What ignited your interest in the high end? Did it come from the music side or the electronics side? Actually from both sides: I come from a musician family but was not talented enough to ...

Featured in this survey are three distinct brands of cables and interconnects: the Audience Au24 SX, Dynamic Design Titania AE15, and Morrow Audio Elite Grand Reference. To be clear, these are not budget wires. They ...

I’ve encountered some great amplifiers over the years, but few have left the enduring impression that the Rotel RB-1090 did back in 2000. A looming and intimidating object, it weighed in at a spine-fracturing 100 ...

CES 2017 and its often-fractious relationship with the high end might very well be encapsulated by the Bob Dylan lyric, “It's not dark yet, but it’s gettin' there.” The decline in exhibitors at the Venetian ...

The Xeo 2 is the smallest and perhaps cleverest model in Dynaudio’s rapidly expanding universe of wireless active loudspeakers. You heard correctly—it’s a truly wireless, internally amplified system. It uses aptX Bluetooth as its wireless ...

Just the thought of France, and my brain instantly slips into sensory overload. I start recalling the delights of a Michelin-starred restaurant, a drive through Provence, the smell of a freshly baked pain au chocolat, ...

To paraphrase the famous TV commercial about a trusted brand, “When Revel talks, I listen.” Revel, a brand from the Harman Luxury Group, is a company that takes its speaker designs very seriously. Its models ...

Atma-Sphere Music Systems, Inc. has been making vacuum tube amplifiers since 1976. Headquartered in Saint Paul, MN, the company is known for its output transformerless (OTL) amplifiers. What ignited your interest in the high end? ...

For parents tuning into Top 40 radio in the 60s, hits like “White Rabbit” and “Somebody to Love” probably confirmed their worst fears. The band was the Jefferson Airplane from San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury district—the counterculture’s ...

A life lesson that we all learn: Looks can be deceiving. It’s also an axiom that applies to the high end—it’s what’s inside that counts. An amp like the Exposure 3010S2D is a case in ...

What is the first thing that comes to mind when you hear the term “flagship” loudspeaker? Its size, of course. Such speakers tend to be impressive, full-range statements—multi-driver platforms that cast long shadows in the ...

How do you follow an act like the Elac Debut B5? The pint-size, two-way compact simply crushed it with its big, hearty sound and puny $229 price tag (reviewed in Issue 260). In a rare ...

Recently upgraded, Frey 2 cable is the sweet-spot wire of Nordost’s mid-priced Norse 2 collection. In truth it’s actually only one player in a much larger bloodline that, in its complexity, begins to resemble the ...

It might be a common perception, but a subwoofer’s role isn’t limited to just adding an octave or so of bass response and going boom. Ideally it should be all about the quantity and quality ...

Elac B5/F5 Loudspeakers $229/$560 The two-hundred-buck small speaker category will never be the same again. Just spend a few minutes listening to Elac’s two-way compact and you’ll understand why so many are singing its praises. ...