The new Cambridge Audio 840C CD player left me shaking my head in wonderment at how Cambridge can sell this much CD player for $1499. The 840C is packed with advanced features, sophisticated technologies, and ...

“Holy Cow!” I exclaimed out loud while opening the outer shipping box. (Actually, what I said was more like a holy expletive for manure, but I’m not supposed to write that.) And no wonder the ...

Once I watched an Olympic play-off between two spectacular gymnasts. They were both superb—skilled, swift, lithe. Mastery of form and flesh fairly radiated from both. In that scenario, one had to win. In the play-off ...

British companies like Meridian and Arcam have used their extensive experience in highperformance audio to springboard into leadership positions in home theater electronics—a transition tougher to pull off than one might think. Whereas it is ...

Bluenote is an Italian highend company that makes a sleek-looking and complete line of components, from turntables, arms, and cartridges to speaker systems. The company was born in 1985 as a consortium of musicians, engineers, ...

In the past two decades, a slow evolution has taken place in audio, as top-notch designers come more and more to understand the nature of the beasts they are working with. Today it is not ...

Although it’s been more than three years since I first reviewed the Ayre CX-7, I’ll bet a slice of the best cherry pie you’ve ever tasted that you won’t need a side-by-side comparison against the ...

The resurgent market for CDreceivers suggests a couple of things to me. People want greatsounding audio in rooms other than dedicated listening environments. They also want small-footprint audiophilequality gear that is proportional to the space ...

Many years ago, I purchased a Creek integrated amplifier as a birthday present for my wife to use as the centerpiece in an affordable, easy-to-use, yet engaging second system for our house. Although she’d complained ...

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 ...

Anticipated Product Introduction Dec 13 - As I write this, the first examples of Arcam's new DV139 universal player are hitting the market. Arcam's marketing director, Geoff Meads, visited me last week with the $2995 ...

HD DVD and Blu-ray Disc as High-Res Music Formats? Dec 30 - All the talk about HD DVD and Blu-ray Disc has centered on their video capabilities and the unfortunate war between the two competing ...

Upcoming in TAS Jan 3 - One of the great mysteries of digital audio (to me, at least) is how CD transport-mechanism quality affects the sound. I'm not talking about the differences between transports as ...

July 5 - Our special feature on the state of digital audio (Issue 174) includes a retrospective in honor of the 25th anniversary of the Compact Disc's US launch. My editorial in that issue laments ...

I recently received an e-mail asking me to weigh in on the controversy over whether lossless data-compression systems such as FLAC, Meridian's MLP (the basis for Dolby TrueHD), and Windows Media Audio (WMA) Lossless degrade ...