Sound

Do you remember when you bought stereo receivers based on their power and connectivity? The entry-level models were low in power and had just a few inputs. As you moved up in the line, they got more power, more ports, and an extra feature or two. The top models looked cooler than the entry-level ones, with a more high-end design flair and they hid their lesser-used controls under a flip-down panel. If someone bought a more expensive model, it's because they wanted better sound quality.

Home-theater receivers followed the same course, except the higher end models had more speaker … Read more

Sales of ridiculously expensive and absurdly powerful cars are holding steady, and the same can be said for extreme, high-end speakers. Granted, there's no practical reason for the existence of the new 450-horsepower Audi R8 Spyder 5.2 Quattro supercar ($161,000), or a Klipsch P-39F tower speaker ($20,000), but if you can afford them, why not? High-end speakers have one very practical advantage over extreme performance cars; they can provide satisfaction on a daily basis. Few Ferrari and Maserati owners use their flashy wheels as everyday rides, and far fewer are brave enough to drive them anywhere near their top speeds! No, these prized possessions remain stowed in garages most of the time.

Prices listed in this top-10 list are for pairs of speakers, and if these are all out of reach, please don't fret, as the next top-10 speaker list will feature the best sub-$1,000 speakers on the planet. Or check out my "Top-10 must-have audio bargains" list.

I've auditioned many of these ultra-high-end speakers personally, so I can attest that they can take you places everyday speakers never go. … Read more

I've known my share of audiophiles who own lots of speakers, amplifiers, etc., but Wayne McManus has 40 high-end headphones. He's slowed adding to the collection, and now mostly concentrates on out-of-production classics--Sennheiser HE90 electrostatics, Sony MDR R-10, Sony Qualia 010, AKG-K1000, Audio Technica L3000, Grado HP-2--because each one has its own distinctive character and feel. McManus thinks speaker-only audiophiles are missing that aspect of the hobby; they're stuck with one sound. For the price of a pair of high-end speakers you can buy a healthy selection of the world's very best headphones. McManus has invested around $50,000 to date.

McManus bought a motor home three years ago, and now spends every April through August exploring the U.S. and Canada. He's semiretired and takes a small selection of headphones with him on the road.

At home he uses a very impressive hi-fi outfitted with MBL 101E speakers, MBL electronics, and a VPI turntable, but headphones have superior detailing. He put it this way: "You may have heard the same album a hundred times over speakers, but you pick up on new stuff over headphones, and when you move up to IEMs [in-ear monitor headphones] you hear even more of that microscopic effect. But you lose the sense of being at a live concert."

So I was hardly surprised to hear that McManus owns a Smyth Realiser A8 processor that makes headphones sound like speakers. He thinks the Realiser A8 makes it almost impossible to distinguish between the sound coming from headphones and speakers. It improves the stereo localization of all of his headphones.… Read more

I get this question all the time, "Do I need to spend a lot of money on wire?" The short answer is no. It's like asking if you need to drop $50 or $100 to buy a good bottle of wine. No, unless you're a wine connoisseur; most folks are perfectly happy with a nice $10 variety. True, you'll use a cable a lot longer than it takes to drink a bottle, but I wouldn't recommend spending more on a single set of wires than you'd spend on wine--unless you're an audiophile.

Audiophiles obsess about the tiniest details of sound quality. That, and we frequently listen attentively, an activity few non-audiophiles ever do. Everybody else puts music on and then reads, talks, works, exercises, or cooks. So if you're not really listening, I wholeheartedly agree, spending money on expensive cables isn't a smart move. Another thing, you'd have to own a pretty decent set of speakers to hear the benefit of better cables, and if you already have a set of great speakers you're probably an audiophile.

So all of you non-audiophiles can rejoice. Don't let anyone talk you into spending a lot of money on a speaker or interconnect cable! Head on over to your local hardware store, Blue Jean Cable, or MonoPrice and buy dirt-cheap, decent quality cables. … Read more

I love high-end headphones. The best ones offer a level of detail and clarity that's hard to match with speakers.

Still, lot of folks never listen to headphones at home; for them headphones sound too small, too inside their heads, and they prefer the sound of speakers. Some of the better headphones, like the Sennheiser HD-800 and the Hifiman HE-5's produce sound that is somewhat less stuck inside the head, but even so they always sound like headphones. Now, with the Smyth Research Realiser A8 processor, headphones can sound like speakers. It's amazing!

Never heard of Smyth Research? Stephen Smyth of Smyth Research developed the algorithm that was later selected by Digital Theater Systems (DTS) for its cinema audio playback system that premiered with the Steven Spielberg's film, "Jurassic Park." Mr. Smyth seems to know his way around sound processing algorithms.

After spending some quality time listening through his Smyth Research Realiser A8, I can testify to its effectiveness. With the Realiser A8, room-filling sound was produced by headphones!

When I heard the Realiser A8 do surround for the first time, I whipped the headphones off in disbelief. Wow! The sound wasn't coming out of the surround speakers! The Realiser A8's spatial localization is 100-percent convincing. The system comes with a set of very-high-quality Stax SR-202 electrostatic headphones and a Stax headphone amplifier, but you can use any headphone with the Realiser A8.

I first listened to a demo of the Realiser A8 at a mastering studio and a few days later at home. In both cases the Realiser A8 processor worked very well. It stores data about the actual sound of the speakers in your room--or any room you take the processor to. Better yet, the Realiser A8 isn't limited to stereo reproduction, it can do full-blown five-, six-, or seven-channel surround. The extra cool aspect of that feature is that you can have the sound of your best stereo speakers reproduced in the front, center, and surround channels. The Realiser A8 seems ideal for two-channel audiophiles who previously avoided tackling home theater. With the Realiser A8, audiophiles can keep their two-channel system intact, and still have a satisfying home theater surround experience. It would also work for SACD and DVD-Audio high-resolution surround sound.

So the Realiser A8 produces vastly superior surround than Dolby Headphone, Beyerdynamic's 5.1-channel Headzone, or any prepackaged virtual surround headphone processor I've heard to date. There's a good reason for that: the Realiser A8 comes with a pair of tiny measurement microphones you place in your ears that document the unique characteristics of each listener's ears, head, and torso in a specific sound environment, like your room. Test tones are sequenced through the speakers for a couple of minutes, while the Realiser A8 performs the required calculations to reproduce the sound of the speakers in the room over headphones. … Read more

Hi-fi salesmen are some of my favorite people. The job is nonstop audio, and they turn their customers onto the best stuff. I know from where I speak; I sold high-end audio for 16 years in New York City. I played more combinations of speakers, amplifiers, turntables, and CD players than any audio reviewer ever has. I knew the gear inside out.

The best sales people are successful because they're all good listeners, and listening is important because you have to first understand what the customer is looking for before you can provide solutions. The best salesmen have lots of satisfied customers, and those customers turn their friends and relatives on to the salesman. The bulk of my sales worked that way.

I dropped by a Long Island, NY, hi-fi shop, Audio Breakthroughs, for the first time last Wednesday. I was immediately stopped in my tracks by the hi-fi store "smell." Nothing bad, just that old familiar slightly sweet scent of new electronics, mixed with a delicate blend of plastic vapors, furniture polish, and packing materials wafting through the air. It's an intoxicating aroma; I love the smell of new hi-fis in the morning!

I know some folks don't trust salesmen, but when I was on the floor I sometimes found it difficult to gauge the intent of a new customer. I'd greet them, exchange a few pleasantries, and try to be of help. Please understand, my store sold speakers priced from $200 a pair to over $100,000. I'd need some sort of ballpark number to get things going, but that wasn't always easy.

The worst part of the job was dealing with people who felt they had a right to hear any combination of gear, at their whim, at any time. Sorry, it doesn't work that way. Now sure, if they just wanted to hear some good stuff that was already set up, and the store wasn't busy I'd play a tune or two. For some that wasn't enough, and they'd become indignant when I tried, graciously, to change the subject. Sometimes they would claim they would have bought something from me, if I had only treated them better. I can't say I was right every time, but over the years I heard from other salesmen in other stores that they never really bought anything. I got out of the business 15 years ago, long before the Internet started chipping away at brick-and-mortar sales.

My favorite customers were the ones who came in with a clear agenda, and could tell me what they wanted, how much they wanted to spend, etc. The demonstration of gear might stretch out over days or weeks, which was fine with me, as long as I felt the customer wasn't wasting my time. Buying a serious hi-fi or home theater system involves a lot of decisions, and having a knowledgeable salesman can be a big help. If you think you're smarter than the sales guy, that's cool, just tell him what you want. … Read more

I've probably listened to and reviewed a thousand speakers, and truth be told, the majority of them never sound like live music. They sound like speakers.

The "problem" with box speakers is that you're always aware the sound is coming out of a box, but Magnepan speakers don't have a box. And they don't have dome tweeters or cone midrange or woofer drivers, either. Magnepan technology is radically different than what you find on box speakers, so the 1.7's sound "floats" free of the speakers themselves.

The new Magnepan 1.7 ($1,995 per pair) looks a lot like the model it replaces, the 1.6, which was regarded by many of the world's high-end audio critics, including me, as one of the greatest less-than-$2,000 speakers on the market. The 1.6 stayed in the line for more than 10 years, and I have every reason to believe the 1.7 will be a standard bearer for just as long. And speaking of value, Magnepan also offers a factory-direct $599 (per pair) panel speaker, the MMG. The technology isn't as advanced as the 1.7's, but it's miles ahead of any other $599 speaker I can think of.

The 1.7 panel is 64.5 inches high, 19.25 wide, and just 2 inches thick. Magnepan builds all of its speakers in White Bear Lake, Minn., and almost all the 1.7's parts that aren't fabricated in-house are sourced from U.S. suppliers. I reviewed the 1.7 for Tone Audio magazine, where you can read the complete review.

The 1.7's technology is unprecedented for Magnepan; the speaker is the company's first "full-range ribbon" design. It's also worth noting that what makes a well setup pair of 1.7s so special isn't just something that only dyed-in-the-wool audiophiles would notice; pretty much anyone with ears will immediately grasp what's going on. Their box-free sound is astonishing.… Read more

High-end audio can be a rather expensive hobby, but every now and then I stumble across something really amazing that's priced for the real world. The Schiit Audio Asgard headphone amplifier looks and sounds like an overpriced high-end audio component, but it sells for $249!

How good is it? Much better sounding than run-of-the-mill headphone amplifiers, the sort designed around inexpensive integrated circuits found in home theater and stereo receivers. The Asgard is a no-holds-barred Class A, single-ended, zero-feedback design. Pardon the audiophile jargon; let's just say the Asgard is built like a serious piece of high-end gear.

Look inside and you see individual resistors, capacitors, transistors, etc, configured in a proprietary design by Schiit Audio's founders, Jason Stoddard, formerly of Sumo, and Mike Moffat, formerly of Theta Digital (two pioneering American high-end audio companies). The Asgard's chassis, circuitboard, and power transformer are all sourced from American suppliers, and the amp is built in Newhall, Calif. Oh, and Stoddard, his wife, or Moffat actually listens to each and every Asgard before it leaves the premises.

The Asgard's clean lines and elegant proportions strike me as distinctive, I love the look. The brushed, all-metal chassis' fit and finish are excellent, easily on par with high-end electronics that sell for four times the Asgard's price. That's no exaggeration, it's really nicely put together. I mostly listened to the Asgard with my Ayre C-5xe SACD/DVD-Audio player, but you could hook it up to any stereo analog connection.

The amp is fairly compact, and can be placed horizontally or vertically. The chassis measures 9 by 6.75 by 2.25 inches, and it weighs 4 pounds. Accessories include a 3.5 mm to 6.3 mm headphone plug adapter, and a high-quality 3.5mm to male RCA cable adapter.

The amp's high-current design makes it suitable for use with all sorts of headphones, rated from 8 to 600 ohms, and it worked perfectly with my favorite Grado, Hifiman, Phiaton, and Sennheiser headphones. A lot of companies toss around phrases like "high-current design," but judging by the amount of heat the Asgard generates, I believe the claim.

It runs very warm to the touch, and even so, Jason Stoddard told me the Asgard was built to have a 20-year lifespan, or at least 5 years if left on continuously. How many $249 consumer electronics products can you buy with that sort of life expectancy?… Read more

Amar Bose started Bose in 1964 when he was a professor of electrical engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He went on to build a very successful company that is one of the top selling hi-fi, headphone, and car audio brands in the United States.

Bose's popularity isn't based on selling budget-priced gear; the company aims higher and has earned its success with a more quality-oriented approach. CNET's Matthew Moskovciak recently blogged about Bose's new Lifestyle home theater systems, that cost from $2,000 for the T20; $2,500 for the V25; and $3,300 … Read more