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The canton of Reference, 2023. It’s not the latest Swiss county; nor its swankiest zipcode. It’s Canton’s new 8-deep Reference range which dropped at this year’s Munich show… |
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No woman no cry; no hifi no sound. When it comes to enjoying music playback… |
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It wasn’t a quad bike for a son of anarchy with revoked driver’s license. It was a quad of review wobbles. The first wheel that came off… |
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Help! If you’re a new hifi manufacturer in the shits; or want to avoid them at all costs… |
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INS for insular? I ‘knew’ the emailer; which is to say, I’d reviewed his products. Now he asked whether I could help with a letter of recommendation for the American immigration and naturalization services… |
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For about a year Ivette had suffered a worsening clogged-up ear… |
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Dawid does Munich. Day One finished. Day Two wrapped. Done. |
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Show preview. At 145 entries deep, our teaser listing of what to see and hear in Munich just completed. Enjoy! |
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Ever since Steve Jobs’ carefully orchestrated product reveals, I remain curious how hifi companies adapt the recipe for their own YouTube versions. Here are three… |
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Had TNT just blown up one of my review shipments from the UK? The Irish Sea is quite narrow. You’d not think that… |
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Jaded jaundice jammed up? Some color commentary on a divisive subject… |
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Axxess is the fourth brand in the Audio Group Denmark family of Ansuz, Aavik and Børresen. Axxess will consist of… |
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A few sweet arguments against salty overpriced ‘audiophile’ servers; for local files only. If you buy music to own and support its creators with more than fractional cloud-streaming cents, you don’t need… |
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Cable risers or lifts. They give engineers the fantods and audiophile critics perfect ammunition to indulge in ridicule. I couldn’t care less. I use… |
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In late 2019 I visited Denmark’s Aalborg to learn about Audio Group Denmark and its brands Aavik, Ansuz and Børresen. Fast forward to early 2023 when I was invited once more… |
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As the world’s only country with the proper URL extension for our hobby, Finland aka dot.fi is home to Hypostatic and their current Blackbird model. That’s a… |
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Audiophile slang, translated… |
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The emailer was Jeffrey Jenkins of Carbide Audio LLC. “We just released an updated version of our footer called the Evo… |
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You too? Lumin’s U1, a pure streaming transport from ~2015, just hit the reset button. Voilà, the U2 successor with all-new processor, linear power supply, fiber-optic and dedicated USB⇒DAC ports plus PCM768 and DSD512 routing… |
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The word ‘cardioid’ already made many rounds in our pages circling Martin Gateley’s sound|kaos subs and prior to those, subs or bass systems from Bastanis/Zugspitz, Cygnus, Ecobox, ModalAkustik and Voxativ. We also heard it with the Silent Pound Challenger, Kii Three/BXT, a master tuning for Buchardt’s A700 and finally… |
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I’m skint. adjective. pertaining to being poor, out of money or broke. British in origin, it derives from ‘skinned’. “I’m way too skint to go drinkin’ tonight.” From my recent news post: In the UltraFi Olympics, Denmark just unleashed a whole team of Ansuz challengers spanning flagship cables and power distributors… |
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Adidas loses NY trial against Thom Browne over three-stripe design. That was the headline of… |
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12 for inches, D for dual. Voilà, the next chapter in Martin Gateley’s exploration of music’s Mariana Trench… |
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In hifi, anything not the signal which somehow arrives at the ear is distortion. In this context, the signal is what’s measured on an oscilloscope. What kind of dead-obvious distortion… |
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Get syng’d up three ways. With Syng’s Cell Alpha, you can. Inside the truncated sphere, this fully class D active omni… |
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Winning. The word could recall actor Charlie Sheen’s tiger-blood period when winning, $50K professional goddesses and cocaine crashed. For me it recalls… |
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En plein air. It’s French for outdoor painting. Now Airplain is Swiss for active speakers with… |
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Knuckleheads; dense enough so nothing penetrates. If true about nothing getting in, nothing should leak out either. Speaker cabinetry enjoys its own variants; boxes so inert that nothing gives. Internal air pressures incite no mechanical response. Welcome to what’s thought of as dead boxes… |
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One-stone Albert’s law of relativity looms large also on coin. One girl’s windfall is another’s daily allowance. One guy’s attainable is another’s completely out-of-bounds. Today we simply don’t bitch over relativity. We exploit it… |
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And the elephant said to the naked man, can you really breathe through that thing? |
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Of caped crusaders and towns. The power of music to connect, entertain and move us in many ways was at the center of the first Cape Town High Fidelity Experience on the 15th of October… |
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Framed: a new Maxi 150… |
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Warsaw 2022 pre-show report. |
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Awards. What they are; or not. In our hifi space they might be five stars, 100/100 across multiple assessor categories, an Editor’s Choice, stand tall in a Year’s End feature, occupy a class like a Hindu caste, be porcine, medieval or lunatic treats; and much more… |
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From a CNN article: “A Chinese vase expected to fetch €1'500-€2'000 at auction sold for more than €9 million after a bidding war between collectors… |
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B.thy mono. So the laird said unto us. And so it was. [From the Gospel of Cédric & Sébastien Bermann.] Whilst their 120wpc stereo amp can strap to 300-watt mono, today’s B.audio amp does stereo only in pairs. To deliver its 300 watts into 8Ω and 500 into 4… |
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How do you decide what to review? ’twas the short form of Raul’s question. My answer isn’t complicated… |
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From CNN Entertainment, September 9, 2022: “Zac Efron was ripped when he appeared in the 2017 film version of Baywatch but now he’s speaking out about how difficult it was to get into that type of shape. “That ‘Baywatch’ look, I don’t know if that’s really attainable,”… |
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Quite a few things improve with age. Take a luxe bottle of Barolo; an unhurriedly aged parmigiano reggiano; a slab of dry-aged ribeye. They all get better. So does that sportscar from Zuffenhausen whose three-digit type designator should be familiar worldwide. Even seemingly mundane things like my electrical toothbrush have made improvements over the years which I never foresaw. Another such member in this club is Friedrich Schäfer – or better, the amps he’s been building for over 40 years now… |
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From Jason Wong of Hapa Audio, “Haiku is the first silica-dioxide-based aerogel RCA cable and most sophisticated instrument developed by us to date… |
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When checking with a gifted designer on status of a pending product already teased… |
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Clunk. The sound of one penny dropping. It wasn’t a Zen moment, rather a more ashamed ‘duh’. It’s when things so obviously stare you in the face that you’re too thick to see ’em. Also hard at work had been new-is-shinier mentality… |
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Have product. Can’t afford to ship it. It’s a song I’ve now heard twice in two weeks, both times about… |
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Unleash the Kraken. With the recent expansion into a very large factory, Denafrips added a new team with much prior speaker design experience… |
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Dawid and Goliath. This story is as ancient as it is deeply engrained in our collective psyche. It’s one I’ve repeatedly pondered since… |
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As a professional voyeur—yes, pervy that—I obviously come across wildly more product sightings than I could ever review, own or even aspire to. Most of it goes in one ear then out the other. In-between some lands in our newsroom. Even though I don’t really need it, occasionally one will cross my path which… |
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Today’s it’s not Emilio Estevez in Repo Man. Today it’s the Epic range of the rePro Men. That’s short for… |
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Groovy. If you still say that, you probably grew up during the hippie generation so are well aged. Not cool. ‘Gnarly’ might peg you a SoCal surfer child. ‘Awesome’, ‘mega’, ‘mondo’, ‘phat’ and many others mark their own time. Each young generation coins its own lingo. Unhip outsiders betray themselves by not knowing it. Or they appropriate it only to use it in error. Again they don’t belong. Wrong handshake. This being mid 2022, a new insider word is atomic… |
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PP. Today it’s not the musical notation asking us to play very softly… |
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NFL. Today it’s not the National Football League but… |
