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May 2nd: Target stands at The Audiophile Store |
We've been busy adding new products to The Audiophile Store, our popular on-line and catalog shopping venue. As usual, the products at the store are ones we would recommend to our best friends. The latest: the Target MR24 speaker stand, as well as the slightly taller MR28. Long-time audiophiles will remember this hefty four-pillar stand as the R-4, which was once made in England and cost something like $800 a pair. It's down to $299 a pair now, for reasons that go beyond the country of manufacture. It now comes in a flat pack, much cheaper to ship, yet easy to assemble.The four pillars are hollow, and you add mass by pouring in kiln-dried sand, or whatever magic damping material you may prefer. But be careful, because once you do that they won't be so easy to move around anymore. You can find the two Target stands on our Miscellaneous Accessories page. There you'll also see what we consider to be the ultimate loudspeaker stand, the Foundation. It looks much like the target, but is made from the densest, most immovable material of any stand we know of. The price is more than four times higher, but it would be our choice for the very best speakers. That "miscellaneous" page, by the way, could almost be dubbed the "support" page. It also includes the two wall-mounted equipment tables from Target, the innovative Smarter Speaker Support for off-wall mounting, Superspikes, Tenderfeet, and the ever useful Audio-Tak. The only reason we haven't renamed it: our best-selling Super Antenna (for FM and TV) is also there. |
May 1st: Linking your computer to your stereo |
| It's widely believed that your future hi-fi audio source is not a CD player but your computer. We've written extensively about using a hard disc as a repository for music...and we don't mean lossy compressed music either. But the cheap sound card in your computer is not what will give you the best of computer-stored music. In UHF No. 82, we reviewed a Blue Circle product called the Thingee. Simple, inexpensive, and effective.  This neat device has its own (surprisingly good) DAC, two digital outputs (coaxial and balanced), and even a headphone jack. Just plug it into the USB connector of your computer, and in your computer's preference or setup panel, choose the Thingee for audio output.We gave the Thingee a warm review, and Blue Circle offered it to us for The Audiophile Store. We've accepted. The Thingee is just C$189.95, and is available now over on our digital page. High quality digital cables are available from the same page. |
April 22nd: Who misses vinyl? |
Apparently the members (and hangers-on, like us) of the Consumer Electronics Association do. CEA ran an Internet poll asking the question...well, you can see it in the illustration.
Even among these presumably savvy purveyors of the latest in electronic gadgets, the appeal of vinyl still resonates. Of course, CEA does say that the poll is not scientific, etc. |
April 19th: Turntables added to The Audiophile Boutique |
It was several years ago that we added a new division to our (very small) empire. We have of course The Audiophile Store, a section we set up 20 years ago to offer recordings and accessories (it began with one label). The Audiophile Boutique has a slightly different mission: it offers actual audio components, brand new but at clearance prices. That is where you can find, for example, the outstanding amplifiers and preamplifiers from Van den Hul. Now the boutique has a couple of turntables. They bear the Goldring brand, but they are designed and built by Rega. There are two of them, starting at $399. Yes, that's a complete price, with a Rega tone arm and the Goldring Elektra cartridge, whose own list price is $117 if you buy it by itself. The pages include links to two past UHF reviews, when the turntables cost far more.Although The Audiophile Boutique is a distinct division, it shares the shopping cart the other sections of UHF uses, so you can mix and match an order: with a turntable and some LPs to play on it, for example. |
April 16th: Preparing the next issue |
We may as well admit it. We've been rather distracted of late by what befell us...or what fell on us: in early March, a major storm flattened our large garage and storage space. Yes, on top of a car and a few tens of thousands of dollars of stock. We got most of it out all right, and we may even have the car back by tomorrow. The structure is partly rebuilt, but there is some uncertainty concerning the outside. Did we mention that Château Hi-Fi is 160 years old and is in a historic area? We'll be sharing more (sad) pictures with you, but in the meantime we are busy laying out the next issue of UHF.Among the products to be reviewed will be the Harbeth HL5 speakers shown at right. They caused a bit of a buzz at the Montreal Festival, and we're looking forward to listening to them in our Omega reference system. Among other products liened up for review are the low-cost ($1500 each) CD player and amp from Simaudio. We'll have two products to help you get music intact from a computer hard disc to the audio components you've chosen so carefully. And we'll listen again to Aurum's impressive CDP player/preamplifier, which now has a couple of optional additions. One is a phono input, and the other is a headphone amplifier. That will come in handy, since we are also lending an ear to two expensive headphones. They're meant for such devices as iPods, but the maker claims far more ambitious specs. Should be fun. |
April 9th: Yet another HDTV technology? |
At the moment it's the liquid crystal display (LCD) that is selling big time. The LCD doesn't offer all the color and luminosity range you might wish for, but it's cheap, at least in smaller sizes. For upscale HDTV, there's plasma, and the best of those are really good. But what else is there? There's DLP, there's D-ILA, and (if only in our dreams) there's SED. But now Mitsubishi, not known as a major player in HDTV, is planning to launch another technology: the laser screen. This will be essentially a DLP screen, much like the ones it and Samsung build, but with a key difference. Instead of a tungsten bulb and a spinning color wheel, the display will use three lasers, in red, green and blue. The company says the screen will have brighter whites, blacker blacks, and be able to reproduce some 90% of the color gamut. That last figure is so much better than anything you can get with other technologies that you'd figure it has to be the future. The new technology will use two-thirds less energy than a plasma screen. What's not to like?Still, there are some skeptics. Red lasers are off-the-shelf components, but green and blue lasers are another matter (the laser used for Blu-ray and the late HD DVD is actually blue-violet). It's believed the green and blue are produced by a form of frequency doubling -- essentially using the harmonics of the main color rather than the color itself. The performance from a frequency-doubled laser may not be as good as claimed. Besides, aren't lasers dangerous for the eye? True, the screen surface will diffuse the light, but won't that cause the interference pattern known as speckling? We shall see. in the meantime, Mitsubishi has definitely grabbed our interest. |
April 5th: Covering the Montreal show |
We're spending four days (ending tomorrow) at Montreal's Festival Son et Image. You can drop by our daily coverage of the show by clicking here. We've always said that it's not a Montreal show if it doesn't snow, and...guess what! This is what we saw out the window Friday afternoon!But not to worry, it quickly melted, and sunshine is predicted for the days ahead. No, we don't have a room at the show, and we haven't had for three years now. But we do have a virtual room on the Internet. It will open through mid-April, and we're told there are bargains to be had. Come by and see us. |
April 4th: The top music store is now virtual |
| It was just last June that Apple's iTunes music store was the number three music retailer in the US. Number one was, as you might expect, Wal-Mart. No more, according to the NPD Group's MusicWatch project. The iTunes store has vaulted to first place, with 19% of music sales. Wal-Mart is now second, a position it is not used to occupying. Best Buy is third, and Amazon and Target share fourth spot. Here's the complete list, leaked by the Ars Technica Web site.  MusicWatch tracks the number of sales, not their dollar value. It also considers the sale of a single song at iTunes or other virtual retailer to be equivalent to one twelfth of an album. Whatever quibbles we might have with the MusicWatch methodology, we acknowledge that the trend is clear: the sale of music over the Internet is growing, and it is clearly the future. We have no problem with that, and indeed we predicted this in some detail some 15 years ago. But what troubled us then, and still does, is that on-line music sales consist almost entirely of compressed music. People don't know what they're missing. Our job -- and your assignment too should you wish to accept it -- is to let them know. |
April 1st: Montreal show opens Friday |
Yes, it's that time again, when audiophiles (and videophiles too) converge on Montreal for the large high end and video show called Le Festival Son et Image. The convergence will include us. As usual, we will be covering the show in detail right on our Web site. What's different this year? Well, check the Festival logo. Stereophile isn't holding its own show this year, and so is sponsoring this one. For all the other details, you can already check out our Festival preview. Daily reports, with words and pictures, will be posted at the end of each day.
UPDATE: As in previous years we have a virtual room (not) at the show. It's already open, with bargains in CDs, LPs and accessories, plus virtual visits to two of our reference systems. The room remains open through April 20th. Special prices may not be combined with other offers. And some items are available in limited quantities, with no rain checks available. Visit the Virtual Room by clicking here. |
March 31st: Hi-def via downloads? Yeah, right! |
| It was just over a month ago that Toshiba and its HD DVD partners cried "uncle," and the spoils of victory went to Blu-ray. Or did they? A number of observers weren't so sure. We all knew that the high-definition format war had gone on too long, hurting both formats. Was the winner, Sony's Blu-ray, going to die smiling on the field of battle, like William the Conqueror? Was the way now clear for downloadable video to be the real winner? In fact no, and events of the past few days have made that plain. There just isn't room for everyone to start downloading films even in imitation high-definition (which is the only option at the moment). As it is, the use of BitTorrent and other P2P (peer-to-peer) systems is squeezing the Internet, and the companies running the pipelines are squeezing back.  The story began in the US, where the huge Internet service provider Comcast has been "shaping" its bandwidth. That means it gives priority to certain services (such as services it markets itself, if you believe the critics) while throttling back service to customers who download large files. "Throttling back" sounds like slowing it down, though some irate customers claim it actually means "accidentally" dropping the connection altogether.Comcast says it will stop doing that by the end of the year, but check the action in Canada. Rogers is going beyond merely "shaping" its bandwidth, to limit service to those whom it considers bandwidth hogs. Customers with "unlimited" service plans will be limited after all, to a maximum of 95 Gb downloads a month even with the most expensive plan. Unlimited?. It seems you're unlimited as to how long you're hooked up, just as long as you don't actually use the Internet. In the meantime Bell, another major ISP, is using traffic shaping and makes no bones about it. But Bell resells service to individual ISPs, which have been claiming connection speeds that Bell will refuse to sustain. They're staming mad. We'll be talking about this more as the story develops, but consider what brought this on. A lot of people are using the Net to download highly compressed, audio and video. So, do you really figure you can push the 30 Gb of a true high-definition movie through the increasingly squeezed pipeline? We figure Blu-ray has nothing to fear. |
March 22nd: Free PDF version of UHF 83 |
 It's the usual: though we have paid versions of the new issue of UHF Magazine, either print or electronic, we also have a free version. It's a PDF, and looks just like the complete version, except that not all of the articles are quite complete.As usual, it's interactive. Click on a title in the table of contents, and you are whisked to the article itself. Click on an ad, and if you are connected to the Internet you'll find yourself on the company Web site. To get it, go over to The Reading Room (whose page is shown here), and click on the thumbnail of the issue 83 cover. You can, of course, get the full PDF version from MagZee for $4.30 (anywhere in the world, all taxes included), or you can get the printed version by air mail from our order page. Copies will be on their way to subscribers Monday. |
March 21st: The electronic version of UHF 83 now available |
 The full electronic version of UHF 83 is now available to subscribers at MagZee (if you have a current subscription, you should have received an e-mail reminder). You can also buy the electronic issue, or subscribe. A single issue costs $4.30 (Canadian), with all taxes, if any, included. Viewing an issue requires Acrobat Reader (on either Windows or Mac OS X), plus a plug-in also available from MagZee.We are working on the free version of the issue, which as usual will be not quite complete, but will nonetheless have lots to read in it. At the start of the week, the renewal reminders will be in the mail, but you don't have to wait. You can renew right on line. Or of course you can subscribe. Last but hardly least, you can order the print issue, which will be mailed right out to you. As usual, there's no mailing charge. The distributor for Canada and the US got the issue Thursday, and copies will be on their way to regional distributors and then newsstands Monday. The issues for subscribers to the print issue will also go out Monday. |
March 20th: UHF 83 published, and the saga of the sagging garage |
 Actually it isn't just sagging. The roof fell in on it. The first victim is a Nissan Altima, which is probably mortally wounded (we'll know next week), but the rather large building is more than a garage, it is also one of UHF's storage areas. Some stock seems to have survived, but that is also something we will see about next week.In the meantime, UHF 83 arrived this morning, and is being prepared for mailing to subscribers. The electronic issue from MagZee should be on line tonight, and the free (but incomplete) PDF edition should arrive before the end of the long weekend. Speaking of the long weekend, we will be taking the whole four days off. Monday morning the electricians will be cutting off power to Château Hi-Fi in order to re-route the electrical entrance temporarily -- at the moment it goes through the garage wall. And on Wednesday, when the demolition crew arrives, there may be some interruptions in our telephone lines, brief we hope. We have more pictures, enough to depress us, but really depressing is that the insurance company has a clever exclusion clause (did you know that a garage is not a "dependence"?), and won't be paying. But then it's only money, right? |
March 17th: International shipping rates going up |
 It's been a long, long time since air mail was "five cents for the first ounce." Our mailing and shipping costs keep rising, but none as quickly as what Canada Post calls "international shipping rates," which is to say rates for countries other than Canada and the United States.There have been several cases recently in which we have shipped an inexpensive product to Europe or Latin America, and actually lost money. Hence the change, effective immediately. We are keeping the same calculated rates, based on a percentage of the product value, but there is now a floor price of $6 (Canadian). The floor price does not apply in Canada or the US, and it applies only to products from The Audiophile Store. It does not apply to subscriptions, magazines or books, none of which we charge shipping for. And of course it will affect only small orders. We hope you'll continue to consider our catalog to be a treasure house of products for the audiophile. |
March 13th: B&W goes mobile |
 Buying a new car? We mean a really upscale car. If you have your eye on a Jag XKR, for instance, you can get it equipped with what are billed as high end speakers from a familiar company: Bower & Wilkins. The engineers at B&W have worked with Ford's Jaguar division to figure out just the right place for 14 speakers.Is that a lot? Isn't it strange to see a high end audio company getting into car audio. The answers are respectively possibly and no. Anyone remember the James Bond Aston Martin with the Linn 12.1 channel system aboard? The 14 speakers include four metal-dome tweeters, nine Kevlar-diaphragm woofer and mid/bass units, including a solo front-center and rear-surround pair, and a single, rear-mounted subwoofer. Each amplifier channel is tailored to its respective speaker with digital signal processing. Did we forget to mention the 440 watts of amplifier power? Let's see, 440 watts divided by 12 volts equals 36.7 amperes. Ouch! |
March 12th: Target equipment tables at The Audiophile Store |
 Another interesting pair of products over at The Audiophile Store: Target wall tables. We first installed one of these when the magazine was young, and we quickly bought two more. We don't know of any other solution to vibration affecting your equipment. It's the perfect place for your turntable, CD player, preamp, etc. Black MDF shelves sitting on spikes.You can see then over at our Miscellaneous Accessories page. |
March 12th: New cables at The Audiophile Store |
This grew out of another of those blind test sessions for UHF No. 83: we listened to a new pair of cables from Atlas, called Mavros. This is the new top of the line. We had been disappointed by some expensive cables before, and not just those of Atlas, but not this time. Indeed, we liked the Mavros biwire-ready speaker cable so much we added it to our Alpha system. There is also a Mavros interconnect, which we have added too: it is between our phono stage and preamp in our Omega system.
Of course we do have access to Atlas cables, and we have added the two Mavros products to the cable page of our Audiophile Store. On that page you can also download the review in PDF form. |
March 10th: UHF No. 83 in production, roof falls in |
 All right, let's not get excited. Usually if someone says the roof fell in, it's a figurative reference to a diagnosis of terminal illness, or the bailiffs coming to cart away the furniture. No, in this case you should take it literally.In Montreal we just had another of those "storms of the century" (good thing it's still a young century!), with winds that could garner a ticket on any of our highways, and the roof did fall in. It didn't fall on our main premises, Château Hi-Fi, but on the garage and storage area next to it. At this point no door will open, and it might be dangerous to go in anyway. The building inspectors come tomorrow, and... Oh yes, the magazine. We reserved time for this morning, and the pages were sent (electronically, we're happy to say) to Beauceville, where our printing plant is. Release date is scheduled for the 20th. Anybody want to buy a slightly used garage? Sigh! |
March 7th: About those Pioneer plasma screens… |
 Who makes the best plasma screens? Pioneer says it does, and certainly the plasma screens with the blackest blacks. The company says on its site:
We started from scratch and dedicated ourselves to making a truly revolutionary display that reproduces what the artist originally intended. And that meant, above all, achieving the blackest blacks imaginable. Sure, except that there is also an announcement that Pioneer is getting out of the plasma business, or at least the plasma-making business. Says the press release: We have judged that maintaining the cost competitiveness of plasma display panels at projected sales volumes will be difficult going forward. Accordingly, we have decided to terminate in-house plasma display panel production and to procure these panels externally... Sources say Panasonic and Sharp are the likely sources. Or (say the cynics in us) the lowest bidder. You figure? |
February 29th: Audio Research purchased |
 The Minnesota company was set up by William Z. Johnson in 1970, and became well known for upscale amplifiers and other audio products, many (though not all) using tubes. Johnson is going into semi-retirement for health reasons, and his company has been purchased.By whom? The Chinese? That keeps happening all over. But no, in this case it’s the Italians. You've probably never heard of Quadrivio SGR, not unless you have extensive dealings with European private equity firms. However the company is not quite new to hi-fi, since its previous acquisitions included Sonus Faber, the maker of definitely upscale loudspeakers. The company is not expected to move to Milan, however. Terry Dorn, who has been with the company for 22 years, replaces Johnson as president. |
February 27th: Listening sessions done |
We're just a little later than planned, but not much, and we have now completed our listening sessions for UHF No. 83. It's all over but the writing (no small thing, to be sure). Have them fill up the midnight oil! We ended the sessions with the Moon LP 5.3 phono stage, and frankly it was a pretty good way to end up. That's it here, from the back with the hood up. This $1500 unit is the more expensive of Simaudio's two phono preamps, and it is excellent. It is actually silent, something few phono preamps can claim, and its resolution of our set of LPs, ranging from classical to jazz to rock, bordered on perfection. We'll have the entire story in the new issue, of course.We also spent some time with the Castle In about 10 days time, then, the issue will be in production. |
February 26th: Blu-ray for $17K |
What's this? It's the new Eidos 20 BD player, and its $16,900 price tag is explained by the fact that it is (a) from Switzerland, and (b) from Goldmund, a company not known for haunting mass market stores. Does anything else account for the price? Goldmund says its "AC-Curator" power supply circuit dramatically improves picture and sound stability and dynamics, and that the "Mechanical Grounding" construction removes from the player mechanism spurious vibrations blurring the video signal and increasing jitter. In addition, the player uses the Goldmund "Magnetic Damper," a device said to lower reading errors.But here's the real bummer: the Eidos 20 BD will play both conventional DVDs and CDs, but not as well as the best players, which is to say other Goldmund players. The Engadget blog characterizes Goldmund products as being "for people with more money than sense.” Oh, harsh! |
February 26th: Upgrading your tone arm cable |
Your tone arm may have a detachable cable, but what do you replace it with? We suggest the Atlas Quadstar Phono Box, which has just been added to our Audiophile Store. If your arm has a five-pin male DIN jack at the bottom, as many do, just unplug the existing cable, and substitute this Phono Box, which uses a gorgeous gold DIN plug and the acclaimed Quadstar wiring (the very best wire compact enough for a DIN connector). Then plug in the cable you want, or try more than one.There are two versions of the Phono Box, with a straight connector (shown here), or an angled connector for turntables with shallow plinths. Both cost $248. The Quadstar Phono Box is (of course) on our analog page. |
February 24th:The cover of the next issue on line |
| We began the photography work for the next issue on Thursday, and the final photos will be taken tomorrow. And now we've made up the cover for the next issue. You can see it in miniature here, and you can see it larger over at The Reading Room, and see the table of contents as well. Photographing the Raysonic CD128, which is featured on the cover, turned out to be tougher than it looked. The CD area and the vacuum tubes are illuminated by blue LEDs, and those emit light at frequencies that the eye can't see but the camera can. The result is that photos look "wrong" unless you work really hard on making the image match what you see. Oh...the background? That's one of the moons of Saturn, called Enceladus. It’s one of the many wonderful images sent back to us by the Cassini robot spacecraft. We thought that it and the player seemed to complement each other. |
February 19th: Into the listening sessions |
We finally got going on the listening sessions for the next issue of UHF, last week, and we continued this week. The Raysonic CD128 was one of the pieces we have just spent time with. This $1900 chunk of brushed metal is, frankly, a looker, but what we heard wasn't too shabby either. But we have to complain about something, so have you noticed that the green screen clashes with the blue diodes around the tubes and the controls?In most of Canada the sales tax on the Raysonic is about $247. For a third of that tax bill, we had another player, which decodes HDCD, and can show movies without embarassing itself too. We'll tell you the whole story in the next issue. Last week we did a followup on last issue's review of the Audioprism power filter, and we wondered whether substituting a better power cable might help. Yes, but we never dreamed how much it would help. And we tried two new upscale cables in the Mavros line from Atlas. One of them was so good that, when we were through, we left it connected to our Alpha system. More details shortly! |
February 16th: HD DVD -- it's over! |
 Ever since the day before CES, in early January, it's looked as though the game was up for the HD DVD format. The bad news has kept on piling up over the past few days: the Netflix DVD rental chain dropped HD DVD in favor of Blu-ray, Best Buy said it would henceforth steer customers to Blu-ray, and Wal-Mart joined in the chorus too. And Microsoft, the biggest backer of HD DVD, which includes players in its XBox 360 game consoles, says it is considering Blu-ray instead.Now the Japanese TV network NHK reports that Toshiba is stopping production of the players it invented, and a source within the company confirms it. We feel the pain of those who put their hearts and souls into the development of what was a pretty credible system of high definition video, but the end of the war can mean only good news. Another year would have killed both systems, and the winner then would have been the likes of iTunes, and its sale and rental of "high definition" movies. To repeat what you may already know, downloadable movies are throttled down in size so they can fit into the pipeline. Making hi-def movies for download means both raising and lowering the definition at the same time. We enjoy the irony, but you can't eat irony. So it will be Blu-ray. Full speed ahead, then. We want better players, audio processors that can actually handle uncompressed sound, and a heck of a lot more movies. When do we want 'em? Now! UPDATE: Well, it's Monday, and Toshiba claims it is re-evaluating its strategies, etc. But it can't help noticing that its stock soared this morning, on the assumption that the HD DVD albatross is off its neck. UPDATE: On Tuesday Toshiba made it official: HD DVD player distribution ends in March. The Blu-ray Disc Association says Toshiba is "more than welcome" to apply for a Blu-ray licence. When you've got the knife in, might as well twist it! |
February 16th: Another phono cartridge at The Audiophile Store |
For some weeks our Audiophile Store has been offering the London Reference phono cartridge. It was, you may recall, on the cover of UHF No. 81, and we were so thrilled with what it allowed us to hear that we broke the piggy bank open and bought it. But it sells for a large chunk of money, and it is of course suitable only for high-precision turntables and tone arms. It is not exactly what most audiophiles are hoping to find...or perhaps not right away. So we've added a new and more affordable cartridge.Before the London Reference, we were using a Goldring Excel on our Linn, and we still use one on the Audiomeca turntable in our Alpha room. It is is discontinued, alas, and so we have turned to its near twin. The Goldring Elite is a detuned version of the Excel, but it is still a low-ouput (0.5 mV) MC cartridge, and it still has a line contact stylus, to play more of the groove, including the parts never played, perhaps, by the previous owner of those second-hand LPs. It's affordable too, at $745. You can see it over on our analog page. |