Jon Grado, and register for a chance to win a set of Grado SR60i headphones, a true audiophile classic. Everyone should own a pair. (I do.) And follow me on Instagram at @stephenmejias.
Source : stereophile[dot]com
Essential Audio Hosts Aurender & Bricasti Design
The highly regarded Bricasti M1 DAC will be demonstrated along with the Reference Music Servers from Aurender. Visitors are encouraged to bring their favorite recordings on memory sticks, CDs, or LPs. The event runs from 12 to 5:30pm, but there will be two separate, 2.5hr-long demonstrations. Space is limited; registration is strongly recommended. Refreshments will be served.
For more info and to RSVP, contact Essential Audio at (773) 809-4434 or register online.
Source : stereophile[dot]com
Ken Shindo, 1939–2014
Photograph: Jonathan Halpern
Ken Shindo, the Japanese audio designer whose electronics, loudspeakers, and accessories have influenced the parallel worlds of tube audio and analog audio, and who is shown above (right) with loudspeaker designer John DeVore, died late last month after a brief illness. He was 74.
A former design engineer for Matsushita, Ken Shindo inherited from his father an interest in recorded music and playback gear. In 1977, after years of devoting his spare hours to learning the sounds of different vacuum tubes and other vintage parts, Shindo-san struck out on his own and founded Shindo Laboratory in Tokyo. Among his first commercial products were the model 1474 preamplifier and a push-pull 350B-powered amplifier called the 124B, both of which were built using new-old stock parts: a Shindo calling-card to this day. By the 1980s, metallic-green casework—inspired, in part, by the characteristic color of certain vintage Altec products—had become another of the company's informal trademarks.
Over the years, with the help of his wife, Harumi, and their youngest son, Takashi—the builder of various Shindo amps and preamps presently in circulation—Ken Shindo produced an astonishing number of different hand-made amplifiers and preamplifiers. Some were designed around traditionally popular tubes—there was almost always an EL 34 amplifier in the line—while others used such relatively obscure tubes as the 6B4G, the PX25, the E2d, and the VT52. In every case, Ken Shindo designed his circuits to play up the characteristics of the tubes he chose to use: a not-insignificant point, considering that most other manufacturers do things the other way around. Consequently, the Shindo Laboratory line is comprised not of multiple amplifiers offering different output-power specs, but of multiple amplifiers with similar specs, each one highlighting somewhat different aspects of musical performance.
Despite some business obstacles in recent years—including new RoHS regulations that effectively prohibit the sale, in Europe, of electronics containing vintage capacitors—Shindo Laboratory continued to thrive, and their product line expanded to include vintage-inspired loudspeakers, many with field-coil drivers; an AC isolation transformer; various step-up and impedance-matching transformers; and a widely imitated record player built around the Garrard 301 motor unit.
An amateur mountaineer, Ken Shindo reportedly enjoyed good health until his sudden passing. According to Jonathan Halpern of the US distribution company Tone Imports, shown above (left) with Ken Shindo and Kertu Halpern (right) in John DeVore’s photograph, Shindo Laboratory will remain in business, operated by Shindo-san's family and employees.
Source : stereophile[dot]com
2014 Records To Die For
The following choices of the venerable—and venerated—staff of this fine mag represent to them the best of their music collections. Variety and whim happily abound. And by revealing what they most like to listen to, our writers tell us who, in some ways, they are. Everyone is encouraged to [ahem] expose himself a little bit by thinking outside the box. Go ahead—confess a devotion to Black Sabbath, say something untoward about J.S. Bach, express an everlasting affection for smooth jazz. Some are more willing than others to participate in this facet of the exercise, but on the whole, our fondest hope is that this mass o' music will send you scuttling to Google—or, better yet, an actual record store (bricks and mortar, you know)—to find something you've read about and now just have to hear. It's in that spirit of being eager to share that we present Records To Die For 2014.
Note: If a recording listed here has previously been reviewed in Stereophile, whether in "Record Reviews" or in a past edition of "Records To Die For," the volume and number of the pertinent issue appear in parentheses at the end of the review. For example, a listing of "(XXXV-12)" means that a review of the recording appeared in Vol.35 No.12 (December 2012).
Source : stereophile[dot]com
Looking Forward: Carla Bozulich’s Boy
From the press release:
Boy is a refreshing and much-needed reminder of what pop—as an oblique angle, influence, and intent—can do in the hands of a ferociously commanding singer/lyricist who has cut her teeth on genre-bending, genre–blending, and DIY aesthetics.
The track “Lazy Crossbones” opens with a mid-tempo drum pattern—the drums recorded with enough air to define a convincing picture of the performance space—before making room for warm keys, searching guitar, and, of course, Bozulich’s special voice, which is as alluring as it is alarming. The result is something like a wonderfully twisted, damaged Fleetwood Mac single—beautiful, powerful, and chilling: more nightmare than “Dreams.”
We can listen to it now at The Quietus and at Tiny Mix Tapes.
Boy was recorded at Tricone Studios in Berlin by Danny O’Really and Rowan Smy; it was produced and mixed by Bozulich and John Eichenseer. Additional mixing and mastering were handled in Montréal, by Jace Lasek, Ian Ilavsky, and Harris Newman. The gorgeous cover art was also done by Bozulich. The album will be available on CD and LP—the latter, pressed on 180 gram virgin vinyl at Optimal Media (Germany), comes in a heavyweight jacket with poly-lined audiophile dust sleeve, a complete liner insert, pullout poster, and a download code for 320kbps MP3 files of the entire album. Few independent labels manufacture their vinyl releases with as much care as Constellation: each one is a work of art.
For more info, visit Constellation Records.
Source : stereophile[dot]com
Benchmark ADC1 USB A/D converter
The front panel offers, from left to right: a Mode toggle to switch between internal and external clocks; a second toggle to select the sample rate (44.1, 48, 88.2, 96, 176.4, 192kHz) for the Main and Auxiliary outputs and to select ADAT or AES/EBU data formats; a third toggle to select the meter range (1dB or 6dB/division) and Peak Hold on/off; and a 2x9-LED level meter. Continuing to the right is a group of controls for the first channel, toggle switches to select gain (0, 10, or 20dB), Variable or Calibrated gain, and a rotary level knob; this group is then duplicated for the other channel.
The rear panel offers, from left to right: a pair of balanced analog inputs on XLRs; two unbalanced AES/EBU Aux outputs on BNC jacks; a USB Type-B port; a Main TosLink output working in either S/PDIF or ADAT format; a Main balanced AES/EBU output on an XLR; word clock input and output on BNCs; and the IEC AC inlet. The word clock ports allow the ADC1 to be used in multichannel applications, slaved to other converters. The Main USB, TosLink, and AES/EBU outputs always offer 24-bit data. The Aux outputs can have a different sample rate from the main outputs, to feed a CD-R or DAT recorder, and can be set to offer TPDF-dithered 16-bit data as well as the original 24-bit data. (TPDF stands for Triangular Probability Density Function, and refers to the spectrum of the dither used.)
Inside, the circuit layout is as clean and as logical as I have come to expect from Benchmark. The analog circuitry appears to be based on OP27, AD797, and LME49860 high-performance op-amps, while the A/D converter chip is an AKM 5394. This is a 24-bit, two-channel, 128x-oversampling, delta-sigma chip capable of operating up to a sample rate of 216kHz and with a high specified dynamic range of 123dB. A Texas Instruments TAS1020B is used for the USB interface, which limites operation via USB to sample rates of 96kHz and below. Two AD1896 asynchronous sample-rate converter chips are present, but I'm not sure whether they're used only to prepare the data for the Aux outputs or for a more fundamental purpose. Benchmark uses what they call UltraLock to reduce the level of jitter.
Sound Quality
I prepared some 24/96 needle drops using the ADC1 converter's USB output and the inexpensive Vinyl Studio app running on my MacBook Pro. In level-matched comparisons of "The Lark," from Moving Hearts' The Storm (LP, Tara 1304), with a 24/192 needle drop made with the Ayre QA-9 A/D converter ($3950) I reviewed in November 2012, the Benchmark had a little more weight and authority to its low frequencies, the Ayre a more delicately drawn soundstage.
The differences were in the same direction with a 24/96 transfer of English singer-pianist Peter Skellern performing "The Continental," from Astaire (LP, English Mercury 9109 702). The Ayre's imaging was a touch more palpable, the Benchmark's sound slightly more upfront, with firmer lows. But overall, the transfers from vinyl were more alike than different. I couldn't hear any meaningful differences between the Ayre and Benchmark converters with "Die Tänzerin," from Ulla Meinecke's Wenn Schon Nicht für Immer, dann Wenigstens für Ewig (LP, German RCA 426124).
I used the Benchmark last May as the master converter to record the final rehearsal of Bob Reina's band Attention Screen performing jazz compositions for trumpet, double bass, drums, and church organ. The outputs of the main pair of organ mikes, a pair of DPA 4003 omnis amplified by a Millennia Media preamp, were fed to the Benchmark running at 88.2kHz, with a Metric Halo MIO2882 used for the spot mikes on the other instruments slaved to the ADC1's word-clock output. The Benchmark's 24-bit AES/EBU output was fed to a Metric Halo ULN-2, and both Metric Halos were connected to my MacBook Pro via FireWire. That way, I could record all 10 channels using Metric Halo's multitrack Record Panel app.
Listening to the sound of the organ mikes, it was obvious that the Benchmark ADC1 had done a great job. With its clean high frequencies and weighty, extended lows, it faithfully captured the magnificence of the newly restored Ralph and Alice Greenlaw Memorial pipe organ at the Community Church of Douglaston, Queens. In the work intended to be the concert's finale, Bob gives the organ's bass pipes a workout—the last note, a sustained, lusty 32Hz C, shook the windows of my listening room.
Conclusion
Benchmark's versatile and full-featured ADC1 USB both measures superbly well and produces digital files that sound equally superb. It offers performance for which, a decade ago, you would have had to pay five times its price of $1795. It also offers better resolution than you get from inexpensive converters like E-MU's popular e404, whose nominally 24-bit A/D converter section actually has about 17-bit resolution. Unless the fact that, unlike the Ayre QA-9 it lacks DSD encoding is a problem for you, I highly recommend the ADC1 for transferring your LPs to digital.
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Source : stereophile[dot]com
