Sound

An industry insider recently admitted to me that only 30 percent of AV receiver buyers ever bother to hook up all seven channels to their receivers. That guesstimate seems a little high to me; the standard 5.1 channel setup: Left, center, right speakers upfront, and a pair of surround speakers to the sides of the main listening position can supply a truly immersive sound experience.

Seven-channel home theater adds two more speakers, placed behind the main listening position. That's tough to accomplish in rooms where the couch or chairs are up against the rear wall. There's no "rear" there, so some folks mount the rear speakers up high, or bounce the sound off the ceiling.

Still, the rear surrounds typically contribute little, so it's pretty hard to justify the added expense and hassle of running the extra wires for a marginal sonic improvement. The one exception might apply to very large rooms where the side and rear surround speakers are further apart from each other. The extra coverage may produce a more complete sense of surround envelopment. … Read more

What, you don't have a turntable? What's wrong with you?

When the CD was unveiled to the world in 1982 with the "Perfect Sound Forever" motto, everyone assumed the LP's days were numbered. Well, nearly three decades later, vinyl's hanging in there and the CD's future looks uncertain.

Vinyl appeals to oldsters who still covet their LP collections, and kids who are just now getting into the groove. To some vinyl sounds better, more musical than digital, and some just dig the more physical connection to the music vinyl provides.

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 … Read more

A good friend of mine is still fuming over picking HD-DVD over Blu-ray. He's held the grudge so long he just recently dumped the player and even some of the discs and bought a Blu-ray player.

I know another guy who's steamed that his $2,000 6-year-old receiver doesn't have HDMI switching, so to get Dolby TrueHD and DTS Master Audio he plays his Blu-ray over the receiver's 5.1 channel analog inputs. Fine, but the receiver doesn't do any sort of bass management over its analog inputs. The sound isn't so hot.

Do you know anybody who bought a plasma TV in 1999 for around $10,000 who still uses it as their primary display? I don't, but I'd bet most of those buyers are on their second or third display by now.… Read more

It's the hi-fi's job to produce the sound of music encoded in a recording.

Does how well or how accurately it produces the sound affect musical enjoyment? I'm not so sure about measurements; they just define distortion levels, power rating, and frequency response, but they don't have all that much to do with good sound. Good sound is much harder to nail down; we like what we like. You know good sound when you hear it.

Studio recordings rarely sound "live," or even realistic. How could they? Chances are the band never played the entire tune together "live" in the studio. Their music was patched together from bits and pieces, overdubbed, pitch corrected, rhythm corrected, EQ-ed, dynamically compressed, and processed in a gazillion ways. Of course, a lot of that also goes into modern "concert" recordings. So what constitutes a good sounding recording is pretty impossible to define. Play it back over a great system and what do you hear? Does it get your blood pumping?

So the question really is, does the music fully engage the listener? Sometimes, the better the hi-fi, the more music the listener hears, the more they like the music. Why that is? I don't know. … Read more

Wilson Audio Specialties didn't invent high-end speakers, but its original WATT speaker, introduced in 1986, changed the rules of the game.

Up to that point, state-of-the-art speakers were all large beasts, but the WATT was a comparatively tiny stand-mounted speaker. Its distinctive pyramidal shape went on to spawn countless imitations.

The WATT was soon joined by the matching Puppy (woofer), and over the ensuing decades the two-piece WATT/Puppy system evolved, culminating in the WATT/Puppy 8 in 2006. Well over 15,000 WATT/Puppys have been sold since 1986, but rather than move to the W/P 9, founder David Wilson decided to start afresh, so now we have the Sasha W/P ($26,900/pair).

Wilson Audio Specialties' director of sales, Peter McGrath, came to New York City to present the Sasha W/P to the press at Wilson dealer Innovative Audio last week. The new speaker's sweeping curves and refined shape make for the best-looking Wilson speaker of all time. … Read more

I have no idea why, but "The Beatles at the Hollywood Bowl" has never been released on CD in the U.S.

Worse yet, I don't think it's going to come out on CD or download when the remastered Beatles albums are released later this year. "Hollywood Bowl" came out on LP in 1977, before the CD was invented, and long after the group broke up. In 1977 all four Beatles were still alive. Luckily enough, it's not at all hard to score a decent "Hollywood Bowl" LP now.

I can't think of another major sixties band that didn't eventually put out a great concert LP. For reasons lost to the mists of time the Beatles live recordings were all pretty poor quality, and these Hollywood Bowl dates are less than stellar-sounding. But the thing is, the performances rock harder than the Beatles ever did in the studio.… Read more

Heard, but hardly seen speakers aren't new.

There's a number of glass and clear plastic speakers on the market, but these fetching British models are something else again. People seem to want speakers and audio gear that "disappears" and still sound great. Ferguson Hill makes a full line of see-through designs, and from the looks of it the FH001 just might be a real contender.

It's a "horn" speaker made of clear acrylic, and its ultrahigh efficiency design allows it to play nice and loud with as little as 3 to 50 watts. So there's no need to use the FH001 with power hungry amplifiers! Horn speakers are easily the "greenest" of speaker types, and work well with even the smallest, most power-efficient amplifiers. I first heard about Ferguson Hill on the Ultimate AV Web site.

Women sometimes buy quality audio, but that doesn't make them audiophiles.

With rare exceptions, all the audiophiles I've known are men. The unifying mantra for audiophiles is that there's always something, maybe an amplifier or speaker just out a reach that might get them a little closer to the music. Audiophiles are gear junkies. They want to have Aretha Franklin or the New York Philharmonic or their favorite music sound like it's in the house. Audiophiles crave an emotional, visceral connection with their music.

That pretty much sums up Margery Budoff's audiophile urges. Like most audiophiles I know, Margery had an unusually strong affinity for music at a young age. She described herself as "A child musician with an industrial design fetish." Even as a little kid she loved the look of stuff, especially older, big and clunky 1950s and 1960s record players.

The first record Margery bought was "Telstar," then Dionne Warwick, then the Rolling Stones. The record player was the thing that could "Decipher the secret code encrypted in the records. I wanted to hear the sound in all its glory. That's how I became an audiophile."… Read more