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. ...

Hiding beneath almost every high-end component is one of its most unsung heroes: footers. Their importance to audio performance is well recognized, yet with the exception of a few manufacturers (typically high up in the ...

Diamond is the flagship cable in the growing WyWires lineup. Visually, Diamond projects an understated elegance with textured black-mesh jacketing over its silverized underlayer. At each end, its signal conductors are collected in polished carbon-fiber ...

The slender profile of Audience Ohno interconnects and speaker cables runs counter to perceived audiophile gospel that high-quality wires must be thick and heavy, with dreadlock twists of conductors encased within unyielding jacketing. Audience turns ...

When Pass Labs introduced its first-ever integrated amplifier, the INT-150 in 2009, the debut was hailed by many, myself included, as a watershed moment for a sector often derided as “down-market.” Reviewing the amp in ...

What ignited your interest in the high end? Did it come from the music side or the electronics side? I developed a love of music at about age 7. I had a small radio next ...

Don’t count the compact disc player out just yet, folks. The CD format may have lost ground to computer-based audio, but as I’ve been positing for the last few issues, the venerable CD drive will ...