The Audiophiliac

The rarely photographed Harry Pearson.

(Credit: Steve Guttenberg)

Harry Pearson, who coined the term "high end," spoke at the Rocky Mountain Audio Fest 2009, held last week in Denver. "High end" has long since spread to cars, cameras, jewelry, real estate, boats, and a gazillion other categories, but audio is where it all started.

Pearson's magazine The Absolute Sound, The High End Journal, and J. Gordon Holt's Stereophile magazine created an audiophile community.

Starting in 1973, Pearson's flamboyant writing style and deep love of gear and music helped prod the state of the art forward through the 1980s. The Absolute Sound's tiny circulation and sporadic publishing schedule didn't hurt its prestige and importance in the industry. A rave review, especially by Pearson, could put a start-up company on the map.

Pearson made people curious about, well, the absolute sound. That is, the sound of musicians and vocalists, recorded in an appropriate acoustic space. We all wanted a hi-fi system good enough to put us in that space. That's impossible, but the goal, reproducing the absolute sound, still drives at least some audiophiles.

Five speakers and sub for music? I don't think so!

(Credit: Steve Guttenberg)

It's interesting. Tens of millions of homes are equipped with multichannel home theater systems, but multichannel music is a dead issue. Stereo rules the roost, for going on 50 years.

Ten years ago it looked like stereo's days were numbered--the two new multichannel formats, SACD and DVD-Audio, were on track to be the next big things. Funny, it didn't work out that way. I cover the subject in detail in my "Whatever happened to 5.1-channel music?" article that appeared in the July issue of Stereophile magazine.

Obviously, 5.1-channel sound makes sense for movies and home theater, mostly because 5.1 was an outgrowth of theatrical film-sound technologies stretching all the way back to the 1950s.

Every attempt to bring surround music into the home without video has flopped, big time. Are you old enough to remember the rise and fall of quadraphonic in the 1970s? What was needed was a surround format that didn't require music lovers to invest in new playback gear. Surely such a format would prove the viability of music surround...wouldn't it?

The Icon comes in four colors.

(Credit: NuForce)

I heard the NuForce Icon (briefly) at the Rocky Mountain Audio Fest last year, and the little bugger was astounding. The anodized aluminum chassis is available in four snazzy colors. It feels well made.

Stereophile's Wes Phillips reviewed it for real. He even had the nerve to hook up the teeny NuForce Icon to a pair of Definitive Technology Mythos STS SuperTower speakers, and Phillips was bowled over by the sound! The sheer incongruity of the match-up was disarming, but in the end Phillips heard the limitations of the NuForce Icon. Used as intended driving small speakers, it's tough to beat for its size and price.

It has USB, 3.5mm, and stereo RCA inputs; and headphone and speaker-level outputs. It's a 12-watt-per-channel desktop amp, so NuForce isn't touting the Icon as a giant killer, just that it'll sound sweet used in the context of a desktop audio system. Did I mention it's little, just 1 by 4.5 by 6 inches, and weighs one pound?

The S-1 speaker.

(Credit: NuForce)

NuForce also offers a matching speaker, the S-1, for $249 a pair. There's also a subwoofer, the W-1, that goes for, you guessed it, $249.

The W-1 subwoofer

(Credit: NuForce)

Audiophiles are on a quest; we're always lusting after the perfect fill-in-the-blank (speaker, amplifier, turntable, CD player, etc).

Catch is, perfect gear wouldn't automatically make every recording sound life-like. At that point the gear wouldn't have a sound per-se; the recordings' sound would be laid bare.

The MBL 101X-Treme Reference System, $250,000, approaches perfection.

(Credit: MBL America)

I wrote "How high do you want your fi?" for the April 2009 issue of Stereophile magazine, and I'm still getting a wide range of feedback about that piece from readers and friends.

I'm defining a "perfect" hi-fi as one that's indistinguishable from the sound of live instruments. No hi-fi has ever fully recreated the sound of a symphony orchestra, jazz group, or rock 'n' roll band. Solo instruments fare better, i.e. guitars, flutes, and vocals; you can almost get a glimpse of their sounds over the best high-end systems. But a drum kit? Piano? No way!

Audio components are far from perfect, so it's no surprise their sounds aren't 100 percent convincing. As imperfect as the gear is, the recordings themselves are even further away from documenting the sound of vocals and instruments.

The age-old analog/digital divide is the least of it. The musicians do their thing, and then the microphones, their positions relative to the instruments, the skill and imagination of the engineer/producer/mastering team's use of equalization, compression, processing, etc., create the sound we hear.

Pop or rock music is rarely played by the complete band, with vocals, live in the studio. Out-of-tune singers and players are pitch-corrected, drummers' off-kilter rhythms are tweaked, there's not a lot of there there to reproduce. Most recordings are so heavily processed they could never sound real.

You get two of these for your $107,000.

(Credit: YG Acoustics)

You'll get no argument from me that $107,000 seems like a lot of money for a pair of speakers.

But the YG Acoustics Anat Reference II Professional is a lot of speaker. Stereophile magazine's Wes Phillips delved deep into the flagship speaker's build and sound quality in his review. It was a tough assignment, but somebody had to do it.

While $107,000 is definitely out of my price range, that doesn't mean there's not a market, albeit a very small market, for products that advance the state of the art. Great, but who buys these things?

Answer: rich people. You probably know some of their names. Rock icon Bruce Springsteen just signed a new $110,000,000 contract. The Boss could and should buy these things (maybe he'd make better-sounding records). And the last time I checked, Tom Cruise is still getting upward of $20 million to appear in a movie. A pair of YG Acoustics Anat Reference II Professionals would be a nice start for his home theater.

In addition, sports superstars are still signing megamillion contracts, and big-business CEOs are still eating at fancy restaurants. Even now, the rich aren't hurting; luxury markets are holding steady.

The Anat Reference II Professional is a three-piece modular loudspeaker. It is, shall we say, on the statuesque side of large; the Reference Main Module sits atop the Studio passive subwoofer, which, in turn, rests upon the Professional powered subwoofer. Each three-module array weighs 440 pounds.

Most of each module is made of aircraft-grade aluminum; the front baffles are a machined "ballistic grade" alloy of aluminum and titanium. The speakers are shipped in six custom aluminum flight cases.

(Credit: Magico)

Times are tough, and even high-end speaker manufacturers are feeling the pinch.

Take Magico, for instance. Its soon to be released V2 speaker is $9,000 less expensive than the current entry-level model, the V3. The brand's probably most famous for its Mini II monitors that go for $29,600. The top of the range Ultimates run, gulp, $329,000! Don't worry, all prices are per pair.

The V2 is certainly built like a Magico; its got the solid aircraft grade aluminum front baffle attached to a 17-ply, vertically stacked Baltic Birch wood cabinet. The entire cabinet is stiffened with aluminum tensioning rods. I haven't seen the V2, but if it's anything like the other Magicos it will be a truly stunning work of industrial design. The V2 is 42 inches high and weighs 120 pounds.

The V2 is a 2.5-way design featuring a pair of 7-inch Nano-Tech woofers and a 1-inch Ring Radiator tweeter.

The V3 received a rave review in the May issue of Stereophile magazine.

Oh, there's one catch to the V2: it won't be available in time for Christmas; deliveries begin early next year. Magico was founded a decade ago in Berkeley, Calif.

Stereophile magazine editor John Atkinson's recent article, "Getting the best from your loudspeakers," provides gobs of useful information.

Atkinson's observation that "inexpensive speakers, optimally set up, may well outperform more expensive models just plonked down willy-nilly" is absolutely true. Proper speaker placement is crucial to getting the best sound out of your speakers.

This CD can help tweak the sound of your speakers.

(Credit: Stereophile)

The article explains how room acoustics affect the sound of speakers, and it's definitely a complex relationship. You won't need a microphone or any technical skill to get the job done, but an Atkinson-produced Stereophile test CD can be a big help when fine-tuning speaker placement.

Perhaps his most important bit of advice comes early on: "Entire books have been written about the relationship between loudspeakers and room acoustics, but the starting point for any successful setup is to position the two speakers and your listening chair as the pieces of an equilateral triangle; that is, the speakers are each as far away from you as they are from each other."

Stereophile magazine writer Wes Phillips is a friend of mine and we occasionally trade mix CDs. A few months ago, we were sitting around listening to our mixes over Wes Bender's tweaked out hi-fi--and this shot perfectly captured the vibe. I Photoshopped this image, shot by Bender.

(Credit: Wes Bender/Steve Guttenberg)

(Credit: Steve Guttenberg)

The end is near, another war seems imminent, oil prices continue to rise, the dollar is in free fall, and now audiophiles have abandoned the CD.

Don't get the wrong idea: they haven't all dumped their CD players for turntables (I wish). Instead, they've bought music servers of some kind or another. How can this be happening?

I read the sad news on the Stereophile July 6 voting feature (scroll down to see results).

That week's question: how do you listen to digital music? The poll says 34 percent still use CD players as their primary digital source. Yikes, I would have guessed much higher, more like 70 percent. Thirty-six percent use a computer-based server, and 10 percent use dedicated servers such as Sonos or Squeezebox. Another 4 percent use iPods! I felt a little better that 11 percent use a SACD or DVD-Audio player. Another 3 percent voted "other."

Mind you, these are the Stereophile online readers, presumably the print readership would skew towards CD players. Or not.

Regardless, something's going on. Audiophiles tend to be a conservative bunch, or at least I thought they were. Me? I listen primarily to CDs and maybe 20 percent of the time to LPs. I cannot imagine using a music server anytime soon, and sound quality issues have nothing to do with that. I like picking music from my collection. It's a touchy-feely, organic process. One album leads to the next, or I accidentally find something I haven't listened to in years.

What about you? What are you listening with?