Alongside the $40,000 Walker Black Diamond record player, the $18,000 TW Acustic Raven AC-3 turntable with $4300 Graham Phantom tonearm is the best source component I’ve auditioned—and far and away the most voluptuous sounding. Indeed, ...

A.J. Conti, founder of Basis Audio, designer of its turntables and arms, and passionate enthusiast about all things vinyl, belongs to an increasingly rare breed of audio designer who hates mystique?mongering and is appalled at ...

Floating the platter of a turntable on a cushion of air has been an approach used by some designers of high-performance turntables to reduce bearing friction, improve speed stability and isolation, and lower the noise ...

I first heard Alon Wolf ’s ground-breaking two-way standmounted loudspeaker, the Magico Mini, at the January 2006 CES, where it made a sensational impression on Robert Harley, Wayne Garica, Harry Pearson, and me. I rave-reviewed ...

Magico founder Alon Wolf made an off-hand comment to me that cut to the core of how he approaches loudspeaker design. We were setting up the V3 in my listening room when he remarked that ...

Back in the late 90s I reviewed the Simaudio Celeste PW- 5000 integrated amplifier. It was my first experience with a component from Simaudio, the Canadian firm established in 1980. It was a terrific little ...

The way I see it AC line conditioning is a key building block for any high-end audio system. However, it would likely be the last item on my checklist of purchases—not because it matters least, ...

Epos M16 It’s hard to not be excited by the Epos M16. For fifteen-hundredninety- five bucks you get an English-designed, Chinese-built speaker possessing truly special performance qualities. The M16 can whisper yet still be clearly ...

Most reports of a great-sounding demonstration at CES or CEDIA are followed by the qualifier “… for a show,” as in: “The XYZ sounded fabulous… for a show.” That’s because it’s rare to hear truly ...

The Gem2 is Revel’s Ultima2 “flex” speaker. Whereas most loudspeakers are designed for a single use, the compact Revel Gem2 can play many roles. Like Transformers for audiophiles, just tell it what you want it ...

You may have noticed that I’ve been reviewing a lot of two-way loudspeakers lately—the stand-mounted Focal JMlab Electra 1007Be (Issue 176), the floorstanding planar-magnetic Magnepan MG12 and MMG (Issue 177), and, now, the stand-mounted GamuT ...

In our Class D amplifier survey in Issue 166, some of my colleagues were unconvinced that the current crop of Class D was ready to take on the Class AB Old Guard in a head-tohead. ...

Stop by the Manley Labs Web site and you’ll see why meeting EveAnna Manley in the flesh at CES proved to be one of the highlights of the Vegas show for me that year. While ...

The C-100 control amplifier is part of PS Audio’s Trio line of small-footprint electronics, which also includes the P-200 preamplifier and the A-100, a Class D amplifier that Barry Willis praised in Issue 170. A ...

The NHT Xd’s are “digital” speakers; they do crossover functions using digital signal processing (DSP). The Xd’s are far from being the first speakers that are digital in this sense—models from Philips, Quadrature, and, on ...