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The Rocky Mountain Audio Fest 2011, held last weekend at the Denver Marriott Tech Center Hotel, showcased a vast array of affordable and high-end audio designs. Hundreds of manufacturers from North America, Europe, and Asia were represented at the show. RMAF has a very different vibe than the Consumer Electronics Show held in Las Vegas every January--RMAF is more of a grassroots affair.

I noted a trend to more stylish audiophile speakers, like the 28-inch tall Davone Ray ($7,500/pair) and the curvy, aluminum-bodied Dali Fazon F5 ($4,495/pair). Most bona fide high-end speakers are big and bulky … 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

Most headphones have tiny dynamic drivers, basically miniaturized versions of the drivers used in box speakers. The Audeze LCD-2 features a completely different technology: it uses thin-film planar magnetic drivers. I first checked out the Audeze LCD-2 headphones last year and absolutely loved them. The company redesigned the drivers to produce even better sound, made the earpads thicker, and now covers the headband in real leather. I found the sound improvements of the revised model significant enough to warrant a new review.

The styling is bulky and retro, but the quality feel of the LCD-2 is more than skin deep; … Read more

Audio Research Corporation (ARC), based in Minnesota, was in the vanguard of the American high-end audio movement in the early 1970s. By then mass-market transistor electronics had all but killed off the vacuum tube, but ARC's founder, William Z. Johnson, not only believed his tube amplifiers sounded better than solid-state gear, he thought tubes were technically superior. That's why ARC billed itself as a "high-definition" company since its start, decades before HDTV came on the scene. ARC was in large part responsible for starting the tube renaissance, and time has proven Mr. Johnson correct, as there … Read more

Using a mobile phone while driving is dangerous enough on its own. Add to that the need to look at your phone to end calls and you have a recipe for disaster. If only today's smartphones had that trusty end-call button that existed on older phones. Fortunately, you can follow these quick steps to turn your power button into the end-call button you've been missing:

Editor's note: This How To is geared toward handsets running Android 2.2 and above.

Step 1: Enter the settings menu from either the app tray or by clicking Menu>Settings … Read more

Audio Arts may be NYC's newest high-end audio shop, but you can tell it isn't really competing with the more established stores in the area. You see, the others carry a mix of high-end and mainstream brands to cater to the broadest possible market, but Audio Arts' Gideon Schwartz only sells products from the most esoteric manufacturers. That said, the services all of these NYC brick-and-mortar shops offer--side-by-side auditions of audio components and hands-on customer service--can't be duplicated by online retailers. Maybe that's why despite astronomical rents, NYC high-end retailers aren't just surviving, new shops … Read more

The Axpona (Audio Expo North America) high-end audio show came to New York on Friday and Saturday. It was a fairly small affair, but I managed to find more than a few astounding sound demos. The most amazing of all came from a tiny S-Series subwoofer-satellite system from Steinway Lyngdorf, which produced an audiophile-grade, lifestyle-oriented system. "Lifestyle" audio is usually synonymous with mediocre sound, but this very small system produced extremely good sound. The S-Series speakers may be just 10.2 inches high, 7.8 inches wide, and 3.1 inches deep, but they (and their matching subwoofers) … Read more

A number of Mac users have run into a problem after applying the OS X 10.6.8 software update that was released yesterday, in which their printers have stopped working. The printer will still be installed, but print jobs fail and the printer is stuck in a paused state. People experiencing this problem may see an error in the system console (shown in the Console utility) that mentions a problem related to "backend" such as the following:

printer-state-message="/usr/libexec/cups/backend/lpd failed

Backend returned status -8 (crashed) Printer stopped due to backend errors

If … Read more

I've heard a number of Verity Audio speakers over the years, and it was always the company's smaller, more apartment-friendly models like the Finn and Leonore that most impressed. Small Verity high-end speakers are still pretty expensive, but when I heard that Verity was about to introduce something a lot more extreme, I wanted to know more about the design. The Monsalvat is very much in the Verity tradition, but the $325,000 speaker system breaks new ground for the company.

Design details are scarce right now, but as statement speakers go the Monsalvat isn't huge: its … Read more