A few years ago I was impressed by the mighty little Amphion Ion, an Arctic white, desktop-size mini-monitor of extraordinary transparency. This was the first CES that I was able to experience Amphion’s flagship entry, ...

Ron Sutherland says he engineered his new stop-of-the-line phonostage, The Hubble (which he calls, not entirely without justification, a “phono preamplification instrument”), by starting from a blank sheet of paper on which he listed only ...

An Important Factor in Choosing a Blu-ray Player Robert Harley I recently took delivery of Classé Audio’s ambitious new $8000 SSP-800 controller for review. I was surprised, however, that the review sample did not decode ...

News from the 2009 Consumer Electronics Show Robert Harley The 2009 Consumer Electronics Show starts this Thursday (January 8) and the TAS editorial team will be there in-force to bring you all the news. Starting ...

LP Sales Skyrocket in 2008 Robert Harley SoundScan, the music-sales tracking company, just reported that sales of LPs increased by 89% in 2008 compared with the previous year. LPs sold at the rate of 1.88 ...

I may be a day late and dollar short in recommending a holiday album for the Christmas season but here goes. Five-time Grammy Award winning folk/pop singer-songwriter Mary Chapin-Carpenter who for twenty years has been ...

It has come to me that by some fortuitous alignment of the stars I’ve ended up with a system in my new second-floor listening room that is the most transparent to sources I’ve ever had ...

To recap: The Aston Martin DBS (aka, the James Bond car) that I enjoyed on two-day loan was delivered with a Bang & Olufsen sound system, customized for the DBS cabin. It’s a 13 speaker ...

I know this will seem like a considerable departure from my usual playing field, but an extremely affordable Litz-wire interconnect from ultra-high-end Japanese manufacturer Audio Tekne, handmade by the wife of Mr. Imai (the designer ...

Name That High-End Audio Company Robert Harley The following is my editorial that appears in the February issue of The Absolute Sound. I’m sure that some company names come to mind as you read through ...

I first heard about the solid-state Soulution 710 about a year ago. This hefty (176 lbs., uncrated), 240Wpc (into 4 ohms) Swiss-made stereo amp had already won a number of prestigious awards in Europe and ...

I've been a semi-serious photographer for many years and, in the heyday of film, owned virtually every kind of camera on the market--from Sinar, Deardorf, and Toyo 8x10s to Linhof, Sinar, and Toyo 4x5s to ...

Early this month I got to visit David Steven and his son David J., Chris, Martin, Andy, Rav, and all the other wonderful folks at dCS—designers and manufacturers of the two best digital products I’ve ...

I couple weeks ago I described my visit to Doug Sax’s the Mastering Lab in Ojai, California to listen the live-to-DVD-Rom demo recordings made by engineer Bill Schnee in concert with the ultra hi-rez JCF ...

Oppo has released some information on its much-anticipated BDP-83 Blu-ray Disc player. The DSD-over-HDMI feature is an interesting twist, as is the direct conversion of DSD to analog (rather than converting DSD to PCM for ...