The Audience ClairAudient Loudspeaker: A 20-Year Dream Realized Robert Harley On a recent visit to Southern California, I stopped in to see Audience, maker of a highly regarded line of AC power-conditioner and signal cables. ...

The Best Stereo System I’ve Ever Heard Robert Harley I’ve heard quite a number of very ambitious playback systems over the years, but none as good as the system I experienced last week in Rockport, ...

It’s been a while since I’ve laid my hands on some new Rotel products. Fact is, I was beginning to wonder what was up since the line was getting a little long in the tooth ...

(Note: Following is the technical "sidebar" for my review of Vienna Acoustics' "The Music" loudspeaker that will appear in the September issue of The Absolute Sound. I also nominated The Music for a 2009 Golden ...

I can’t resist ending this essay with a little photo gallery of some of the breathtakingly beautiful things I saw during my stay in Japan. The first printed above is a photo of the gate ...

One of the first things Osamu Ikeda asked me when we met—and it wasn’t the first time that the question of age, mine or theirs, was brought up by these Japanese craftsmen—was, “How old do ...

Not all of Mr. Imai’s Audio Tekne systems cost small fortunes, although, outside of his tweaks and incredibly reasonably priced cables and interconnects, they do tend to be pricey, as handcrafted works of applied art ...

All three of the gentlemen I’m going to introduce you to are master craftsmen of the highest reputation in Japan. With the possible exception of Mr. Ikeda, whose Fidelity Research products were very well known ...

The 2009 TAS Editors’ Choice Awards—How We Choose Robert Harley We’re putting together the 2009 Editors’ Choice Awards, the comprehensive feature in which we list every product in every category that we recommend. At about ...

Before I left for Japan I knew that Audio Tekne products would prove to be extraordinary; after all, I’ve been living with Mr. Imai’s $12k TEA-2000 phonostage, his $3k ALT-8905 AC line transformer (into which ...

Before I talk about the three master craftsmen whom I had the pleasure of visiting on my just-completed trip to Japan, I’d like to share my first (and I hope not last) impressions of the ...

The smallest entry in PMC’s eight model i Series, the two-way DB1i is also affectionately known as the “dinky box”. I’ve heard a great many petite speakers over the years from the original Proac Tablettes, ...

Perspective can be a rare commodity in a world where the latest “next best thing” always seems to grab the headlines. I wrote about the Synergistic Research Tesla Cables back in Issue 171 and was ...

You guys won’t be hearing from me regularly on the Forum threads for a short while (which may come as a great relief to some). On Friday I’m going to Tokyo with Tangram Audio’s Yujean ...

Electrocompaniet, based in Norway, has been producing audiophile products since 1973, but it is now making a concerted push to capture a significant share of the US high-end market. As part of its strategy to ...