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A high-performance, high-end speaker, made in Utah

The Zu Essence is a big speaker, with a really big sound, fully capable of rocking out like few high-end speakers anywhere near its $3,600 price can. The Essence's wham-bam dynamics are explosive, so please trust me on this, you'll never get that sort of impact from a bookshelf or smaller speaker. My complete Essence review appeared in Home Entertainment magazine, but let me share with you the gist.

Speaker design over the last decade has mostly been devoted to producing greater accuracy, higher resolution, lower distortion, and wider frequency response, but those qualities don't necessarily produce a sound that will stir your soul. Accuracy is one thing, but there's an artistry to speaker design no computer will ever match. Zu designers are definitely more interested in musicality than accuracy, and it totally works.

The Essence is 49 inches high and 12 inches wide and deep. It has a 10.3-inch full-range driver and a 2.5-inch foil-ribbon tweeter. The advanced technology tweeter is sourced from Taiwan, and then entirely rebuilt and modified in Ogden, Utah. All of the 10.3-inch paper-cone driver's parts are made in the U.S., and assembled in the Zu factory. The completed tweeters and woofers are extensively tested and sorted into matched, close-tolerance pairs that are used in production speakers.

Zu offers a range of standard painted and wood veneer finishes, and a slew of extra-cost custom paint finishes. Zu's paint shop does outstanding work, with overall build quality the equal of speakers that sell for many times the Essence's $3,600 price. In the context of today's high-end speaker market the Essence is a steal!

This speaker can rock out better than any speaker near its price, and since the Essence is unusually efficient, it clicked with very low-power amps, like the $378 Miniwatt N3 (3.5 watts per channel amplifier). Actually, the speaker sounded best with a First Watt J2 (25 watt stereo amp), but I've also used the Essence with my 400 watt per channel Parasound JC 1 power amps, no problem. In fact, the Essence delivered great sound with every amp I've tried. … Read more

Beyerdynamic T1: Mercedes-Benz of headphones

You can buy a set of great full-size headphones for $100 from Grado or Sennheiser, but if you want to pick up one of the world's best headphones, be prepared to spend more than $1,000. Granted, no one needs a $1,000 headphone to listen to music or a $140,000 Porsche Panamera Turbo sedan to drive to work, but they're nice things to have. That's why we cover them on CNET.

Audio-Technica, Sennheiser, Grado, and Ultrasone's latest attempts to advance the state-of-the-art are really expensive, but before the introduction of the T1, Beyerdynamic's top models all carried an MSRP of less than $400. With the Tesla T1, Beyerdynamic joined the $1,000-and-greater club; it sells for $1,295.

Steep prices haven't stopped the high-end headphone market from booming, and Beyerdynamic can't keep up with the demand for the T1. It's hand-built and tested in the company's headquarters in Heilbronn, Germany.

Its padded leather headband and soft earpads provide high comfort levels, and while we were testing the T1 over some rather hot and humid late spring days, the headphone remained comfy for hours on end. The T1 comes packed in a very impressive aluminum storage case.

According to Beyerdynamic, the T1's transducer is the first to produce more than one Tesla of magnetic flux density (hence the T1 designation). A more powerful magnet better controls the diaphragm's movement, which should produce lower distortion.

Most of the T1's outer earcup is covered with a finely woven wire mesh, which allows the user to hear outside sounds. Actually, the T1 is classified as a "semi-open" design, so it partially limits how much sound the wearer would hear, compared with open Sennheiser and Grado designs. The T1's thick cable is just shy of 10 feet long (118 inches) and it's fitted with a 6.3mm connector. Beyerdynamic doesn't include a 3.5mm adapter for use with iPods or other portable devices.

I listened to the T1 with three different amplifiers: an Onkyo TX-SR805 receiver, Woo Audio WA6-SE vacuum tube amp, and Burson Audio HA-160 solid-state headphone amp ($699). Beyerdynamic's headphone amp, the A1 ($849), would likely be a serious contender, but I didn't have a chance to try it. … Read more

Listening to B&W's $15,000 diamond speaker

I first wrote about Bowers & Wilkins updated diamond speakers in January, but I finally got to hear them a few weeks ago at Innovative Audio & Video, one of B&W's New York City dealers.

Specifically, I listened to the 802 Diamond speaker that sells for $15,000 a pair. The speaker has a big and beautiful, carefully honed design.  The 159-pound speaker stands 44-inches high by 14.5-inches wide by 22-inches deep. It has a 1-inch synthetic diamond dome tweeter, 6-inch woven Kevlar midrange driver, and two 8-inch Rohacell woofers. Rohacell is a super lightweight, yet highly rigid material that is ideal for woofers that need to move a lot of air without flexing.

The 6-inch midrange driver is housed in a teardrop shaped "head" that is crafted from inert Marlan composite material, a synthetic, mineral-filled resin. This granite-hard enclosure is sprayed with seven coats of hand-polished black lacquer. The head's internal cavity--a sphere closely coupled to a short tube--absorbs most of the sound from the back of the driver. On the outside, the teardrop shape smoothly disperses the sound around the speaker, creating a solid, three-dimensional stereo image.

The diamond tweeter is fitted to a tapering tube that is filled with absorbent wadding to control the energy that radiates off the tweeter's backside. The diamond tweeter doesn't look like a diamond at all, it's a dull gray dome, so it wasn't just used for show. B&W favored aluminum tweeters for its top models for years, but now uses  diamond domes because of their higher stiffness-to-density ratio. According to B&W, diamond gets closest to the sound of a hypothetically perfect tweeter.

I've heard my share of high-end speakers, but the thing that struck me first about the 802 Diamond's sound was its purity. It's the second-generation diamond model, the original version was the 802 D--the company changes it models every five to seven years. B&W offers a complete range of 800 Diamond Series speakers for hi-fi and home theater systems. … Read more

Denon's $3,000 receiver proves bigger is better

I've reviewed many Denon receivers, but never one of the really big ones. Richard Ames, that lucky devil, had the pleasure of putting the Denon AVR-4810CI through its paces for "Home Entertainment" magazine.

Each of the receiver's nine channels puts out 140 watts. Just about every surround format is on board, including Dolby ProLogic IIz height channel processing and Audyssey's DSX (which adds the possibility of width channels as well). You also get Audyssey's MultEQ XT 8-point room correction processing.

Video signals, regardless of resolution or input, can be upconverted/transcoded to HDMI and … Read more

Headphone mania hits New York again

This was my third Head-Fi "meet," and at each one I've met lots of great people sharing a common passion for hi-fi. I'm not sure why, but Head-Fi members are a lot younger than most audiophiles. You see a lot of under-30 members, and it seems like under-40 Head-Fi-ers are in the majority! The weather outside on Saturday in Queens, NY, was frightful, but inside the vibes were warm and inviting. This event was hosted by my friend, Aaron Kovics (Head-Fi username Immtbiker).

Head-Fi meets gather Internet friends at a place, in this case a hotel, where they can listen to each other's headphones and headphone amplifiers. Some amps are home-built designs, some are commercial units. And unlike regular hi-fi shows, you can listen to what you want, with your own music, as loud as you want.

I met one guy with a set of vintage Grado Signature HP-2 headphones, probably from the early 1990s. They had a very dynamic, bold sound, and a special something I can't quite put my finger on. I'm a big fan of John Grado's current line of headphones (and phono cartridges), and I sold a lot of those early Grados (designed by John's uncle, Joseph Grado) when I worked as a salesman at a high-end audio store.

As I recall the original Grado headphones sold for $400 or $500, but used ones now go for $1,300 to $2,000! That's what I love about the best high-end gear; it sounds amazing, it's built to last, and it goes up in value! Think anybody will want to buy a 30-year-old iPod for a premium price in 2040 to actually listen to? I doubt it. … Read more

Park Avenue Audio, a kinder and gentler high-end store

When I first met Dennis Yetikyel at Park Avenue Audio last year, I didn't realize he was the owner of the store. He's so laid-back and easygoing I just thought he was one of the guys who worked there. The store was founded in 1976 as a family business by Yetikyel's granddad, so it's definitely a mainstay in the New York City high-end audio scene. Yetikyel started working at Park when he was 16; he now heads a staff of eighteen people.

Park has a welcoming vibe and a carefully selected roster of brands for its … Read more

$229 vacuum tube amplifier wows audiophiles

If you think all high-end products are stupid expensive or mammoth monstrosities, the MiniWatt vacuum tube integrated amplifier should change your mind. What differentiates high-end gear from mass market technology is performance; mainstream manufacturers know sound quality isn't much of a priority for most buyers, so they build their products to sound just good enough.

By high-end standards at least, the MiniWatt is dirt cheap, just $229 (shipping is $40). And measuring just 5 by 4 inches, the little guy can fit anywhere. Powerful it's not, just 2.5 watts for each channel, but that should be plenty … Read more

The future will be...

As we’re nearing the end of a year and the end of a decade, it’s time to look back and ahead. With at least three formative events in this young 21st century (9/11, the Tsunami, and the Great Recession) providing some sort of apocalyptic arch and instilling a profound sense of anxiety, it is no wonder that former visionaries are gathering at conferences asking “Where did the future go?” But, at the end of the day, the end of all days didn’t occur, and as the New York Magazine points out in its comprehensive review of … Read more

How tech touched the '00s

I've been enjoying all of the end-of-decade lists that have suddenly cropped up. I like knowing what I was intimately aware of and what I completely missed.

This week, the Associated Press came out with its list of "50 things that changed our lives in the aughts." First off, the reference to the "aughts" made me chuckle. Back in late 1999, I was concerned about two things: Y2K and what the heck we were going to call the first decade. Neither of those concerns turned out to be much of a problem in the end. &… Read more