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 ...

At The McIntosh Group (TMG) event held on the Italian island of Sardinia, corporate officers and key group managers reported an upbeat outlook for the group’s "four diamonds" collection, i.e. McIntosh Labs, Audio Research Corporation, ...

As a first-timer attending the Munich High End Show this year I experienced an audio event as high-spirited and enthusiastic as any in recent or distant memory. Returning home I half expected the 2016 Newport ...

As I was a first-timer to the Munich High End show, my veteran TAS colleagues assured me that it would be a real eye-popper. Indeed, the open, airy atrium venue known as the MOC was ...

The Atmosphere line of speaker wire and interconnects from Synergistic Research (SR) represents the brand’s latest thinking on cables. Comprising four distinct models with ascending levels of performance, Atmosphere is perhaps SR’s most ambitious offering ...

For any audio company, making the leap from the desktop to the listening room is not the simple, slam-dunk proposition it might appear to be. The goals are often at odds with each other and ...

The question is actually a very simple one: Are you an audiophile whose ears are attuned to the sound of live, unamplified acoustic music performed in a natural setting—traditionally defined in these pages as “the ...

The K-03X is Esoteric’s penultimate CD/SACD player. Similar in appearance to the significantly more costly Esoteric flagship K-01X, the K-03X represents a commanding presence. Built to a standard of quality and luxury that few players ...

Equipped with remote control, phonostage, four unbalanced RCA inputs, microprocessor control, and even a trendy front-panel headphone output, the Rogue Audio RP-5 is a handsome, full-featured preamplifier that’s thoroughly modern in every sense of the ...

Everyone hates to admit it, but first impressions count. So, call me superficial, but I became an admirer of the Spendor D7 straight out of the box. Here was a neo-classic 38" tower that was ...