The 32-year-old Canadian firm Simaudio is one of those few companies with a decades-long track record of marketing nothing but great-sounding and beautifully made products at competitive prices. Although Simaudio isn't an entry-level brand by ...

Not many high-end audio marques have survived to observe their 50th anniversary. Bryston, a Canadian company with product lines in both the professional and consumer markets, celebrated fifty years of existence in 2012. With an ...

Kuzma Stabi S$2075eliteavdist.com The Stabi S is Kuzma’s least expensive turntable, but you wouldn’t know it to listen to the thing. Blessed with deep background silences, the Stabi S makes a great complement to the ...

“A bunch of the boys were whooping it up at the Malamute Saloon.” All of the claims of huge breakthroughs over the years do bring to mind this opening line of Robert Service’s famous poem. ...

In recent years Oppo Digital has followed a simple recipe for success: Just build universal disc players that offer greater versatility, more audiophile-friendly features, and more sensible pricing than the competition does, and then give ...

ExaSound Audio Design is a Canadian company that designs and domestically manufactures two DACs: an e18 multichannel model and the recently released $2499 two- channel e20, the subject of this review. So just what distinguishes ...

PrimaLuna ProLogue 5$1259primaluna-usa.com The 36Wpc vacuum-tubepowered ProLogue 5 is more authoritative than its rating would lead you to expect, and offers a warm, rich presentation, yet really does not sound “tubey” in any traditional sense, ...

Hard though it is to believe, it is now twenty years since the first units for the digital correction of speakers in rooms began to appear. I recall that when I first wrote about the ...

Reviewers constantly see gear come and go, but, as you can imagine, we regret the parting of some pieces more than others. Roughly two years ago Esoteric had to pry its K-03 player from my ...

Z-Infinity Audio was founded in 2001 by Zsolt Mathe with the goal of offering perfectionist tube gear that is designed, tested, and hand-assembled in the U.S. Zsolt, who is of Hungarian descent, has designed audio ...

The highest praise I can give the Lamm ML2.2 is that it doesn’t sound like a single-ended-triode amplifier. That may seem like an odd way to start what you’ll soon see is a rave review ...

I realize that Esoteric is best known for its transports, which it sells as full-fledged components as well as raw mechanisms that, in turn, form the guts of other manufacturers’ products. However, since my review ...

For many people, the term “high-end audio” equates to “high-priced audio,” but I fondly recall a time when things were not this way. TAS founder Harry Pearson once remarked that (I am paraphrasing, here), “The ...

Vandersteen 2Ce Signature II$2395 The Vandersteen 2 is the classic three-way floorstander, delivering excellent top-to-bottom balance and an engaging musicality. Moreover, Vandersteen’s baffle-less, time-and-phasecoherent design can suggest the spatial focus usually heard with planars. It ...

Over a year ago at this writing, I first heard about Von Schweikert Audio’s new VR-44 Aktive on a Von Schweikert Audio-sponsored forum on the Audio Circle Web site, where it was announced that the ...