Man, I’ve been a jet-settin’ fool this year. First I went off to Germany in the spring, to make a quick stop at the high-end show in Munich and to take a factory tour of MBL’s offices in Berlin and its factory in Eberswalde (a picturesque little town just outside of Berlin) in advance of reviewing the fantastic MBL 101 X-Treme loudspeakers. (For pictures taken at the MBL factory, see my review of the 101 X-Tremes in Issue 189).
In October, I traveled to fabled Istanbul, Turkey, to sightsee and to hear the $300k Kharma Grand Exquisites (which happen to be set up in three different homes in Istanbul), then on to beautiful Amsterdam and colorful Breda, where Charles van Oosterum, the CEO and chief engineer of Kharma, has his offices and factories. (For pictures of cabinets being finished at the high-end furniture factory outside of Breda that makes the enclosures for Kharma speakers, see the thread http://www.avguide.com/forums/kharma-grand-exquisite-loudspeaker.)Though I would like to, I don’t know whether it is physically possible for me to review Kharma’s flagship Grand Exquisites, as each speaker side weighs half-a-ton and doesn’t break down into barely manageable pieces (like the MBL 101 X-Treme does) for hauling upstairs; however, I did get to audition the Grand Exquisites at length in Istanbul and in Breda, in four different rooms, with top-rank electronics and top-rank digital and analog sources and my own records and CDs, and it is (as I noted in my last blog) one of the small few speakers I would nominate for my pantheon.
Now, at the tail end of November, I’m headed to Europe again—this time to England to visit dCS. In Issue 183 I reviewed dCS’s fabulous $67k Scarlatti CD/SACD player—the most lifelike digital source I’ve heard—which was also named one of TAS’s 2008 Product of the Year in Issue 189. Soon after I reviewed the Scarlatti stack, dCS announced a Scarlatti Upconverter that can be used with the hard-drive-based digital sources. At the same time, David Steven of dCS invited me to visit dCS’s facilities in Cambridge. By the time you read this my wife and I will be winging our ways to Old Blimey, to see and hear what dCS hath wrought.
Before this spring I’d never traveled to Europe (or, save for a brief step into Canada when I was a kid, outside the U.S.). While TAS reviewers are often invited abroad to make “factory visits,” I’ve stayed home. Not this year. Maybe it’s because I’m getting older, but I decided that if I didn’t take the opportunity now—with companies whose products I’ve reviewed on several occasions and know well—it might not come around again. I will, of course, take pictures in Cambridge (and in London) and post them or links to them on our site and will write up what I see and hear at dCS’s facilities for my next few blogs. I also hope to review the Scarlatti Upconverter in the near future.
By Jonathan Valin
I’ve been a creative writer for most of life. Throughout the 80s and 90s, I wrote eleven novels and many stories—some of which were nominated for (and won) prizes, one of which was made into a not-very-good movie by Paramount, and all of which are still available hardbound and via download on Amazon. At the same time I taught creative writing at a couple of universities and worked brief stints in Hollywood. It looked as if teaching and writing more novels, stories, reviews, and scripts was going to be my life. Then HP called me up out of the blue, and everything changed. I’ve told this story several times, but it’s worth repeating because the second half of my life hinged on it. I’d been an audiophile since I was in my mid-teens, and did all the things a young audiophile did back then, buying what I could afford (mainly on the used market), hanging with audiophile friends almost exclusively, and poring over J. Gordon Holt’s Stereophile and Harry Pearson’s Absolute Sound. Come the early 90s, I took a year and a half off from writing my next novel and, music lover that I was, researched and wrote a book (now out of print) about my favorite classical records on the RCA label. Somehow Harry found out about that book (The RCA Bible), got my phone number (which was unlisted, so to this day I don’t know how he unearthed it), and called. Since I’d been reading him since I was a kid, I was shocked. “I feel like I’m talking to God,” I told him. “No,” said he, in that deep rumbling voice of his, “God is talking to you.” I laughed, of course. But in a way it worked out to be true, since from almost that moment forward I’ve devoted my life to writing about audio and music—first for Harry at TAS, then for Fi (the magazine I founded alongside Wayne Garcia), and in the new millennium at TAS again, when HP hired me back after Fi folded. It’s been an odd and, for the most part, serendipitous career, in which things have simply come my way, like Harry’s phone call, without me planning for them. For better and worse I’ve just gone with them on instinct and my talent to spin words, which is as close to being musical as I come.
More articles from this editor
