Sound

The Rocky Mountain Audio Fest 2009, held last week in Denver, showcased the best and brightest in new high-end headphones and iPod sound enhancing gear.

I blogged about Wadia's super iPod dock, the 170i Transport last year, and Wadia now has a matching digital-to-analog converter/power amplifier, the 151. It has one USB, one Toslink, and two coax inputs. The 170i was the first "dock" to extract a digital output from an unmodified iPod, so for those who really care about sound quality, the Wadia 151 will be the way to go. The 151 PowerDAC will soon be available in black and silver.

Jack Wu of Woo Audio brought a nice selection of his tube headphone amplifiers to the show. I'm a huge fan of Woo Audio, its amps have made my Grado and Sennheiser headphones sound better than ever. Woo was also showing prototypes of its upcoming digital-to-analog converters, the sound showed great promise. … Read more

The Rocky Mountain Audio Fest 2009, held last week in Denver, showcased the best and brightest in high-end audio gear.

Hundreds of high-end manufacturers, from tiny one-person operations all the way up to industry giants like JBL were on hand. RMAF has a very different vibe than the Consumer Electronics Show held in Las Vegas every January--RMAF is a more grassroots affair.

I never heard of RAAL, a company based in Serbia, but its small (I'm guessing 7-inch-tall) speakers, produced a huge, room-filling sound. The speakers totally disappeared as sound sources.

The speaker uses twin aluminum cylinders, with 4-inch drivers firing up and down and a special "ribbon tweeter" sandwiched between the two cylinders, firing front and rear. Each speaker has its own, separate woofer, housed in another tube with 6-inch woofers at each end.

It's a fully powered system; just hook up a source such as a CD player and you're good to go. Price and availability weren't announced, but the company is hoping the complete system will cost around $4,000.

TAD (a division of Pioneer Electronics) had the best sound I heard at RMAF. Their newly revised Reference One speaker ($60,000 per pair) was far from the most expensive speaker in Denver, but the 330-pound towers produced the most vivid, clear, and transparent sound. Bass drums were tight, pitch-perfect; stereo imaging was, again, remarkably precise and three-dimensional. Vocalists virtually materialized between the two Reference Ones.

Some of that amazing sound quality has to be attributed to the Bel Canto electronics that TAD was using. The compact e.One Series components use just a tiny fraction of the AC power consumed by their hotter running, bigger and heftier competition. Bel Canto does things differently.… Read more

For over 10 years ElectronLuv has been producing custom amplifiers and high-end components.

I think they're awesome-looking things, and I love that they're built to order. In a way ElectronLuv's design ethos reminds me of the "American Chopper" TV series where they custom build high-end motorcycles to order. But in this case it's stereo pre- and power amplifiers, guitar amplifiers, turntables, and horn speakers designed to meet ElectronLuv's customers' desires.

Some might call it steampunk or retro chic, but I think ElectronLuv products are unique and represent the best of American high-end audio.

ElectronLuv's Josh Stippich needs three to six months to design and build each of his one-of-a-kind products. In the early design stages Stippich sends his customers drawings to get feedback so he can give them exactly what they want. … Read more

High-end audio can be expensive, but there are deals to be had.

Take a gander at EMP Tek's nifty Limited Edition System that goes for $595. It's a three-piece affair with a stereo tube integrated amplifier and a pair of sweet-looking bookshelf speakers.

Call me jaded, but I've heard a bunch of iPod speaker systems in that price range that sounded like glorified boom boxes. And since most of them are single-box systems they don't do much in the way of stereo separation. Yes, they make bass, but it's always bloated, thick, and boomy bass. Impressive to some at first, but its not what you'd call hi-fi sound. These iPod systems' power amp wattage is rarely specified or it's wildly exaggerated. For $600 you should be able to get a decent sounding system, and there's no such thing as a decent sounding iPod speaker for that kind of money.

The EMP Tek Limited Edition System is something else again. Its 40-watt-per-channel rating seems about right. Small enough to fit on a desktop, it's just 6.6 inches wide, 4.5 high, and 10.25 deep, and the amp has three inputs. Two are minijacks, so you can plug your iPod/MP3 player in, and there's a stereo RCA input you might use to pump the sound of your DVD or Blu-ray player through the system. The amp's two tubes are backlit with blue LEDs, which look extra cool. The amp weighs 8 pounds.… Read more

Headphone lovers of the world unite! We now have our own wiki, Wikiphonia.

Headphones are hugely popular now, but they were around long before "i" and "Pod" ever got together. The history is long and deep, and Wikiphonia is a fantastic resource for anyone who wants to know more about headphone technology and related information.

Headphone geeks are a breed apart from audiophiles as I know them, but they're an even more intense bunch. One of the great things about headphonia is you can get in pretty deep without a big investment. Hard-core types like to build their own headphone amplifiers.

Wikiphonia has an entry that covers 1970s era USSR copies of Western headphone technologies and designs, "The copying was done out in the open, probably and correctly, they figured no one would start a conflict with a superpower over a few headphone patents."

For me, it all started with Sennheiser's HD 414. Its bright yellow earpads were super cool, and the sound was awesome. Back in the early 1970s it was a really big deal, a giant leap better than anything I'd ever heard. You can read all about it on Wikiphonia.… Read more

Dynamic range compression isn't new, it's been used by recording, mixing, and mastering engineers for many decades. A little bit of compression is fine, but over-compression can sound downright ugly. Most of today's music, whether it's on LP, CD, the radio or iTunes is over-compressed. Most remastered CDs are over-compressed.

Before we go any further, I'm not referring to the lossy compression used in MP3s, or lossless compression used in Apple Lossless. They've got their own set of problems, but dynamic range compression is a very different predicament.

To the casual listener compression can sound "good," mostly because it makes the music seem louder and punchier, and once music's natural soft-loud dynamic shifts are squashed flat music is easier to hear in noisy environments like cars or over iPods. Compression reduces the need to adjust playback volume--because it's always nearly the same volume--loud.

Engineers worry that if they don't compress their recordings the music would seem too soft and low. That is, if a music listener went from really loud, compressed music to quieter, uncompressed music they probably wouldn't like uncompressed music--unless they turned it up! That way they would hear the music's natural soft-loud dynamics.

Unfortunately, that's not an acceptable scenario to most engineers or record labels. They're addicted to over-compression, it's a hard habit to break.

But the unnatural onslaught of compressed sound obliterates musical nuance, delicacy and emotional power. Compression's loud-all-the-time nature sucks the life out of music.

Here's a great video that demonstrates the evils of compression.… Read more

Powerful-sounding receivers are hard to come by.

Sure, you can buy respectable-sounding models from the usual suspects--Denon, Marantz, Onkyo, Pioneer, Sony, and Yamaha--but most of the more affordable models lack real muscle. They sound acceptable at moderate volume levels, but can't fully convey home theater impact the way bigger, read "more expensive," models do.

Onkyo's new HT-RC180 ($1,049 MSRP) is THX Select2 Plus Certified and that's always a good sign. A bevy of features including an Ethernet port that enables the HT-RC180 either to receive and output audio tracks playing on your PC, or to bypass your PC and directly stream Internet radio stations such as Rhapsody and Pandora. There's five HDMI 1.3a inputs and the ability to upscale any video input to 1080p via Faroudja DCDi Cinema. You'll soon get the complete scoop in the full HT-RC180 review I did with Matthew Moskovciak.

The features are nice, but it was the HT-RC180's power and dynamic slam that wowed me.

The very first thing I noticed about the HT-RC180 was its ability to play nice and loud without strain. True, in absolute terms it probably can't play much louder than lesser receivers, but the HT-RC180 definitely sounds better playing loud. Home theater, at its best, is all about producing a more visceral experience, and the HT-RC180 does just that.… Read more

KEF's HTB2SE-W wireless subwoofer is first and foremost, a great subwoofer. The fact that it's a wireless design is icing on the cake.

The HTB2SE-W is a marriage of two existing KEF products--the HTB2 subwoofer and the Universal Wireless Kit--and I have reviewed both of them for CNET.

The subwoofer is a round design, a mere 7.7 inches thick, and yet it still manages to go deep into the bass. When it's vertically oriented, it stands 15.4 inches tall, or if you prefer, it can be horizontally oriented.

The subwoofer sports front- and rear-mounted … Read more

Every year, the major record companies produce more miserable-sounding recordings. I'm not surprised by this. The labels know most folks listen to music with iTunes or streaming audio, and sound quality is a low priority for most music listeners. My weekend poll is ample proof of that.

Lyor Cohen, CEO of recorded music for the Warner Music Group, cares about sound, at least at home. He admitted, in so many words, to being an audiophile on the pages of the September 20 New York Times Sunday magazine. The media has been alerted! It's like learning that a fast-food bigwig is a wine snob.

Cohen was Run-DMC's road manager in the 1980s, and he now works with Jay-Z, Madonna, and the Beastie Boys. In the article, Cohen said his hi-fi is his "favorite possession." The Clearaudio turntable pictured in the article is a very high-end German model that "won a gold medal at a consumer technology convention a few years ago." … Read more