In years gone by, audio people used to refer to speaker design and manufacture as a Black Art. And they had a point. Not so long ago, hand-doped drivers and special response-contouring in crossovers to ...

I can’t say that the Boulder 1021 is the best CD player in the world. I haven’t heard them all, and I have not had the opportunity to audition top competitors from Accuphase, Meridian, and ...

For someone who has lived through a decade when tube amplifiers were considered by many to have been obsoleted by transistor designs it was delicious irony to witness the renaissance of tube amplification in the ...

I listen to music almost every day. Which is to say, I hardly ever listen to CDs. Call me a Luddite but I’m married to the sound of vinyl. No, it’s not because I enjoy ...

Whenever I’m reviewing phono pickups, one of the first recordings I reach for is Doris Day’s Hooray for Hollywood, a Columbia album from the early days of stereo. An extraordinary number of pickups, even very ...

There is no greater feel-good story in audio than a company that, having fallen on hard times, manages to pull itself up by its boot straps, reorganize, and re-enter the competitive marketplace. Micromega is one ...

The BEE of NAD’s BEE series of components pays homage to its designer Bjorn Erik Edvardsen, who also designed the storied 3020 integrated amplifier that put the company on the map three decades ago. Introduced ...

Room treatments are, in my experience, mixed bags. There is a thin line between damping resonances and overdamping the entire musical presentation. The trouble is that most traps and wall panels damp or diffuse more ...

I’ve listened to a lot of audio equipment over the years, but I can count on one hand (without using all my fingers) the number of times I’ve heard something that was fool-me realistic. The ...

The Episode, the latest addition to the Reference 3A speaker lineup, may be fairly summed up as the Grand Veena’s smaller brother. Positioned between the Veena and Grand Veena it is said to offer an ...

Take a cleaver and hack a CD player into two functional halves. What you end up with is a transport and a digital-to-analog converter (DAC). Is that really necessary? Is there a good reason to ...

I’d just finished shutting off the system after a lengthy session listening to a wide range of LPs. There was The Police’s Synchronicity, a smattering of Jennifer Warnes and Holly Cole and Tom Waits, and, ...

The three phonostages represented in this survey cover a range of reasonable price points. They are basic though distinct in operation and are externally adjustable for use with the majority of cartridges. All are solid-state ...

It is the boon of vinyl that some of its most attractive qualities—musical warmth, naturalness, space and atmosphere—are often evident in even its most modest applications, the bane that its defects—pitch instability, phase anomalies, tracing ...

Have you ever fallen in love with the sound of a mid-powered amplifier, decided to move up in that manufacturer’s line to a more powerful unit, and found that the sonic magic that originally captivated ...