Early this month I got to visit David Steven and his son David J., Chris, Martin, Andy, Rav, and all the other wonderful folks at dCS—designers and manufacturers of the two best digital products I’ve ...

I couple weeks ago I described my visit to Doug Sax’s the Mastering Lab in Ojai, California to listen the live-to-DVD-Rom demo recordings made by engineer Bill Schnee in concert with the ultra hi-rez JCF ...

Oppo has released some information on its much-anticipated BDP-83 Blu-ray Disc player. The DSD-over-HDMI feature is an interesting twist, as is the direct conversion of DSD to analog (rather than converting DSD to PCM for ...

Meridian Audio, the venerable British firm at the forefront of digital-audio technology, announced today that it has acquired music-server manufacturer Sooloos for an undisclosed sum. Sooloos’ music servers will continue to be sold under the ...

Man, I’ve been a jet-settin’ fool this year. First I went off to Germany in the spring, to make a quick stop at the high-end show in Munich and to take a factory tour of ...

A few weeks ago I spent an afternoon with engineers Bill Schnee and Doug Sax at The Mastering Lab, Sax's 5.1-channel facility in Ojai, California. I was there ostensibly to listen and to offer feedback ...

During a tour of Chinese audio-equipment factories last year, I visited the home of “The World’s Number One Audiophile,” Mr. Ji Hui Li. In addition to owning perhaps $3 million dollars worth of high-end gear ...

December 3 - China's booming economy and rise as an exporting giantare having an increasingly important effect on the audio industry. The influence is two-fold. First, Chinese audio factories are turning out high-quality products in ...

December 10 - "You have to see it with your own eyes to believe it." So I was told by more than one person during the GuangZhou audio show about the hi-fi systemâno, make that ...

I just got back from a ten-day overseas jaunt that took me, first, to beautiful, richly historic Istanbul, Turkey, then to Amsterdan in The Netherlands, and finally to Breda in The Netherlands. (Those of you ...

Removing the Sword in the Stone: MSB Technology's iLink iPod Station The "sword in the stone"âan apparently insurmountable problemâof the iPod for audiophiles is the inability to access the digital bitstream so that we can ...

There's Hope for Our Youth After All I was having dinner with Bob Carver in Austin, Texas,the other night when a funny thing happened. As you probably know, Bob Carver is the founder of Carver, ...

The Absolute Sound- Insider with Robert Harley Welcome to the first installment of my weekly high-end audio blog, where I'll be bringing you information, observations, and, I hope, insights into high-end audio. I'll also share ...

Esoteric P-03 Universal Disc Transport & D-03 Digital-to-Analog Converter I've just returned from a visit to the U.S. headquarters of TEAC, parent company of the Esoteric brand of high-end disc players. I was there researching ...

Is the $149 Oppo DV-970 Universal Disc Player a Giant-Killer? Dec 12 - There's been much buzz about Oppo's bargain disc player being competitive with much more expensive units. There's no question regarding the DV-970's ...