This year we limited ourselves to two Golden Ear awards apiece. I’m not going to tell you which two products I picked—for that you’ll have to wait for Issue 193 of TAS—but I am going ...

Inside the YG Acoustics Factory Robert Harley YG Acoustics is a relatively young company (founded in 2002) that has made quite a splash in the upper-end of the loudspeaker market. The firm has attracted some ...

Alright, I’m coming clean. Believe it or not sometimes I just like my audio & video simple. I mean “one box” simple. I don’t want to pull another interconnect, power on three or four components ...

It is my sad duty to report the shocking news that my friend David Steven, Managing Director of dCS, died suddenly and unexpectedly on Saturday February 21, 2009. I spent several days with David and ...

As many of you already know, my musical tastes are wide-ranging. Pop and rock, classical (the occasional opera aria), a smattering of jazz, a dash of musical theater. As a kid growing up in the ...

I received this letter from Koetsu's US distributor regarding the perils of buying Koetsu cartridges from "gray market" resellers. KOETSU BUYER BEWARE Recently, Koetsu has received numerous inquiries about so-called “new” and “cheap” Koetsu phono ...

A $10k Electronic Device for a Penny? Robert Harley Back in 1979, Walter Becker and Donald Fagan (Steely Dan) wanted to store drum sounds in solid-state memory. Their long-time engineer, the great Roger Nichols, set ...

For Magico lovers and the just plain curious, here's a little photo journal covering the delivery of the fabulous Magico M5 loudspeakers. 1) Here they are in their cartons on the delivery truck--about five hundred ...

Taking the Guesswork out of Phonostage Gain Robert Harley The March issue of TAS includes a sidebar on matching a phono cartridge output level to phonostage gain. To summarize, if the phonostage has insufficient gain ...

I’ve been listening to an exceptional pair of integrated amplifiers over the last few months and I thought I’d share a couple early impressions. The Marantz PM-11S2 and the ATC SIA2-150 are not small units. ...

I returned to the Sumiko suite in the Venetian on two different days this year and was rewarded with the opportunity to hear two speakers that this well-regarded distributor/importer will be pinning much of its ...

Digital Audio Jitter and Image Stabilizer Binoculars Robert Harley I recently bought a pair of Canon Image Stabilizer binoculars for wildlife viewing. Image Stabilizer technology, widely used in digital cameras and camcorders, optically eliminates the ...

This CES brought a whole slew of affordable new integrated amps, preamps, and power amps from established players as well as from less-familiar brands. The biggest news in affordable electronics at CES was undoubtedly the ...

Is Balanced Connection Better than Unbalanced? I received this e-mail from a reader, and thought I'd share his question and my answer. Editor: I am hoping you can clarify or comment on balanced vs unbalanced ...

Several noteworthy phonostages made their CES debuts. Pass Labs introduced its new high-performance phonostage, the SCP-1 (less than $4000), which has up to 76 dB of gain. Unlike the two-chassis Xono, which it replaces, the ...