Within a few minutes of firing up Harbeth’s HLP-3ES2 mini-monitor, I smiled and thought, “I know this sound. It’s every bit as good as I remember.” For several years in the nineties, I used a ...

For those of us living with limited shelf space and ever-tightening budgets there is no more egalitarian audio component than the DVD/CD receiver. It offers a multitude of features, sufficient power, and construction quality consistent ...

Few system upgrades are as popular and easy as a cable swap. And cables between $500 and $1500 are in the most hotly contested price range. Joining the ranks is Argentum Acoustics—a division of the ...

The Italian high-end audio manufacturer Goldenote is based in Florence, perhaps the world’s most beautiful city as well as the birthplace of the Renaissance. That beauty and history is reflected in the company’s S-1 Signature ...

AC power-conditioning specialist Running Springs Audio has quietly established itself in many first-rate retailers and upper-end systems over the past eight years. Although it has not received as much attention as some others in the ...

Just a couple of issues ago I reviewed the AAS Gabriel/DaVinci turntable with DaVinci’s Grandezza tonearm (which, out of pure sloth, I’ve been persistently misspel-ling as “Grandeeza”). Part of that package included the moving-coil cartridge ...

Even in the best of times emotion plays a major part in five-figure buying decisions; in today’s economy passion ultimately has to rule. If you are a genuine audiophile, you buy because what you buy ...

Few components strike fear in an audiophile’s lumbar region like the heavyweight electronics from Krell. Its current lineup includes the Evolution series of electronics and LAT speakers. And no one will forget the Master Reference ...

Entry-level may mean different things to different manufacturers, but at C-J it definitely does not denote a major sonic penalty relative to its ultra-high-end products. Cost containment may be implemented through circuit simplification, judicious passive ...

As with many things seen from afar, an audio critic’s life appears enviable, even romantic. All we do is sit back, wait for FedEx or UPS to drop off the next cool toy, sit back ...

Sony Electronics’ ES (Elevated Standard) products are the crème de la crème of its line—a showcase for high-quality construction, premium parts, and Sony’s razzle-dazzle features and technologies. Sharing space at the summit of the ES ...

In a world of transformative technologies, no recent development has been as rewarding to me as the synergistic combination of high-definition video, satellite television, and the digital video recorder (DVR). Those technologies by themselves are ...

Clearaudio Nano Phono, Musical Surroundings Phonomena II, Graham Slee Era Gold MK V and Era Gold Reflex and Elevator EXP The three phonostages represented in this survey cover a range of reasonable price points. They ...

Getting started in the high end means making some tough decisions. And they don’t come any tougher than choosing between a compact and a floorstanding speaker in the $1k range. There was a day when ...

Let me begin this review with the punch line. The new Pass XP20 is one of the best linestage preamps around, and the XA160.5 power amp one of the best Class A power amps I’ve ...