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 ...

What an extraordinary act of creation from designer Clayton Shaw this speaker is! While this isn’t the first speaker to use digital signal processing for its crossover, the DSP is here used for something new. ...

Integrated amplifiers continue to surprise and inspire me. Just when I think I’ve heard pretty much all there is to hear from this segment, along comes the Muse Model Two Hundred. And to look at ...

The Esoteric X-05 is a CD/SACD player that makes you want to gather every compact disc in your collection and give it another spin. And all the more so if you’re still listening to vinyl. ...

I don’t know audio history well enough to remember when the first tube/solid?state hybrids were introduced. But in the eighties I used to roll my own by using a Nova solid?state preamplifier (with apologies to ...

Vinyl can seem like a miracle. The possibility of inscribing subtle musical information out to 40kHz and beyond on a disc and replicating the disc in massive quantities by plating and then pressing plastic is ...

For those of us who enjoy concert performances on video, Blu-ray Disc is a revelation. The format delivers lossless high-resolution multichannel audio, which in itself is cause for celebration after more than ten years of ...

I first encountered the Benchmark DAC1 digital-to-analog converter two years ago at an audio show. The exhibit was in an area of the show that did not allow playback via speakers. But Benchmark had some ...

As I previously reviewed and recommended the Atma-Sphere MA-1 Silver Edition OTL for induction into the Audio Hall of Fame, it didn’t take long for the hallmark purity and neutrality of the more affordable M-60 ...

The Music Hall Maven is a stylish updating of one of audio’s most enduring components, the stereo receiver—the one-chassis solution that integrates the preamp and amp stages with an AM/FM tuner. Classic, sensible, understated. Dig ...

Dutch-based PrimaLuna has in recent years garnered much critical acclaim for the phenomenal price-to-performance ratio of its line of tube gear. The business model of European designs manufactured in China is not new per se, ...