UHF No 70 (Net).indd - Ultra High Fidelity Magazine

No. 70 

$4.99 

ISSN 0847-1851 

Canadian Publication Sales 

Product Agreement 

No. 40065638 

BEYOND THE CD: How SACD won the war. 

We review two SACD players and adopt 

one of them. And we dare to pit SACD 

against analog! 

OTHER REVIEWS: Loudspeakers from 

Equation, Reference 3a, Wilson Benesch 

and muRata. Plus a limited edition amp 

from Simaudio. 

AS WELL AS: Using an iPod as a fullfidelity 

music source, the video screens of 

tomorrow, and Montréal 2004. 

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Audiophile CDs 

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DVD and SACD

Issue No. 70 

Cover story: The ultimate SACD (and everything else) 

player, the Linn Unidisk 1.1. Behind it is the very 

bright Rho Ophiuchi star (the blue one), and the M4 

global cluster (purplish, at lower right). 

Cinema 

Future screens 19 

Can you buy the perfect video screen? Perhaps 

not yet, but UHF looks at what’s here…and what’s 

coming. 

Features 

How SACD Won the War 22 

Or, to put it another way, how DVD-Audio blew it 

big time 

Montreal 2004 26 

by Gerard Rejskind 

UHF exhibits, and we take a look around too 

Touring with Witnesses 28 

by Albert Simon 

Albert plays sherpa to a couple of audiophiles at this 

biggest of electronics shows for consumers 

The Listening Room 

Linn Unidisk 1.1 31 

Is this the source component audiophiles have been 

waiting for all this time? It looks that way! 

Shanling SCD-T200 36 

It plays SACDs. It plays CDs too. It could even be 

the player you’ve saved up for. 

Equation 25 Speakers 39 

They’re good enough to have been contenders as 

a reference, and you know what? They very nearly 

made it. 

Reference 3a Royal Virtuoso 42 

A renewed version of an old favorite. And we do 

mean favorite! 

Wilson Benesch Curve 45 

Diamonds are made from carbon. So are humans 

if you add water. And so are the cabinets of these 

speakers. 

muRata Super Tweeters 49 

Speakers that take up where your ears leave off 

Simaudio Moon W-5LE Power Amp 50 

Specially built for you and 249 other lucky people 

Goldring GR1 Turntable 52 

It’s hard to fi nd a good phono cartridge at this 

price. This one comes with a turntable and arm. 

Apple iPod 54 

Can it also be a poor man’s music server? 

Software 

Gershwin Forever! 56 

by Reine Lessard 

Life is short, art is long. Gershwin’s life and legacy 

are the proof 

Record Reviews 62 

by Reine Lessard and Gerard Rejskind 

Departments 

Editorial 2 

Feedback 5 

Free Advice 7 

Classifi ed Ads 66 

Gossip & News 69 

State of the Art 72 

ULTRA HIGH FIDELITY Magazine 1

UHF Magazine No. 70 was published in July, 2004. All 

contents are copyright 2004 by Broadcast Canada. They 

may not be reproduced or transmitted in any form, or by any 

means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, 

recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, 

without written permission from the publisher. 

EDITORIAL & SUBSCRIPTION OFFICE: 

Broadcast Canada 

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World Wide Web: http://www.uhfmag.com 

PUBLISHER & EDITOR: Gerard Rejskind 

ASSOCIATE EDITOR: Reine Lessard 

EDITORIAL: Paul Bergman, Reine Lessard, Albert Simon 

PHOTOGRAPHY: Albert Simon 

ADVERTISING SALES: 

Québec: Reine Lessard (450) 651-5720 

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Ultra High Fidelity Magazine invites contributions. Though 

all reasonable care will be taken of materials submitted, we 

cannot be responsible for their damage or loss, however 

caused. Materials will be returned only if a stamped selfaddressed 

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Ultra High Fidelity Magazine is completely independent of 

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2 ULTRA HIGH FIDELITY Magazine 

Editorial 

Changes to the reference systems 

I suppose every magazine talks about “reference systems,” though in many 

cases the role of such a system is a mystery, since it isn’t really used for most 

reviews. In our case, all reviews are done using one of the reference systems. 

And we change them as little as we can get away with, because a reference 

that changes all the time is scarcely a reference at all. 

As of this issue we have several changes, more than we had had for a long 

time, and indeed more than we had intended. 

First, we have finally selected a new reference loudspeaker for our Alpha 

system. The decision was a long time coming, yet the final choice was swift and 

unanimous. The new reference is the Living Voice Avatar OBX-R, which we 

had reviewed in issue No. 67. It has the ingredients we had sought: reasonable 

size, very extended and clean response, very high resolution, high efficiency, 

and electrical characteristics that won't assassinate small amplifiers. It will be 

an excellent working tool, and incidentally it will be a lot of fun to listen to. 

We knew the speaker change was coming, but the reviews in our last issue 

pretty much mandated another change. The Audiomat Phono-1.5 is so good 

that we decided to acquire it. We still use vinyl for a number of our reviews, and 

the superb resolution of the Phono-1.5 will enable us to do our job better. 

There is more. For a number of months we have been telling readers that 

the war between DVD-Audio and SACD is headed for a final conclusion, with 

SACD the almost certain winner (see How SACD Won the War in this issue). 

Didn’t that mean we would finally need an SACD player ourselves? Sure, but 

the acquisitions budget was a little lean, and we wondered whether we could 

economize a bit. Perhaps we could say that whatever we bought was an interim 

reference, with a definitive one to come later as the state of the art advances. 

We had done that nearly two decades ago with Compact Disc (a Teac was our 

first purchase, with a Spectral player arriving later). 

Hah! Linn’s Unidisk 1.1 player was scheduled for this issue, and just over 24 

hours after we unpacked our sample, we knew we could make no other choice. 

Some manufacturers will say we were wrong not to wait, and we should have 

bought their player. They will have their chance to demonstrate what chumps 

we are, because we now have a great point of comparison. 

And there’s one more change. We have long used a Simaudio Moon W-5 

amplifier in our Omega system. We’ve heard for ourselves the improvements 

Simaudio has made to its flagship amp, and we were thinking that possibly 

we should get one of the new ones, perhaps not right away, but… 

Then came an opportunity. Simaudio announced the W-5LE, a premium 

“limited edition” version numbered from 001 to 250. We will be using number 

016 in all future tests. It’s reviewed in this issue. 

By the way, our colleague Albert has long used a W-5 that was among the 

first ones made. He now listens through number 024. 

Finally…a price rise 

I may as well let you know in advance. A single issue of UHF has cost $4.99 

for a long time (and for years before that it was $4.95…don’t ask!). In early 

2005, the price will rise. 

That means the price of a subscription will go up too. But with the cost of 

both paper and postage rising soi sharply, there’s no choice. 

All I can promise you is value. I hope you’ll agree.

DOG-EARS ARE FOR DOGS! 

Some audiophiles snap up every single issue of UHF, yet they hesitate to subscribe. 

Why? They’re afraid of getting copies that are dog-eared 

and torn. 

So here’s a strange fact: dog-eared copies may 

be awaiting them at the local newsstand. 

It makes sense if you think about it. Where do copies 

sit around unprotected? On the newsstand. Where 

do other people leaf through them before you arrive? 

At the newsstand. Where do they stick on little labels 

you can’t even peel off? Surprise! 

At a lot of newsstands, they do exactly that! 

What you want is a perfect copy. And the perfect copy is the one in your 

mailbox. No tears or bends, because each issue is protected by a sealed plastic 

envelope. With the address label on the envelope, not on the magazine. 

Of course, you’ll have to make a certain sacrifice. 

Are you willing to pay, oh, maybe 23% less for the privilege of having a perfect 

copy? And be protected (for a while) against the coming price rise? 

And are you willing to qualify for a discount on one or both of our original books 

on hi-fi (see the offer on the other side of this page)? 

You are? Then perhaps the time has come. JUST SUBSCRIBE 

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The books that explain… 

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Five dollars off each of these two books if you subscribe or renew at the same time 

The UHF Guide costs $14.95 (Canada) plus 7% GST (15% in NB, NS, NF), US$19.95 (USA) CAN$25 (elsewhere). 

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See ordering information on the previous page. 

A $5 discount applies on either book, or each, when the order is placed at the same time as a subscription, a subscription renewal, or a subscription 

extension (if you subscribe, use the form on the other side of this page. No need to fill in the information a second time). 

PLUS: 

Finally, all of Gerard Rejskind’s State 

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YES! Send me a copy of State of the Art . 

It costs just $18.95 (Canada) plus 7% GST (15% in NB, NS, NF), US$18.95 (USA) 

CAN$32 (elsewhere, including air mail)

I have been an avid subscriber to 

UHF since 1993 (the issue had a review 

of the Castle Chester and Totem Model 

One), and I have enjoyed every bit of 

your magazine. 

Now that you have a home theatre 

setup, why not review more home theatre 

speakers, specifi cally those offered 

by Axiom Audio? Your readers might 

benefi t from such a review of this Canadian 

speaker company for two reasons: 

1) They are a Canadian company, eh! 

2) Being mail order, if the sound of these 

speakers are any good, readers who have 

limited budget but would like to go home 

theatre can get there without breaking 

the bank. 

Renante Barroga 

ST-LAURENT, QC 

I was hoping, and I am sure many 

readers are as well, that when you test the 

iPod in the next issue, that you will also 

try out the new “lossless compression” 

offered by iTunes version 4.5. Sounds 

interesting. Just a thought. 

Paul Hirvinen 

THUNDER BAY, ON 

Apple lent us an iPod for only one month, 

and it was shipped back two days before Apple 

announced its lossless compression. That 

would double the iPod’s capacity. 

I just bought an iPod and have been 

extremely impressed by its ease of operation 

and versatility. I haven’t assessed its 

overall sound quality yet, and I will be 

very interested in your coming review 

from that perspective. 

The one thing that really infuriates 

me, though, is that we Canadians can’t 

download from the iTunes music store. 

Can you address in your article 

when (if?) we will ever be able to use 

the iTunes download facility? Are there 

other alternatives, with a broad sampling 

of artists, that are legal in Canada? 

Feedback 


Longueuil, Québec, Canada J4K 5J4 

uhfmail@uhfmag.com 

If not, perhaps you could provide 

a CRTC contact address so we can all 

send letters asking why Americans can 

download songs from Canadian artists, 

who permit their music to be downloaded, 

but we cannot. I just can’t believe 

the CRTC can be so pig-headed about 

universal access to music. (Perhaps 

you could offer advice on the best way 

to secure a US credit card and mailing 

address!) 

Craig McDougall 

CALGARY, AB 

The CRTC has no jurisdiction in this, 

Craig. The problem seems to be getting the 

many worldwide divisions of the big record 

companies, many of which appear to have a 

pathological death wish, on side. We would 

add that we have trouble getting excited over 

the possibility of paying a buck for a single 

song with nine tenths of the information 

missing. We would like to see Apple offering 

the alternative of full-resolution downloading. 

One record company, Magnatunes 

(www.magnatunes.com) already does. 

I eagerly await your review of the 

Apple iPod. I have been looking in 

various stores for a chance to audition 

one myself, but only computer stores 

seem to carry them. They escort you to 

their iPod display and allow you to listen 

to their MP3 files through powered 

computer speakers — no thanks! I need 

to listen to WAV fi les that are well done 

through a good audio system. 

I produce a lot of WAV fi les from 

LPs and tapes, which I usually edit with 

small amount of EQ, band extrapolation 

and/or normalizing before burning 

them to CD. Rather than run 40 feet of 

interconnect from my computer to the 

main listening room for auditioning, 

I have been burning “trial and error” 

CDs in order to come up with my fi nal 

mix. I know for certain that over the 

last two years I have scrapped over 50 

such CDs. The iPod seems to be a good 

alternative to this wasteful method, and 

even though it may not pay for itself in 

saved CD blanks it should be a lot more 

convenient. But like you, I need to know 

what it sounds like before I decide. 

Feeding the analog signal through a 

mini jack is one of my concerns. Another 

is the quality of its analog playback 

circuit. I imagine that it is just fi ne for 

background music, but most of my music 

from LPs will be for dedicated listening 

and I want to make sure I get it right. 

The iPod has to give me the same quality 

I get from my main CD playback system. 

Perhaps I am expecting too much. 

Lloyd Marshall 

EDSON, AB 

Well, you can check our fi ndings in this 

issue, Lloyd. The quality of what you hear 

will depend not only on the iPod but also on 

the quality of the A/D converter in your 

computer. In some cases it can be surprisingly 

good. 

I have been reading your magazine 

for about two years now, and have yet 

to see a better one. I live in the US, and 

sadly there is no stereo magazine here 

(or even in the UK, for I do read some 

of them) that can even come close to 

yours. 

1) In UHF No. 68, you wrote an article 

on testing several different speaker 

cables, and I think you mentioned 

something like the Nordost Valhalla is 

close to the Wireworld Eclipse. Is this 

correct? This cable costs around fi ve 

times the price of the Eclipse, but on the 

other hand I believe in your judgement. 

Does this mean Nordost spend too much 

on advertising? 

2) Have you, or will you ever, review 

the following components: Simaudio 

Moon I-5 Limited Edition, JMLab 

Micro Utopia BE, YBA Intégré Passion, 

Naim CDS3, and NAIT5i/CD5i? 

3) Will you ever compile all the technical 

articles (like the ones about power, 

acoustics, stereo sound, etc), and also 

all the music articles by Reine? These 

would be an excellent addition to your 

collection of highly valuable books you 

have published so far. 

Ernes Ho 

SAN JOSE, CA 

ULTRA HIGH FIDELITY Magazine 5 

Feedback

Feedback 

Note that our evaluation was based on 

Wireworld’s own Comparator Disc, not on 

a side-by-side comparison. The YBA Intégré 

Passion was on the cover of issue No. 64. 

As for the books, Reine says she appreciates 

the request! 

Even if I hadn’t been trying to make 

myself useful in the Charisma room 

much of the time this year, I would still 

have missed a lot of the Montreal show. 

You fi lled it in for me. Thanks a million 

for the terrifi c online report. 

Bravo for doing it in the fi rst place, 

bravo for posting PDQ, bravo for the 

great pics, bravo for making it all readable 

and accessible even for relative audio 

novices. Another triumph. 

Toby Earp 

MONTRÉAL, QC 

A f ter read i ng t he Mont rea l 

Show report, I would like to clarify 

information concerning Synthesis 

products (page http://www.uhfmag. 

com/Montreal2004/day3.html ) I believe 

it’s an Italian company rather than a 

German one. 

Jacek Rymut 

Poland 

Quite right. Glad you’re keeping an eye 

on us! 

Please fi nd my renewal cheque for 

13 more issues. While other magazines 

are interesting in their own particular 

ways, yours is the one that never ceases 

to entertain. Even my wife (who loves her 

music too) is getting into it: “Anything 

from from those guys guys in Montreal today?” is 

a familiar refrain refrain around our house after 

checking the mailbox every day. 

While I understand their angst, I 

have to chuckle over the legion of readers 

who would gladly sacrifi ce some of your 

precious sleep for more frequent issues. 

That would remove one of the things 

that make you who you are (and, I feel, 

one aspect of your success). Different 

doesn’t quite explain it, and I hesitate to 

use the word quirky, but there’s some- something 

to be said for a little…all right, 

unpredictable quirkiness. The anticipation 

of an upcoming issue’s arrival is 

similar in some ways to the search for a 

new equipment upgrade, the hunting and 


waiting is sometimes just as rewarding 

as the getting. 

Regular monthly publishing would 

remove some of that quirkiness and 

hence, some of the fun of your magazine. 

And isn’t it supposed to be fun? 

Keith Ferguson 

VICTORIA, BC 

I don’t understand your frequency 

response graphs for speakers. They seem 

very strange to me in that the fl uctuations 

are tremendous. For example the 

Reference 3A De Capo-i: according to 

your plot, there is a 5 dB dip around 

70 Hz and another 5 dB dip at approximately. 

5000 Hz. These plots do not 

at all correspond to what I am used to 

seeing in other publications. 

I am assuming that your test conditions 

differ form other testers. However, 

the results plotted on your frequency 

response graphs are so “jagged” that I do 

not see how one could learn much about 

the speaker’s quality. 

I should point out that my technical 

knowledge of audio phenomena and electronics 

is very limited. I am stating this 

from the strict point of view of an audio 

consumer (defi nition of an audiophile?) 

who is accustomed to looking at graphs 

without understanding the underlying 

concepts. 

André Nickell 

BEACONSFIELD, QC 

We have some misgivings about them 

too, André. At one time we stuck to text 

descriptions of frequency response. Later, we 

began using graphed versions of the results, 

and just recently we have been using actual 

instruments graphs. These graphs are the the 

literal truth, and in a real room a speaker 

really will have these variations. Earlier 

graphs may have been more helpful, however, 

because each frequency point showed the average 

response over a third of an octave, thus 

smoothing out the chaotic variations. 

There is no standardized method for 

measuring speaker response, and manufacturers 

mostly select a method that will show 

speakers in their best light. That’s not what 

we do, but we have perhaps gone too far the 

other way. 

There’s a copy waiting for you… 

More and more new subscribers to UHF discover the magazine the way you 

are right now, by reading the PDF copy on the Internet. But you’ve probably 

noticed that the PDF is incomplete. Get a subscription, or a copy of this issue, 

by ordering on line: https://www.uhfmag.com/Order.html. 

After years of reading UHF, and 

being an octogenarian (with hearing 

better than that of most 35-year olds) 

I had better speak up before it is too 

late! 

Reine, your contributions to UHF 

add a touch of class and humanity to a 

fi ne technical (though at times occult) 

periodical. I particularly enjoy your 

articles on various humanistic subjects. 

The Music Critics (UHF No. 69) brought 

to mind a couple of my favorite critical 

jibes. 

Referring to a rather heavy-duty 

Mimi, Shaw remarked that Mimi 

appeared to suffer not so much from 

consumption as from overconsumption. 

After the fi rst performance of the 

brahms Fourth, a critic (his name escapes 

me) remarked, “It is certainly no joke 

that this dead tired symphony should 

have to run the gauntlet of four movements.” 

I wonder why I tend to associate 

Brahms — is it his distinctively close 

string harmony? — with Victorian 

drawing rooms cloaked in heavy, deep 

brown velvet drapes, aspidistras and 

mantelpieces edged with hanging (again, 

brown velvet) bobbles. Maybe I once saw 

a picture of him in such a setting. 

Tell the boys I can explain electrical 

phenomena, but I never had much faith 

in the occult. Keep them earthbound. 

Roy A. Woodland 

BARRIE, ON 

P.S. You will note that this comes to you 

by by e-mail (envelope mail, that is). 

Some 15 years after giving them up, 

I recently renewed my subscription to 

Car and Driver. To my amazement, I 

found their test drives now include a very 

short summary which takes the form of 

“Highs,” “Highs,” “Lows” and “Verdict,” besides a 

separate separate column called “Counterpoint”!! 

The latter presents the alternate opinion 

of …three columnists! 

Say, who started it first, you or 

them? 

J-P Létourneau 

CAP ROUGE, QC 

Them. We have yet to borrow an idea 

from another audio magazine, but we do 

steal regularly from other magazines past 

and present that we consider outstanding 

in their respective fi elds. Car and Driver 

is one of them.

Free Advice 


Longueuil, Québec, Canada J4K 5J4 

uhfmail@uhfmag.com 

I am having a hard time getting an 

unbiased and straight answer and hope you 

can help. 

I am searching for a new CD player, 

and I am still on the fence about SACD. 

Currently I have the MSB Link III DAC 

and will be getting the upsampling board. 

What will I get by spending more money on 

a CD player that the DAC does not correct 

or improve? 

The rest of my system is the Jolida 502a 

integrated amp and Triangle Titus 202 

speakers. So you can tell I am on a budget and 

would really like to save on the CD player. 

Jerry Kottom 

GARVIN, MN 

It sounds to us as though you’ll really 

want to plan ahead, Jerry. We’ve also 

been on the fence about SACD, because 

the war of standards reminded us and 

everyone else of the battle between Beta 

and VHS. But we now think SACD is the 

“VHS” of the new drama, and if that’s 

so you’ll want an SACD player sooner 

or later. We can say right off that we 

are not sold on upsampling, which can’t 

truly add to the resolution of a recording, 

though it can easily muck up what 

is already there. You didn’t mention 

what transport you are using with your 

MSB converter, but if the combination is 

working quite well you may want to take 

the money for the upsampling card and 

put it into an SACD fund. 

There are SACD players that can do 

wonders with conventional CDs as well 

(see our review of the Shanling player in 

this issue), but they are not legion, and 

they are not cheap. Our advice on this 

may yet change (and we hope it does), 

but it’s possible that you’ll want to make 

room for your CD player even after the 

new super player arrives. 

I realize I have written to you guys 

recently, but I don’t know who else can 

answer my question reliably. 

My system consists of a Linn Sondek/ 

Syrinx/Supex 900 Super and an Alchemist 

Nexus (brought to my attention thanks to 

your review) into a Rotel 980BX preamplifi 

er. My amplifi er is by a local manufacturer, 

an EL34-based amp I consider to be a good 

value at $1300. My speakers are heavilymodifi 

ed Mission 770’s. 

The places I feel my system is lacking are 

bass extension (it bothers me but I live in a 

basement apartment, so I can’t go nuts), 

imaging ( I believe my room is at fault, as 

I’ve heard these speakers throw up a nice 

image in a different room and system), 

and, most troubling, the fact that while 

most music sounds satisfying, massed violins 

sound shrill and “dry,” especially from the 

turntable. 

I suspect the main culprits to be the 

cartridge and preamplifi er, so I’ve purchased 

a Benz Micro MC Gold, but haven’t yet 

installed it. (I am thinking of reselling it to 

buy something with a line contact stylus.) 

1) Do you think the Benz Micro is a step 

in the right direction? 2) Where should my 

next thousand bucks go? 

These problems are quite troubling for 

me, and have usurped my signifi cant other 

as my primary focus in life. Please help me 

with my troubles and let me go back to being 

the happy-go-lucky gent milady was so taken 

with all those years ago!! 

Perry Howell 

THORNHILL, ON 

We rush to the rescue, Perry! 

The Benz Micro may be a good 

choice, though as you note it doesn’t 

have a line contact stylus. Certainly your 

Supex is old enough to tell stories of days 

gone by to its grandchildren. However 

the symptoms you’ve noted — insuffi 

cient bass and shrill, dry top end — are 

the typical result of an arm that is 

adjusted too high, so that the vertical 

tracking angle of the cartridge is exces- 

sive. That means the cartridge is canted 

forward too much. It should be canted 

forward slightly, because most LPs are 

cut at an angle of 20 to 22 degrees, not 

the 15 degrees they’re supposed to be cut 

at. Too small an angle makes the bass 

loose and tubby, and the treble murky. 

An error in either direction mucks up 

the focus, too. 

We recommend setting this up by 

ear, using a pure stereo audiophile LP, 

such as those of Opus 3 or Proprius. Go 

for best focus on one of these, and you’ll 

have a good average setting for all LPs. 

Your other problems will be solved at the 

same time. 

Our compliments to milady. May 

your castle be fi lled with good music. 

I am new to high end hi-fi and would like 

to buy a tube amplifi er. I have listened to the 

Jadis Orchestra Reference integrated tube 

amplifi er with Jadis Orchestra speakers. I 

would like to receive your advice for matching 

speakers to the Jadis Orchestra Reference, 

and if you have any comments on the Jadis 

speakers also. 

Please also comment about the tone 

controls in the amplifier. As you may 

know, now they have the Lux version of the 

same amplifi er in Canada without the tone 

controls. Which one would you suggest? 

Semih Alsaid 

ISTANBUL, Turkey 

We are not fond of tone controls. 

We all have recordings that can use a 

little tonal adjustment, but the chances 

that the “correction” from tone controls 

will exactly compensate for a recording 

problem are remote indeed. What’s 

more, tone controls take away from 

performance even when they are set to 

neutral. An amplifi er without them is to 

be preferred. 

Jadis loudspeakers are not distributed 

in North America, and we have never 

heard them. The Jadis amplifi er, which 

we reviewed in UHF No. 58, will work 

well with most loudspeakers of reasonable 

sensitivity, say 89 dB or more. We 

don’t know what speakers are available 

in Istanbul, of course. Among possible 

brands you could listen to are Epos, 

Linn, Spendor, Naim, Ruark, Thiel, 

Vandersteen, Piega, Epos and Totem. 

Those are only a start. 


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Free Advice 

From your experience with CDs, is 

there a particular label (FIM, Audioquest, 

Chesky, etc.) or CD format ( XRCD, 

XRCD2, HDCD, SACD, Hybrid SACD, 

DVD-A) that excels from the Red Book CD 

or LP records? 

Do CDs recorded in digital (DDD) 

sound better than those recorded in analog 

(ADD or AAD), or are these a matter of 

quality in the mastering process? If a disc has 

been transferred to SACD from an analog 

recording, how is this superior to an LP? 

Jerome Chionglo 

MARKHAM, ON 

SACD is defi nitely more than a marketing 

tool, Jerome. Or at least it is when 

the original recording was made with 

something more than 16 bits and 44,100 

samples per second. We mention this 

because some mainstream labels have 

re-released Red Book CDs as SACDs 

by the simple expedient of upsampling… 

making up new data and charging you 

extra for it. And we thought Enron and 

Worldcom were isolated instances! 

Though DVD-A is also way superior 


to Red Book CD, we believe that SACD 

has won the war. Pretty much all recent 

SACDs are hybrid, with a Red Book layer 

readable by conventional CD players. 

The presence of that layer doesn’t seem 

to harm anything. Any SACD player will 

let you hear the increased dynamics and 

“liveliness” of well-recorded discs, but 

getting full musical satisfaction means 

picking your player carefully…and, alas, 

paying way more than the minimum 

cost. 

It is a (fairly) well kept secret that 

a lot of music producers long ago 

returned to analog recording for their 

masters, believing that analog, at the 

very least, wouldn’t leave them with a 

pounding headache after a long day’s 

work. An SACD made from an analog 

original can sound better than the LP 

because it won’t have the well-known 

(and acknowledged) defects inherent 

in cutting and playing back an analog 

record. 

Which leaves the question of what 

we call “transitional technologies,” 

such as HDCD and XRCD. Both were 

intended to tide us over the sometimes 

painful age of CD by maximizing the 

medium, and in the former case sneaking 

extra information past the medium’s 

limited resolution. We like them both, 

and we are especially fond of HDCD. 

However that technology now belongs 

to Microsoft, not traditionally known as 

a high end audio champion. The future 

is spelled S-A-C-D. 

Here is one that I am sure you’ve been 

asked before: the lifespan of a laser. We know 

that a cartridge’s stylus can last for a very 

long time if it is properly aligned and kept 

free of debris. The trouble with cartridges 

is that the metal (forgot the term) where 

the stylus is mounted can become weak with 

time. I need to know the approximate lifespan 

of a laser on a good quality machine like a 

Karrik. In the past we kept hearing numbers 

like typically 1000 hours, but shouldn’t the 

same principle from cartridges apply to lasers 

as well? 

Nick Lakoumentas 

MONTRÉAL, QC 

Yes, we’ve been asked that before, 

Nick, but it was a long time ago, and the 

answer has changed. 

In the early days of digital, the estimate 

was that a laser pickup might have 

a life of 2000 hours, which meant an 

expensive repair after playing less than a 

couple of thousand discs. In slightly later 

mass market machines it could mean a 

new player, since pickup were often glued 

in place permanently. We don’t know 

whether that was a good estimate, since 

in many a player the mechanism will 

fail before the laser does. We’ve seen 

estimates of as much as 20,000 hours, 

which we presume is a guess (though 

it sounds more convincing than saying 

“really, really, really long”). 

In practice, the lifespan may depend 

in part on how “hot” the laser is run. 

The laser in a car player may run quite 

hot, since it must perform under diffi cult 

conditions, whereas a high end player 

may have its pickup set up for longer 

life. 

Phono pickups also used to be rated 

at an estimated lifespan of 2000 hours, 

meaning that it would take that much 

play to cause perceptible wear of the 

diamond stylus. Modern stylii have a

much longer life. The resilient mount of 

the cantilever, which may be rubber or 

some synthetic material, can harden with 

age, however. Metal fatigue (the word 

you were searching for) can cause the 

cantilever to break, too, but in practice 

most stylii are wiped out by accidents 

long before they can wear out. 

As you know computers can record music 

on “data” CDs, though in my experience 

even recent high-quality burners don’t give 

good results, and their copies are very easy to 

distinguish from the originals. That’s why 

an audiophile friend and I have acquired 

audio recorders. Mine is a simple one-drawer 

Pioneer that works only with special “music” 

CDs, but my friend has an Alexis Masterlink 

with hard disc, which can also use data 

CDs. We’ve been looking for CD blanks that 

can give superior sound, and the results were 

a surprise. 

First, the quality differences among 

brands is huge. Any computer experts 

who can explain this are welcome! But the 

greatest surprise is that data CDs in general 

give better results than music CDs on either 

recorder (the single exception is the Pioneer 

high end music CD). Can you explain why? 

We’ll accept paying more for music CDs 

because sonic quality is important for us, but 

what we get is inferior quality. If the music 

industry is faced with piracy, I’m starting 

to think it’s not entirely undeserved. 

I was also surprised to discover that, on 

my Pioneer, the only way I can make a truly 

identical copy is to copy it…in the analog 

domain!!! I attribute this anomaly to the 

fact that the digital coaxial link between my 

Audio Research transport and my Pioneer 

recorder must introduce some audible jitter. 

The quality of my tube DAC may also be 

a factor, and it seems to indicate that the 

Pioneer’s analog-to-digital converter must 

be of good quality. 

Could you give me some advice on the way 

to improve domestic production of Compact 

Discs? My Pioneer was purchased used, and 

the dealer refuses to deactivate the protection 

against data CDs. 

Jean-Pierre Létourneau 

QUEBEC CITY, QC 

Theoretically at least, he could 

be held legally responsible for having 

bypassed an “anti-piracy” measure. We 

use quotation marks, because, though 

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the law on this matter is clear in such 

countries as the United States, it isn’t in 

Canada. The Canadian government has 

signed the international treaty on intellectual 

property, but it has not ratifi ed 

it, much less changed its copyright laws 

accordingly. 

Unfortunately we don’t have a defi nitive 

conclusion to offer. Our experiences 

with our own computers (three Macs: a 

G4, a G5 and an iBook) yielded excellent 

results, with copies we could not 

distinguish from the originals even on 

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our reference systems. However some 

of our readers have reported much less 

happy results with Windows PCs, as 

did another reader with a Macintosh 

G4 substantially identical to one of our 

machines. 

Jitter is certainly a factor, as is probably 

your digital cable, but there is more. 

The characteristics of different CD-R 

brands can affect jitter. Specifi cally, with 

certain discs the data “pits” burned into 

the substrate won’t be precise, which 

means the player will have diffi culty 


Free Advice

Free Advice 

determining the exact start of the pit. 

Some players, indeed, may do better than 

others. Some players can’t read CD-Rs 

at all, and it is easy to suppose that some 

others will do so less than perfectly. 

• Analogue Productions 

• Audio Fidelity 

• Cisco Music 

• Classic Records 

• Mosaic Records 

• Simply Vinyl 

• Speakers Corner 

• Sundazed 

Many other non-audiophile labels 

Over 1,200 new vinyl titles in stock 

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1-877-DGROOVE 

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We ourselves had had excellent results 

with both TDK and Maxell discs. The 

worst are CD-RWs. 

If it’s any consolation, commercial 

pressing of CDs is not problem-free 

either. Ask any music producer whether 

the CD he gets back from the plant 

sounds exactly like the original master 

tape. He’ll laugh. Or perhaps not. 

I have loved music since I can remember. 

I have subscribed to UHF almost since its 

inception, and I am trying to put together a 

music system. 

My modest budget and gear currently 

consists of: SOTA Sapphire turntable, Syrinx 

PU3 tone arm (with upgraded wiring), 

Clearaudio Virtuoso Wood MM cartridge, 

Rega EOS phono stage, Vecteur Club 10 

amp, Totem Tabu speakers, Wireworld 

Atlantis speaker cable and Eclipse 3 interconnects, 

Inouye powerline conditioner, and a 

Gutwire cord for the phono stage. 

I listen to a lot of live music at work, 

and I have spent quite a bit of time trying 

to put together a system which will let me 

enjoy this kind of faithful reproduction at 

home. I purchased the amp, speakers, and 

phono stage used without hearing them, 

trusting to favorable reviews by you. Don’t 

get me wrong, I have all the faith in the 

world in your opinions; after all, believable 

music reproduction is what you’ve always 

been about. I believe the fault obviously 

lies somewhere within (my system, not my 

head). 

I have continuously read in your magazine 

that this ideal is defi nitely possible, but 

so far the experience has eluded me. I listen to 

the electronic signals, and they sound reasonably 

detailed, semi-rhythmic, and somewhat 

dynamic, but, unfortunately, not believable. 

I’m at a loss! 

Please tell me the most logical way to 

determine what the problem is. I thought 

that, with this caliber of equipment, I would 

be able to recreate a reasonably good facsimile 

of real instruments and voice. I close my eyes, 

listen, wish really hard, but all I get is major 

disappointment and more spam. Do you sell 

anti-depressants and/or ghetto blasters at the 

Audiophile Store? Both are becoming more 

and more attractive alternatives. 

Clay Palfenier 

BURNABY, BC 

Oh, we think we can suggest considerably 

better than either boomboxes or 

Prozac, Clay, which doesn’t necessarily 

mean we can give you a quick answer 

on something obvious you may have 

overlooked. 

Our fi rst observation is that at least 

you’re working from the right point of 

comparison: live music. That’s better 

than any “reference system,” but the 

down side is that you’re difficult to 

please, and you won’t easily settle for a 

poor imitation. We suggest fi rst looking 

at the source, not because your source is 

poor, but because you have only a single 

one. If you also had a quality CD player 

or a good tuner, we would ask whether 

alternative sources also fail to please. 

What we would do first, then, is 

double-check every possible turntablerelated 

setting: suspension tuning (a 

little time-consuming on the SOTA), 

lubrication, belt condition, leveling, 

lateral cartridge alignment, correct arm 

height (this is often way wrong) and antiskating 

setting. We ourselves go down 

this check list once a year…more often 

if we hear anything we don’t like. Some 

of this sounds like spring cleaning, and 

in fact some years ago we published an 

article on spring cleaning for music systems. 

It included cleaning and tightening 

all of the connections, and straightening 

out the rat’s nest that the back of a system 

can quickly become.

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We would then attack the other end. 

No, not the speakers but the acoustics. 

Most rooms are nowhere near optimized 

for music, of course, and that’s a major 

barrier to the enjoyment of what should 

sound like live music. What we usually 

suggest is to start with different speaker 

placements, remembering that even 

small changes can make surprisingly 

large sonic differences. 

To this we will add a tip we may never 

have given before. You can minimize the 

infl uence of the room boundaries on the 

sound of your system by sitting close to 

the speakers. Of course that will mean 

doing more than merely sliding your 

chair forward. You’ll need to place the 

speakers closer together, toed-in slightly, 

as far as possible from any room boundaries, 

and sit close. Sound engineers 

call this “nearfi eld” listening, and even 

studio control rooms with supposedly 

optimized acoustics mostly have a pair 

of small speakers placed right on the 

mixing console for exactly that reason. 

We don’t mean to suggest that this 

is how you should run your system from 

now on, though really toxic acoustics 

might require it. For one thing, nearfi eld 

listening is not quite natural, more like 

listening through headphones. It will, 

however, allow you to hear what your 

system sounds like when the room is not 

serving as the principal intermediary. If 

a serious system-based problem remains, 

you’ll actually hear it more clearly than 

ever, and you can then go about solving 

it. If you fi nd yourself wishing the system 

sounded like that all the time, you will 

then have a point of comparison as you 

search for a definitive placement, or 

you make other changes to the room 

acoustics. 

My present system consists of the Marantz 

CD17KIS, Krell KAV400xi amplifi er and 

the Thiel CS1.5 speakers. I think the weakest 

link is the CD player, which I intend to 

replace sometime soon. I fi nd that the soundstage 

images it projects are not palpable and 

precise enough. I am looking in the direction 

of the new Meridian G08 or G07. 

I have also read that a good CD player 

with a rich tonality gives more palpable 

imaging. Any advice or suggestions would 

be appreciated. 

John Tiong 

SIBU, SARAWAK, Malaysia 

You’re absolutely right that you can 

get better imaging with a superior CD 

player, John, and you can get a lot more 

besides. If you choose right, you’ll also 

get smoother highs, more solid lows, 

better transparency (in the sense that 

you can hear soft sounds even when 

louder ones are playing), and a better 

rendition of both rhythm and melody. 

Those last two surprise many people, 

who assume that rhythm and melody 

are so basic that any player can get them 

right. We wish that were true. 

There are a number of relatively 

affordable players today which can 

deliver what you’re looking for. One of 

the Meridians may be the right choice. 

The G07 and G08, neither of which 

we have heard, appear to be substantially 

identical except that the G08 

has the ability to “upsample” CDs to 

24 bit/96 kHz resolution. We wouldn’t 

pay a lot extra for that feature. 


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I am new to hi-fi , and some help in 

choosing an integrated amp will be helpful. 

I’m planning on purchasing a pair of Totem 

Forest speakers, but I don’t know what amp 

will go well with them. I can only spend about 

$4500, and I’m willing to buy a used amp. 

Paul Brookbanks 

BOWMANVILLE, ON 

Paul, the Forests are not as effi cient as 

many speakers of recent vintage, because 

Totem doesn’t follow marketing trends 

much, but nor are they diffi cult to drive. 

A well-designed amplifi er with at least 

50 watts per channel can handle them 

just fi ne. On the other hand the Totems 

are revealing, and you’ll want an amp 

that doesn’t make you cringe on diffi cult 

passages. 

We’ve reviewed a number of quality 

integrated amplifi ers in your price range 

in the last while. You might want to listen 

to the Vecteur I-6.2, the Simaudio Moon 

I-3, the Roksan Caspian and the YBA 

Intégré DT, to mention only a few. You 

may want to check out tube amps too. 

I am ready to start upgrading my system, 

and I will be starting at the source (that

much I know). I would like to spend no more 

than C$1000 on a CD player. I know you 

recommend the Cambridge D500 player as 

the best low-cost unit, followed by Rotels and 

Regas higher up the price scale. 

My short list includes the Cambridge 

D500SE and the Azur 640C, the Rotel 

RCD-02 and the new RCD-1072. I am also 

interested in the Shanling CD-S100 MkII. 

The Rega Planet 2000 is a possibility, but I 

believe it is out of my price range. 

I like the fact that both the Rotels have 

HDCD decoding, but since most of my 

discs are not HDCD-encoded, would an 

upsampling player be more benefi cial? Some 

of the above players tote a 24 bit Delta-Sigma 

DAC. Does this mean that they upsample to 

96/192 kHz? 

Tim Leeney 

GEORGETOWN, ON 

They may be upsampling to 24 bits 

and 96 kHz, Tim, and a number of 

new players offer such upsampling as a 

feature. It is just that — a feature, not a 

promise of better quality. 

The presence of a 24-bit chip makes 

such upsampling possible, of course, 

but it’s there in the main because that’s 

the size chip the big manufacturers are 

making now. And if you had one in a 

player you built, you wouldn’t be shy 

about saying so, would you? Nor would 

we. 

Now to specifi c advice, or at least as 

specifi c as we can get under the circumstances. 

We haven’t seen or heard the 

Shanling you mention, though we have 

heard more expensive Shanlings. Nor 

have we heard the Azur player, which 

comes from Cambridge’s new series, 

though we’ve had a look inside one. It 

looks promising, and we hope to get our 

hands on one soon. Perhaps you can ask 

a dealer to let you hear one alongside the 

D500. Pick some recordings you know 

and love, take notes, and be sure to listen 

to the music and not just the sound. 

With my Bryston 3BSST/BP-25P and 

B&W Nautilus 803 system, I am using: 

an Oracle Delphi MkIV with MkV Record 

Clamp and MkV Turbo Power Supply with 

Cardas Golden Reference cord; Alphason 

Xenon MCS arm with Ortofon 540. 

I want to upgrade arm/cartridge to 

something more wholesome, but accurate, 

nothing strident. I was considering a new 

Rega RB700 (maybe an RB1000, but that’s 

overkill) with a Clearaudio Virtuoso Wood 

MM cartridge. What do you think? 

David Chirko 

SUDBURY, ON 

We would hesitate to change the arm, 

David, unless we were going for…well, 

perhaps overkill is the right word. The 

Alphason Xenon was a somewhat simplifi 

ed version of the celebrated HR-100S 

we still use in one of our reference 

systems. 

On the other hand, replacing the 

Ortofon is certainly a good plan. Is the 

Clearaudio the right choice? Though we 

admire what Clearaudio does in its top 

products, including its MC pickups, its 

moving magnet pickups have very high 

inductance if we go by the spec sheet. 

We would look elsewhere: Shure, Benz 

Micro, Grado, etc. 

I have put together a pretty good sounding 

system using material from your magazine 

as reference. I was wondering if you would 


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Free Advice

Free Advice 

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at aliquatuero.

Has the cathode ray 

tube fi nally earned 

the right to a comfy 

retirement? In the 

world of computers the answer 

is pretty much yes. Except for 

economy machines, or high 

end machines for graphics 

artists, new computers mostly 

come with liquid crystal 

displays. As the 

price of LCDs 

drops, its 

v i c - 

tory is 

l i k e l y to be complete. 

But video is another matter. Though 

most computer users favor brightness 

and (apparent) sharpness over all 

else, owners of home theatre systems 

are looking for much more. And new 

technologies — some already here and 

others on the horizon — will make the 

home theatre experience much more like 

watching a “real” movie. 

The cathode ray tube is a diffi cult act 

to follow, though. 

The CRT: still alive? 

It’s a vacuum tube, of course, one of 

the very last ones to survive in massmarket 

consumer products. It still works 

very well because it is a mature technology. 

The CRT has been refi ned to the 

point where it has been able to fend off 

a number of competitors. And fi rst in its 

list of advantages is price. 

Price is important, because TV sets 

have become a commodity. What we 

mean is that the choice is dictated far 

more by price and (to a lesser extent) 

features than by great technological 

advantages. However, the CRT has more 

than mere low cost to offer. 

Future 

Screens 

The most important of these 

is the range of brightness it can 

offer. If it were an audio component, 

we would call it dynamic 

range. A CRT can be very bright, 

but it must get very bright before 

it overloads and treats all brightness 

values the same. Of course the 

tube itself is not the only factor 

determining the range of 

tones, but at its best it can 

make more expensive 

d isplay s 

look washed 

out. 

A l o n g 

with the wide brightness range comes a 

vast range of colors, and it’s easy to see 

why. If a display doesn’t wash out in the 

bright scenes and doesn’t get murky in 

dark scenes, it can present a wider gamut 

of colors. That means a CRT-equipped 

TV set has less need to “translate” a 

color it can’t reproduce into one within 

its range. We don’t want to overstate 

this point, because no display can come 

close to matching the range of colors 

visible to the human eye…or even to 

photographic fi lm. 

If the CRT is so good, why would we 

want to replace it? 

Unfortunately the CRT also has 

a long list of drawbacks. The tube is 

large, and especially deep, it is fragile, 

it is heavy, and — like other vacuum 

tubes — it eats up energy. It is ill-suited 

to TV sets bigger than 36 inches (measured 

diagonally, about 91 cm). It is also 

Can you buy the 

perfect video screen? 

Perhaps not yet… 

ill-suited to the widescreen sets that are 

now the norm in home theatre. Let’s see 

why. 

A CRT is a big glass bottle, with an 

emitter of electrons in the “neck” at the 

rear. The face is coated with colored 

phosphor dots which glow when an electron 

beam strikes them. A complex set 

of magnetic control devices sweeps the 

electron beam across the face, making 

the appropriate dots glow to make up 

the image. 

The illustration shows an early CRT, 

with a neck much longer than the width 

of the screen. Those early CRTs were 

round, to avoid light falloff in the corners, 

and even many modern CRTs have 

rather rounded corners. As manufacturers 

began making larger screens (a 21” 

tube used to be the “big screen” norm), 

they were reluctant to increase the tube 

depth in proportion. The short-neck 

tube was born, and as tubes got even 

wider, the necks got proportionately 

shorter yet. The modern CRT is likely 

to be something like this. 

Notice that the electron beam going 

to the extreme edge of the screen is 

traveling a lot farther than the one 


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going dead centre. Worse, it strikes the 

screen surface at a angle, projecting an 

oval onto the screen surface rather than 

a circle. That means poor focus at the 

edges, worse in the corners. That’s why 

most TV screens have rounded surfaces. 

Expensive flat screens use electronic 

compensation to minimize problems. 

Even so, the CRT has a practical size 

limit. Its size was once adequate even 

for large rooms, because scanning lines 

looked crude on a bigger screen. As line 

doublers and sophisticated video processors 

became common, screens grew. 

Not that the CRT has vanished from 

home theatre. Most rear projection sets 

still use a CRT…three of them in fact, 

one for each of the colors used for the 

image. Those tubes are turned up very 

bright, and projected onto the screen. 

They work well, though an RPTV needs 

careful alignment to make the three 

images converge exactly on the screen. 

Even so, they may not stay converged. 

Plasma…the imperfect miracle 

Huge fl at screens that could be hung 

on the wall were a staple of science fi ction 


years before they appeared. You may 

recall the wall TV sets in Fahrenheit 451, 

based on the Ray Bradbury novel. The 

plasma screen appeared to be the realization 

of that long-predicted technology. 

Indeed, its futurist look drew a lot of 

early adopters, at least ones with deep 

pockets. Prices have dropped dramatically, 

but they are still not cheap. Nor 

are they perfect. 

The plasma display is inherently 

fl at, because there is no scanning, as 

there is with CRTs. Each tiny module 

of the unit contains an inert gas trapped 

between two glass plates. At the rear is 

an electromagnetic exciter, which heats 

the gas so it emits ultraviolet energy. 

A phosphor coating on the front plate 

glows in the appropriate color. A plasma 

screen throws off a lot of light, and it is 

an eye magnet in high end stores. 

The drawbacks? There’s more than 

just the price. The gas takes a short but 

fi nite time to heat enough to glow, and 

some screens have diffi culty following 

movement, which is why demos are 

mostly done with landscapes. Contrast 

ratios are poor, making for punchy 

images but little nuance. The screen 

may be thin, but it is heavy, fragile and 

energy-hungry, and hot… 

And, oh yes, it has a fi nite life. So 

do CRTs, but they don’t cost as much. 

Tossing out a burned out plasma screen 

can make you cry, and you may replace 

it long before it goes dark, because it is 

prone to burn-in: the pixels most used 

will darken fi rst. Ouch! 

Liquid crystals 

The fi rst LCDs showed up over a 

quarter century ago in pocket calculators. 

An LCD is a diode with an intriguing 

property: apply a voltage to it, and it 

will darken. That’s how LCD elements 

can form the digits on your calculator or 

your watch. 

On a video or computer screen 

they are used differently. Tiny LCDs 

are placed behind a colored fi lter, and 

depending on its voltage state it will be 

transparent, letting light through, or 

opaque. A large fl uorescent bulb and 

diffuser behind the LCD lattice light 

up the resulting image. 

LCD screens are turning up on a lot 

of computers, as already noted, but also 

on TV sets. They are costly, but they are 

light and they use little energy, which 

is perfect for laptop computers. They 

require no convergence adjustments 

There is no burn-in effect, and changing 

a bulb is potentially cheap, though some 

displays have bulbs that are astoundingly 

expensive. Check before buying. 

You should know that LCDs have 

their own problems. You can pay $700 

for a display not much larger than a 

magazine cover. Like plasmas they 

can be slow to react. They can suffer 

from “stuck” pixels, jammed either on 

or off, and that may not be covered by 

the warranty unless there are lots of 

them. Colors shift as you move off axis. 

LCD images can look crude at close or 

medium quarters, because the individual 

crystals are clearly visible. 

And the LCD panel has one other 

drawback seldom mentioned: the range 

of colors is narrow. The color gamut 

chart is misleading, even so, because the 

fl uorescent bulb used as backlighting 

does not emit a continuous spectrum. 

Use a prism to see the fl uorescent spectrum, 

and you’ll see a series of discrete 

lines rather than a full rainbow. Add to 

that the fact that LCDs have trouble 

with deep blacks. 

Note that some manufacturers, 

notably Sony, now make rear projection 

TVs using LCDs rather than CRTs. 

Our judgement stands. 

Digital Light Processing 

The DLP is an invention of Texas 

Instruments, a one-time electronics 

powerhouse that hadn’t done anything 

this original in years. 

The heart of the DLP is a tiny mirror 

controlled electronically so it either 

refl ects light toward the lens, or else into 

a “light sink,” a black absorbent surface. 

Early DLP projectors had blacks that 

were closer to grey, but the rest of the 

spectrum was superb, with bright,natural 

colors, no burn-in, and a long lifespan. 

Replacement bulbs are inexpensive and 

are user-installable. Perfection? 

As with plasma, the cost was something 

of an obstacle, running into the 

tens of thousands of dollars. The tiny 

DLP modules would surely come down 

in cost, but in the meantime there was 

a trick that could drop the cost by two-

thirds: use one module for all three 

colors. This is done by placing a colored 

wheel in front of the light source, with 

movements perfectly synchronized with 

the electronic circuits. As the wheel 

rotates, it projects a red image, then a 

green image, then a blue image. Thanks 

to the eye’s persistence of vision — the 

same phenomenon that lets us see a 24 

frame per second fi lm as a continuous 

moving picture — the three colored 

images blend into a single color image. 

But not for everyone. Some people 

have poor persistence of vision (it is they 

who gave movies their British nickname, 

“fl icks”), and indeed we all have poor 

persistence of vision near the outer edges 

of the retina. Fortunately, the DLP has 

been improving. The colored wheel now 

turns much faster than it once did, as fast 

as 9000 rpm. And the color chips are 

repeated twice, thus doubling the rate of 

change. The eliminates the color fl icker 

for nearly everyone, though you should 

check for yourself before buying. 

Early DLPs were found in front 

projectors, the fi rst to be compact and 

lightweight, except for the crude LCD 

projectors. The DLP has now found its 

way into rear projection sets. They are 

already excellent, and there is reason to 

hope this still-young technology will 

continue to evolve. 

D-ILA 

This largely unfamiliar acronym 

stands for Digital Direct Drive Image 

Light Amplifi er. This is JVC’s variant on 

LCOS, which stands for Liquid Crystal 

on Silicon. 

You may already have seen such a 

display, because D-ILA is used in giant 

high-res screens at such venues as sports 

stadiums. That gives you a clue as to its 

major drawback: only Major League 

Baseball can afford one. 

The “silicon” referred to is the material 

used for the substrates of transistors 

and diodes. Each LCOS module — the 

size of a single pixel — has its own driver 

circuitry behind it, where it is out of the 

way. It is then possible to bounce the 

light off the crystal instead of through 

it. LCOS pixels have extremely high 

refl ectivity, and the brightness of the 

screen is then dependent on the size 

of the bulb. Powerful xenon bulbs can 

throw a lot of light even into a stadium, 

a large convention centre, or a Vegas 

casino sign. 

Brightness is not the whole advantage, 

we should add. We’ve mentioned 

that conventional LCD screens have 

pixels that are all too visible. An LCOS 

screen has a much fi ner grid, and looks to 

the human eye like a continuous seamless 

fi lmlike image. The D-ILA response 

curve is not truly linear, but its natural 

shape makes it possible to get blacks that 

are very dark. 

You cannot for the moment buy an 

LCOS for your home theatre system, 

JVC will shortly release home-sized 

D-ILA screens We rather expect that 

they will be expensive enough that Bill 

Gates and Warren Buffett will be the 

major customers, but there is reason to 

think prices will drop quickly. 

Organic Light Emitting Diodes 

It’s no secret that Kodak is fi nding the 

21 st Century rough, as more consumers 

and even pros shelve fi lm cameras in 

favor of digital. Kodak didn’t see that 

coming and came late to the party, 

but the company showed lack of vision 

another way. 

It was in 1979 that Kodak engineers 

discovered a tiny but interesting semiconductor 

that emitted an extraordinarily 

bright light when an electrical 

voltage was applied to it. Unlike the 

familiar LED used as a power indicator 

on nearly all electronic equipment, the 

OLED is not a crystal, and therefore it 

can be made both small and inexpensive. 

It wasn’t until eight years later that 

Kodak fi nally patented the device, and 

a dozen years after that it realized this 

might have an application. 

The OLED has a long list of advantages. 

It is simple to implement, because 

the driver circuit is built right into each 

diode. Despite the brightness, the screen 

draws little current, making it a natural 

for digital cameras (Kodak already 

offers one), mobile phones and laptop or 

handheld computers. The diode reacts 

extremely quickly, making it suitable for 

following action. Viewing angle is wide. 

The color range is excellent. 

Could it work for a video display? 

Though it is now used to make very 

tiny screens, Kodak has given us a 

demonstration of a fi lm on a prototype 

15-inch screen. The quality was extraordinary. 

It will be a couple of years before 

screens like the one we saw appear on the 

market, and longer yet before TV-sized 

panels are made commercially. Both 

Sanyo and Sony are working on these 

products, however. 

Between now and then, Kodak will 

need to get caught up on its research. 

Like the LCD, the OLED does not have 

the blackest of blacks. Worse, the screen 

life may be adequate for a camera, but 

possibly not for a video screen. We’ve 

seen widely contradictory reports on 

this, we should add. 

The OLED is exciting enough to 

have triggered some blue-sky speculation. 

Because these organic diodes can 

be laid down onto any sort of substrate, 

including metal foil or textile, it may be 

possible to have a big-screen TV that 

rolls up, like a projection screen. Or a 

tee shirt with a video display right on 

the sleeve. 

Let’s hope the possibilities compensate 

the company for declining sales of 

Kodacolor! 


Nuts&Bolts

How SACD Won the War 

tles? Should you buy a Palm 

handheld or a PocketPC? 

Should you pick a PC or a 

Mac? Should you go for Beta or VHS? 

In the latter case, of course, even 

technophobes know the answer. We 

also know the outcome of the cassette 

vs 8-track rivalry, not that it matters 

so much anymore. And we know that 

consumers who guessed wrong got little 

sympathy from the merchandisers of 

failed standards. 

Of course, there have always been 

alternatives to the clear knockout of 

the Beta/VHS battle. Half a century 

ago, when RCA launched its 

45 rpm discs against Columbia’s 

microgroove LP, both standards 

won, and they stayed around 

for decades. On the other hand, 

when Philips’ DCC digital cassette 

went up against Sony’s 

MiniDisc, there were two ways you 

could lose. 

So what about DVD-Audio versus 

SACD? 

Despite claims by numerous audio 

mavens, including a 

majority of specialty 

magazines, we have 

long known that the 

CD Red Book standard of 16 bits and 

a 44.1 kHz sampling rate wasn’t even 

giving us what the LP had offered, 

never mind the “perfect sound” that 

digital promised. promised. Over the years crack 

designers have have found ways to optimize 

the imperfect imperfect standard: better fi lters, 

mapping systems that minimized (or at 

least optimized) optimized) mathematical rounding 

errors in the digital bitstream, bitstream, and even 

HDCD encoding, a way of giving 16 

bits the performance of 20 bits or more. 

Of course, course, we all suspected there was a 

better standard in our future…but what? 

And when? 

Nuts&Bolts Don’t you love technology bat- 

A disc that holds more 

The emergence of the DVD gave us 

hope. The new medium was conceived 

primarily for movies, to be sure — the 


“V” stood initially for “video.” Still, a 

storage medium was a storage medium. 

The new disc would have nearly seven 

times the storage space of a conventional 

CD, more than enough for a superior 

digital music system. Doubling the sampling 

rate to 96 kHz* would of course 

take twice the data space, and bumping 

the 16 bits up to 24 bits would increase 

size by another 50%. That would be 

easy to handle, and in fact we could 

even double the sampling rate again to 

192 kHz. Perfect sound would fi nally 

arrive. 

But of course movies was where the 

money money was, and it was on movies that 

the DVD Consortium (later renamed 

the DVD Forum) concentrated. There 

was plenty to concentrate on, because the 

DVD was an amalgam of two incompatible 

technologies, and the consortium consortium 

had to listen listen to many dissenting voices. 

The result was that the audio-only disc 

became an afterthought. 

Indeed, it nearly got derailed. As 

Or, to put it another 

way, way, how DVD-Audio 

blew it big time. 

members of the consortium tested different 

film sound systems on human 

subjects, they became convinced that 

one of the eventual winners, Dolby Digital 

(then called AC-3) was to all intents 

and purposes perfect. Then why not 

use a similar system for DVD-Audio? 

Even though the DVD had huge storage 

capacity, it wasn’t quite enough. If 

we wanted to add surround sound, with 

5.1 channels, we would need to increase 

space by another 275%, taking us to nine 

times the CD’s storage space. Too much. 

Compression was inevitable. 

For some time it looked as though 

the new medium would be crippled 

by the same compromises that 

affected DVD-Video, and there 

were letter-writing campaigns 

by audiophiles, arguing for a 

lossless system. Finally, one 

was proposed, Meridian’s MLP 

(Meridian Lossless Packing) 

compressed the signal by as much 

as half but could reconstitute the 

original signal bit for bit. With its adoption 

in late 1998, DVD-A seemed to be 

on its way. There were more than 160 

member companies, 

many of them eagerly 

waiting to release 

DVD-A discs…or so 

we were told. 

In the meantime, there was action 

elsewhere. 

The “other” superdisc 

The original CD standard had been 

developed by Sony and Philips, which 

had made a good deal of money over 

*Obviously, 96 kHz is more than double 

44.1 kHz. It is in fact double the 48 kHz sampling 

rate that most first-generation digital 

masters were recorded at. The master would 

then be downsampled to the CD standard. 

That required an unwelcome transformation. 

Most DVD-A mastering is today 

done at 96 kHz. Some producers argued for 

88.2 kHz, which would downsample nicely 

for CD. That rate was adopted as a DVD-A 

option, option, though it is seldom used. 

The truth about the new formats 

This has always been true of UHF: what you read in its pages is not what the 

best-known audio (and home theatre!) magazines tell you. This is even more 

true when it comes to the new media, such as SACD and DVD-A. Our goal is, 

and has always been, to help you make the choices best for you. Oh…by the way, 

the subscription information is on page 3…page 5 of the PDF.

the years by receiving a small royalty 

on every CD made. If a new proprietary 

standard could replace the CD, the revenue 

stream would continue. It seemed 

unimaginable that just two companies 

could be successful against a consortium 

of well over a hundred competitors, but 

these were no ordinary companies. 

And it so happened that one of them, 

Sony, had a high-resolution standard 

waiting in the wings. For some time, 

Sony Music had been recording its 

masters with a system known as Direct 

Stream Digital. UHF discussed the 

system extensively in issue No. 55. DSD, 

unlike the DVD-A and CD standards, 

does not use the familiar pulse code 

modulation, and does not store actual 

signal values. Rather it uses what is 

known as Delta Sigma modulation to 

track changes in the signal. 

It works this way. The initial signal 

value is stored in a temporary memory 

register (but not in the recording) for 

reference. If the next sample is higher 

than the stored value, DSD records a 

one, and if it is lower it records a zero. 

During silence the signal doesn’t change, 

and so DSD records alternating ones 

and zeroes. Sony says that the density 

of bits is analog-like, and indeed that if 

you run the bitstream through a simple 

fi lter, you will actually hear the signal. 

DSD is inherently rather noisy, and 

noise-shaping is used to shift the noise 

into upper frequencies where it cannot 

be heard. 

A DSD channel takes up exactly four 

times the space of a CD channel. A 5.1 

channel version would be too big for a 

DVD, but then Sony and Philips are not 

using the DVD as a storage medium. 

Interestingly enough, the DVD 

Forum included DSD as one of the 

standards of DVD-A, but that did not 

prevent Sony and Philips from launching 

its own disc, known as the Super Audio 

Compact Disc. It looks just like a DVD, 

and like a CD too for that matter. SACD 

was actually launched before DVD- 

Audio, in late 2000. The very expensive 

(C$8000) Sony SCD-1 player sounded 

excellent, but the DVD-A crowd was 

optimistic: unlike DVD-Audio, the 

SCD-1 was strictly a two-channel 

player. 

That was a temporary victory. Prices 

of SACD players came down, slowly at 

fi rst, and then much faster. What’s more, 

second generation players had surround 

sound, just as DVD-A did. 

The rivalry 















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DVD-Audio stumbles 















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Getting the standard wrong 

It was only thanks to Meridian that 















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What now for SACD? 















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doloreriure tat.

THE ANNIVERSARY COLLECTION: 

Issues No.7-19 (except 11, 15, 17 and 18, out of 

print): nine issues available for the price of five 

(see below). A piece of audio history. Available 

separately at the regular price. 

No.69: Tube Electronics: Audiomat Opéra , 

Connoisseur SE-2 and Copland CSA29 integrated 

amps, and Shanling SP-80 monoblocks. 

Also: Audiomat's Phono-1.5, Creek CD50, as 

well as a great new remote control, GutWire's 

NotePad antivibration device, and a musicrelated 

computer game that had us laughing 

out loud. And there’s more: Paul Bergman on 

the return of the vacuum tube, the Vegas 2004 

report, and the story of how music critics did 

their best to kill the world’s greatest music. 

No.68: Loudspeakers: Thiel CS2.4, Focus 

Audio FS688, Iliad B1. Electronics:Vecteur 

I-6.2 and Audiomat Arpège integrated amplifiers, 

Copland 306 multichannel tube preamp, 

Rega Fono MC. Also: Audio Note and Copland 

CD players, GutWire MaxCon power filter. And 

there’s more: all about power supplies, what’s 

coming beyond DVD, and a chat with YBA’s 

Yves-Bernard André. 

No.67: Loudspeakers: A new, improved 

Reference 3a MM de Capo, and the awesome 

Living Voice Avatar OBX-R. Centre speakers 

for surround from Castle, JMLab, ProAc, Thiel, 

Totem and Vandersteen. One of them joins 

our Kappa system. Two multichannel amps 

from Copland and Vecteur. Plus: plans for a 

DIY platform for placing a centre speaker atop 

any TV set, Paul Bergman on the elements of 

acoustics, and women in country music. 

No.66: Reviews: the Jadis DA-30 amplifier, the 

Copland 305 tube preamp and 520 solid state 

amp. Plus: the amazing Shanling CD player, 

Castle Stirling speakers, and a remote control 

that tells you what to watch. Also: Bergman on 

biwiring and biamplification, singer Janis Ian’s 

alternative take on music downloading, and a 

chat with Opus 3’s Jan-Eric Persson. 

No.65: Back to Vinyl: setting up an analog 

system, reviews of Rega P9 turntable, and 

phono preamps from Rega, Musical Fidelity 

and Lehmann. The Kappa reference system 

for home theatre: how we selected our HDTV 

monitor, plus a review of the Moon Stellar DVD 

player. Anti-vibration: Atacama, Symposium, 

Golden Sound, Solid-Tech, Audioprism, 

Tenderfeet. Plus an interview with Rega’s 

turntable designer, and a look back at what 

UHF was like 20 years ago. 

No.64: Speakers: Totem M1 Signature and 

Hawk, Visonik E352. YBA Passion Intégré 

amp, Cambridge IsoMagic (followup), better 

batteries for audio-to-go. Plus: the truth about 

upsampling, an improvement to our LP cleaning 

machine, an interview with Ray Kimber. 

. 

No.63: Tube amps: ASL Leyla & Passion 

A11. Vecteur Espace speakers, 2 interconnects 

(Harmonic Technology Eichmann), 

5 speaker cables (Pierre Gabriel, vdH , 

Harmonic Technology, Eichmann), 4 power 

cords (Wireworld, Harmonic Technology, 

Eichmann, ESP). Plus: Paul Bergman on 

soundproofing, how to compare components 

in the store, big-screen TV’s to stay away 

from, a look back at the Beatles revolution. 

No.62: Amplifiers: Vecteur I-4, Musical 

Fidelity Nu-Vista M3, Antique Sound Lab 

MG-S11DT. Passive preamps from Creek and 

Antique Sound Lab. Vecteur L-4 CD player. 

Interconnects: VdH Integration and Wireworld 

Soltice. Plus: the right to copy music, and how 

it may be vanishing. Choosing a DVD player by 

Back Issues 

features. And all about music for the movies. 

No.61: Digital: Audiomat Tempo and Cambridge 

Isomagic DACs, Vecteur D-2 transport. 

Speakers: Osborn Mini Tower and Mirage OM- 

9. Soundcare Superspikes. And: new surround 

formats, dezoning DVD players. 

No.60: Speakers: Monitor Audio Silver 9, 

Reference 3a MM De Capo, Klipsch RB-5, 

Coincident Triumph Signature. Plus: a Mirage 

subwoofer and the Audiomat Solfège amp. Paul 

Bergman on reproducing extreme lows. 

No.59: CD players: Moon Eclipse, Linn Ikemi 

and Genki, Rega Jupiter/Io, Cambridge D500. 

Plus: Oskar Kithara speaker, with Heil tweeter. 

And: transferring LP to CD, the truth on digital 

radio, digital cinema vs MaxiVision 48. 

No.58: Amplifiers: ASL AQ1003, Passion I10 

& I11, Rogue 88, Jadis Orchestra Reference, 

Linar 250. Headphone amps: Creek, Antique 

Sound Lab, NVA, Audio Valve. Plus: Foundation 

Research LC-2 line filter, Gutwire power cord, 

Pierre Gabriel ML-1 2000 cable. And: building 

your own machine to clean LP’s. 

No.57: Speakers: Dynaudio Contour 1.3, 

Gershman X-1/SW-1, Coincident Super 

Triumph Signature, Castle Inversion 15, 

Oskar Aulos. PLUS: KR 18 tube amp. Music 

Revolution: the next 5 years. Give your Hi-Fi 

a Fall Tune-Up. 

No.56: Integrated amps: Simaudio I-3, Roksan 

Caspian, Myryad MI120, Vecteur Club 10, NVA 

AP10 Also: Cambridge T500 tuner, Totem 

Forest. Phono stages: Creek, Lehmann, 

Audiomat. Interconnects: Actinote, Van den 

Hul, Pierre Gabriel. Plus: Paul Bergman on 

power and current…why you need both 

No.55: CD players: Linn CD12, Copland 

CDA-289, Roksan Caspian, AMC CD8a. Other 

reviews: Enigma Oremus speaker, Magenta 

ADE-24 black box. Plus: the DSD challenge for 

the next audio disc, pirate music on the Net, the 

explosion of off-air video choices. 

No.54: Electronics: Creek A52se, Simaudio 

W-3 and W-5 amps. Copland CSA-303, Sima 

P-400 and F.T. Audio preamps (the latter two 

passive). Musical Fidelity X-DAC revisited, 

Ergo AMT phones, 4 line filters, 2 interconnects. 

Plus: Making your own CD’s. 

No.53: Loudspeakers:Reference 3a Intégrale, 

Energy Veritas v2.8, Epos ES30, Totem 

Shaman, Mirage 390is, Castle Eden. Plus: Paul 

Bergman on understanding biamping, biwiring, 

balanced lines, and more. 

No.52: CD players: Alchemist Nexus, 

Cambridge CD6, YBA Intégré, Musical Fidelity 

X-DAC, Assemblage DAC-2. Subwoofers: 

Energy ES-8 and NHT PS-8. Plus: Paul 

Bergman on reproducing deep bass, Vegas 

report, and the story behind digital television. 

No.51: Integrated amps: YBA Intégré DT, 

Alchemist Forseti, Primare A-20, NVA AP50 

Cambridge A1. CD players: Adcom GCD-750, 

Rega Planet. An economy system to recommend 

to friends, ATI 1505 5-channel amp, 

Bergman on impedance, why connectors 

matter, making your own power bars. 

No.50: CD: Cambridge DiscMagic/DACMagic, 

Primare D-20, Dynaco CDV Pro. Analog: Rega 

Planar 9 , the Linn LP12 after 25 years. Also: 

Moon preamp, Linn Linto phono stage, Ergo 

and Grado headphones. Speaker cables: Linn 

K-400, Sheffield, MIT 750 Also: a look back at 

15 years of UHF. 

No.49: Power amps: Simaudio Moon, Bryston 

3B ST, N.E.W. DCA-33, plus the Alchemist 

Forseti amp and preamp, and the McCormack 

Micro components. Also: our new Reference 

3a Suprema II reference speakers, and a 

followup on the Copland 277 CD player. Plus: 

how HDCD really works. 

No.48: Loudspeakers: JMLabs Daline 3.1, 

Vandersteen 3a, Totem Tabù, Royd Minstrel. 

CD: Cambridge CD4, Copland CDA-277. Also: 

An interview with the founder of a Canadian 

audiophile record label. 

No.47: FM tuners: Magnum Dynalab MD-108, 

Audiolab 8000T, Fanfare FT-1. Speaker cables: 

QED Qudos, Wireworld Equinox and Eclipse, 

MIT MH-750. Parasound C/BD-2000 transport 

and D/AC-2000 converter. And: Upgrading 

your system for next to nothing. 

No.46: Electronics: Simaudio 4070SE amp & 

P-4002 preamp, Copland CTA-301 & CTA-505, 

N.E.W. P-3 preamp. Digital cables: Wireworld, 

Audiostream, MIT, XLO, Audioprism, and 

Wireworld’s box for comparing interconnects. 

Also: YBA CD-1 and Spécial CD players. Yves- 

Bernard André talks about about his blue diode 

CD improvement. 

No.45: Integrated amps: Copland CTA-401, 

Simaudio 4070i, Sugden Optima 140. CD: 

Adcom GDA-700 HDCD DAC, Sonic Frontiers 

SFD-1 MkII. Interconnects: Straight Wire 

Maestro, 3 versions of Wireworld Equinox. 

Plus: Yamamura Q15 CD oil, and “Hi-Fi for the 

Financially Challenged”. 

No.44: CD players: Rotel RCD970BX, 

Counterpoint DA-10A DAC. Speakers: 

Apogee Ribbon Monitor, Totem Mite, more 

on the Gershman Avant Garde. Also: Laser- 

Link cable, “The Solution” CD treatment, 

AudioQuest sorbothane feet, Tenderfeet, 

Isobearings. Plus: Inside Subwoofers, and 

the castrati, the singers who gave their all 

for music. 

No.43: The first HDCD converter: the EAD 

DSP-1000 MkII. Speakers: Gershman Avant 

Garde, Totem Mani-2 and Rokk, Quad ESL- 

63 with Gradient subwoofer. Plus: Keith O. 

Johnson explains the road to HDCD, and our 

editor joins those of other magazines to discuss 

what’s hot in audio. 

No.42: Electronics: Spectral DMC-12 and 

Celeste P-4001 preamplifiers, amps and 

preamps from Duson. Also: Sonic Frontiers 

SFD-1 converter, power line filters from 

Audioprism, Chang, and YBA. Plus: Inside 

the preamplifier, and how the tango became 

the first “dirty” dance. 

No.41: Digital: Roksan DA-2, EAD DSP-7000, 

McCormack DAC-1, QED Ref. Digit. Cables: 

Straight Wire LSI Encore & Virtuoso, Wireworld 

Equinox, van den Hul The 2nd & Revelation, 

Cardas Cross & Hexlink Golden, Transparent 

Music-Link Super & Music-Wave Super. Plus: 

Bergman on recording stereo. 

No.40: Integrated amps: YBA Intégré, Rotel 

960, Sugden A-25B, Sima PW-3000, Linn 

Majik, Naim NAIT 3, AMC CVT3030, Duson 

PA-75. Stereo: what it is, how it works, why 

it’s disappearing from records. 

No. 39: Speakers: KEF Q50, Martin-Logan 

Aerius, Castle Howard, NEAR 40M, Klipsch 

Kg4.2. Plus: QED passive preamps, followup 

on the Linn Mimik CD player. 

No. 38: CD players: Roksan Attessa, Naim 

CDS, Linn Mimik, Quad 67, Rotel 945, 

NOTE: Price rising in early 2005! 

Micromega Model “T”. Plus: How the record 

industry will wipe out hi-fi, and why women 

have been erased from music history. 

No.37: Electronics: Celeste 4070 and McIntosh 

7150 amps, Linn Kairn and Klout. Plus: 

RoomTunes acoustic treatment, why all 

amps don’t sound alike, and how Pro Logic 

really works. 

No.36: CD players: YBA CD-2, Linn Karik/ 

Numerik, Sugden SDT-1, Mission DAD5 and 

DAC5, Audiolab 8000DAC, QED Digit, Nitty 

Gritty LP cleaner, Plus: an interview with 

Linn’s Ivor Tiefenbrun, and part 7 of Bergman 

on acoustics: building your own acoustical 

panels. 

No.35: Speakers: Castle Chester, Mirage M- 

7si, Totem Model 1, Tannoy 6.1, NHT 2.3, 3a 

Micro Monitor, Rogers LS2a/2. Plus: Tests of 

high end video recorders, hi-fi stereo recordings 

of piano performances of 75 years ago. 

Acoustics part 6: Conceiving the room. 

No.34: Cables: MIT ZapChord & PC2, Monster 

PowerLine 2+, M1, M2 Sigma, Reference 2, 

Interlink 400 & MSK2, Straight Wire Maestro, 

Isoda HA-08-PSR, Audioquest Ruby & 

Emerald, AudioStream Twinax, FMS Gold 

& Black, NBS Mini Serpent. Acoustics 5: 

Diffusing sound. “The Plot to Kill Hi-Fi,” the 

much-reprinted article on audio retailing. 

No.33: CD players: Spectral SDR-1000SL, 

Esoteric P-2/D-2, Micromega Duo.BS, Proceed 

PDT2/PDP2 and PCD2, MSB Silver, Esoteric 

CD-Z5000, Carver SD/A-490t. The future of 

audio, according to Linn’s Ivor Tiefenbrun. 

Acoustics part 4: Absorbing low frequencies. 

No.32: The Audio Dream Book: Our 152-page 

guide to what’s out there. Acoustics part 3: 

Taming reverberation. 

No.31: Amplifiers: Counterpoint SA-100 and 

SA-1000, Audio Research Classic 30, QED 

C300 and P300, Sugden Au-41, Audiolab 

8000P, Carver C-19, Arcam Delta 110 and 120. 

Why balanced lines? Buying audio by mail. 

Acoustics part 2: Predicting standing waves. 

No.30: Speakers: Castle Winchester, Energy 

22.2, P-E Léon Trilogue,NHT 1.3, Celef CF1, 

Polk RM3000, Response II by Clements. 

Acoustics part 1: Room size and acoustics. 

No.29: Turntables: Linn Basik & LP12 with 

Lingo. Oracle Delphi MkIV, Oracle Paris. 

Pickups: Goldring Excel, 1022 & 1042, 

Revolver Bullet, Talisman Virtuoso DTi, Sumiko 

Blue Point, Roksan Shiraz. Test CD’s. Dorian’s 

Craig Dory. 

No.28: Integrated amps: Linn Intek, Naim 

NAIT 2, Arcam Alpha II, Audio Innovations 

500 II, Mission Cyrus Two, Creek 4141, Sugden 

A-21. Plus: an Aiwa cassette deck, and a guide 

to distortion. 

No.27: Cables: Prisma SC-9 and Cable 10, 

MIT MH-750, MH-750 CVT MI-330SG, and 

MI-330SG CVT, Supershield. Cassettes: We 

compare Maxell, Fuji, Sony, etc.. The Esoteric 

V9000 cassette deck. Choosing a VCR. 

No.26: CD players: Spectral SDR-1000, 

Kinergetics KCD-40, Micromega CDF 1, Arcam 

Delta 70 and Black Box, Mission PCM II, Quad 

66. A panel compares CD and LP, and Keith 

Johnson talks about rethinking audio.Paul 

Bergman on amplifier design. 

To see a list of older issues: 

http://www.uhfmag.com/Individualissue.html 

EACH ISSUE costs $4.99 (in Canada) plus tax (15.03% in Québec, 15% in NB, NS and NF, 7% in other Provinces), US$4.99 in the USA, CAN$7.50 elsewhere (surface) 

or $8.60 (air mail). THE ANNIVERSARY COLLECTION (issues 7-19 except 11, 15, 17 and 18) includes 9 issues but costs like 5. For VISA or MasterCard, include your 

number, expiry date and signature. UHF Magazine, Box 65085, Place Longueuil, Longueuil, Qué., Canada J4K 5J4. Tel.: (450) 651-5720 FAX: (450) 651-3383. Order on 

line at www.uhfmag.com

Feature 

Montreal 2004 

This is no small show. See the 

crowd in the picture above? 

No, those aren’t the visitors 

to the Festival du Son et de 

l’Image, Montreal’s immensely successful 

annual show. Those are the exhibitors, 

milling about at the official cocktail 

party at the end of Day 2. 

Of course we were exhibiting as well 

as fi nding a few minutes to run about 

and cover the rest of the show. On the 

page across is our own system over in 

Delta 317. It was composed of our new 

Linn Unidisk player, Van den Hul Array 

preamplifi er and monoblocks borrowed 

from our Audiophile Boutique (audiophileboutique.com), 

and the Reference 


3a Royal Virtuoso speakers reviewed in 

this issue, sitting on Foundation stands. 

At right you can see Reine, faithfully 

taking orders for books, magazines, 

recordings and accessories. 

Despite the usual dense crowds in 

our own room, I did take advantage of 

some breaks in the fl ow to check out 

other rooms at the Delta, and also the 

larger halls in the Four Points across the 

street. 

What you see below left is the 

dramatically-styled Chord CD player, 

though I should add that its innovation 

doesn’t stop at its looks. 

Notice the two loops of cable 

at the rear? The Chord Blue 

transport actually passes 

on an incredible 64 bits of 

data…which means 32 bits 

per cable! With a pair of 

Chord 500 watt monoblocks 

and large Neat MF7 speakers, 

it sounded superb. 

I made a note to ask for 

the long-awaited McCormack 

UDP-1 universal player. It 

sounded very good with 

SACD when I heard it, and it 

was no slouch with conventional 

CD either. I listened 

to it with McCormack electronics (of 


course), and a pair of speakers that 

were new to me: ASW, which stands for 

“Accurate Sound Wave.” 

Among other large speakers I heard 

and appreciated was the Focus Audio 

FS 888 (shown below), much larger than 

the (also excellent) FS 688 that was on 

the cover of UHF No. 68. Then there 

was the Rega R9, dramatically styled (not 

unusual with Rega) but well-engineered 

as well. And over at Pierre Gabriel, I got 

to hear the new Master Series speaker, 

which I had seen in prototype form, but 

not heard until now. 

Also large was the Verity Audio 

Lohengrin, a four-way speaker of most 

impressive performance. The Lohengrin 

consists of a three-way module which 

includes a ribbon tweeter, plus a tall base 

that contains a potent 38 cm polypropylene 

woofer. Now here’s the amazing 

part: the woofer and enclosure together

have a resonance of 19 Hz. This is of 

more than casual interest, because the 

resonant frequency is also the frequency 

below which response drops like a stone. 

Indeed, Verity claims response down to 

15 Hz. It couldn’t do that in a hotel room 

(nor in most rooms), to be sure, but I can 

testify it doesn’t get timid as the music 

reaches for the lower octaves! 

The oddest speaker display was 

that of Totem, which had used lights, 

cloth, and silhouettes to create a forest. 

Hidden behind one of the cloths was a 

pair of…Forest speakers. A small video 

setup was at one end. You can see it on 

page 30. Five stars for imagination, but 

just half a star for catering to visitors 

curious about Totem’s new products. 

Over at the Cyrus room, I had a 

good look at the new Cyruslink system, 

meant to store all your music and make it 

available throughout the house. Its heart 

is the C$9500 Linkserver, which looks 

like a CD player, but contains a huge 

hard disc (up to 250 Gb). 

I was surprised to see Bösendorfer 

exhibiting at the Festival for the fi rst 

time. Yes, the legendary piano maker. It’s 

not so well known that the company also 

makes loudspeakers. The demonstration 

was done with a video system, using the 

D-VHS high defi nition system. Both the 

video and the audio rather disappointed 

me, though that may refl ect more on 

the people who had set up the room 

than on the actual performance of the 

Bösendorfer speakers. 

I didn’t have time to brave the long 

lineups for the demo of the Sensio 3-D 

video system, whose latest incarnation 

I had seen in Vegas. But the Montreal 

demo included one more key product: 

D-Box’s Odyssée motion simulator 

chairs. Albert did get to see (and feel!) 

it, and reports that the combination was 

a memorable one. 

I got to hear an exceptional demonstration 

of the Linn Unidisk player…not 

that I needed one, since by the time 

the Festival opened UHF had its own 

Unidisk. Past Linn rooms were rather 

reverberant, with too much surface and 

not enough furnishings. This time wraparound 

curtains tamed the nasties. The 

Unidisk fed a Klimax Kontrol preamp, 

three Klimax amps (two monoblocks 

and a stereo amp, driving Akurate 242 

speakers. An SACD version of one of 

the familiar Patricia Barber recordings 

sounded sumptuous. 

The small Newfoundland company 

Aurum was back, with a more mature 

version of its unusual system: four singleended 

tube amps for the midrange and 

tweeter, Bryston solid state modules for 

the bass, and electronic crossovers all 

around. Very nice. For good measure, 

Aurum had brought its own Integris 

CD player. I wouldn’t be surprised if we 

heard more from Aurum. 

A lot of turntables were playing at the 

show, including ones from Clearaudio, 

DPS, Roksan, and Pro-Ject, among 

others. Is vinyl dead? Sure…like tubes 

are dead! 

Want more about the show? You’ll 

fi nd plenty of text and pictures on our 

site: www.uhfmag.com/Montreal2004. 

By any standard, this was a superb 

show. Will we be back next year? Just try 

to keep us away! 


Feature

Waitley, “It’s not what you are that 

holds you back, it’s what you think 

that you are not.” I was reminded 

of that statement when I heard Gaetan’s 

first comments as we 

started on our tour. 

“I don’t think my 

ears are t rained 

enough for this,” 

he said, sounding 

almost apologetic. 

And yet, Gaetan is, 

among many other 

things, a guitarist 

who remembers carrying 

his instrument 

along as reference, 

when he bought his 

first pair of speakers 

(and what did he 

settle for, you may 

ask? Magnepans!). 

“But that was a long 

time ago,” he adds. 

Strange, how many 

people underestimate 

their ability to simply 

appreciate music when faced with an 

array of sophisticated equipment. I don’t 

know much about this, some would say, 

dismissing the idea altogether, or I’m 

not an expert. Yet they go to concerts, 

they talk about what they heard, and 

they know what they enjoyed and what 

they didn’t. 

Touring With Witnesses 

This year I toured the Montreal 

show twice with two very different 

companions, and I thought I’d share 

their impressions with you as if you 

were here with us. I let them guide me 

Feature In the words of psychologist Dennis 

Illustrations: 

Above: the unusual Wilson Benesch Discovery 

speaker, with its external woofer. 

Lower right: Musicians from a local high 

school playing live in the Delta lobby 

(perhaps to show us all up). On the next 

page: two turntables. At top, the affordable 

Pro-Ject RPM9 with carbon fi bre 

arm and electronic speed control. Below, 

the eye-catching Clearaudio Master 

Reference. 


by Albert Simon 

through the different rooms (well, okay, 

I also suggested a few I thought should 

be on our list), and I often asked them 

to go in fi rst and let me know if I should 

come in too. Interesting. 

This won’t be an actual review, just 

impressions, comments, a lot of nods, 

raised eyebrows and silent wows. 

“Look at this, a Thorens turntable, I 

didn’t know they still made them,” said 

Gaetan as we listened to a clear rendition 

of Muddy Waters playing through a 

Unico integrated amp and Opera speakers, 

handcrafted in Italy. He didn’t say 

much else, but I liked the presence and 

the immediacy of the music. He didn’t 

say much in the next room either, and yet 

we were both impressed by the sound of 

the blue and silver Shanling equipment, 

glowing quietly. We took the time to 

listen to Jheena Lodwick singing Getting 

to Know You through a pair of ALI 

Acoustics speakers. 

We had an interesting experience 

in another room, where a Krell SACD 

player was hooked to professional-looking 

Nagra amplifi ers playing through a 

pair of Parsifal speakers by Verity Audio. 

A track of Fidelio’s SACD Via Crucis 

by Liszt was on: beautiful choral voices 

rose airily, firmly supported by low 

organ notes. And then the same track 

was repeated in multichannel, using 

an additional pair of similar speakers 

behind us. We looked at each other with 

raised eyebrows, the music fi lling the air 

and seeming to transport us. As we left, 

the same procedure was repeated with 

Nicolas Major on solo guitar. Gaetan had 

doubts written on his face. “My ears are 

not yet accustomed to surround sound,” 

he explained. 

He smiled broadly as we entered the 

next room, staring at the pair of B&W 

805 Signature speakers, “I should be 

able to recognize their sound, I have a 

small pair of B&W speakers at home.” 

Their music was fi nely produced by an 

all-Classé system with the CAP-2100 

integrated amp and CDP-100 player. 

Later, as we listened to the Naim and 

Spendor combination in another setting, 

Gaetan pulled out one of his CDs 

and asked to listen to it. It was a Frank 

Martin composition played by guitarist 

Jürgen Ruck. “Remarkable neutrality,” 

he exclaimed. “There, that’s what a 

guitar sounds like,” he added, looking at 

the Naim CD5 player, NAC 112 preamp, 

NAP 150 power amp and the Spendor 

Classic SP3/1P speakers. As we were 

leaving, I glanced at the Nottingham 

Horizon turntable. “They’re back,” I 

said. I don’t think he believed me. 

Gaetan was now leading the way, 

from one room to the next; his doubts 

about his discerning ability had diminished, 

and when we had listened for a bit 

in some rooms, and he shrugged with an 

apologetic smile, and I knew it was time 

to explore some more. 

Facing the large Martin-Logan 

Ascent speakers he became very still, 

totally concentrated, and asked to listen 

to the same Frank Martin guitar piece. 

The Wadia (Series 3) 302 player played 

it through the Blue Circle BC3 Galactica 

MKII (a dual mono linestage preamp) 

and the BC28 hybrid power amp. Gaetan 

didn’t say a word. He slowly sat down 

and asked to listen to another of his 

CDs, featuring the Hilliard Ensemble 

of male voices. “Voices are the ultimate 

test for me,” he whispered. He left the 

room reluctantly, lost in his thoughts. 

(He would often refer to this moving 

experience after the end of his tour.) 

Another memorable experience he 

had was with the Living Voice Avatar

OBX speakers with Conrad-Johnson 

amplifi cation (ACT2 preamp and Premier 

140 power amp), with Chord’s 

BLU transport and DAC 64 converter. 

“You can even hear the guitar’s woody 

resonance,” he exclaimed, “and the low 

notes are superb.” When the Hilliard 

Ensemble sang, he noticed the defi nition 

in the voices and the clear separation, 

and he smiled broadly. “I never knew 

the tenor was that good.” 

Gaetan seemed transformed now, 

walking confi dently toward each new 

experience, his remaining doubts dissolving 

in a newfound assertiveness. 

“This system is defi nitely one of the 

top four,” he stated unequivocally in 

the Linn room. The Unidisk 1.1 was 

matched to a Klimax Kontrol preamp, 

a set of three power amps (one Klimax 

Solo mono amp and two Klimax Twinstereo 

amps) feeding a pair of Akurate 

242 speakers. “The brass sound great,” 

said Gaetan, after listening to Blood, 

Sweat and Tears’ Spinning Wheel. Then 

he became fascinated with the comparison 

done with a different source, the 

Kivor server, containing multiple CD 

selections stored without compression. 

An interesting comparison Gaetan 

did did was with the two Pierre Gabriel systems. 

He asked to listen to Charles Ives’ 

Piano Sonata No. 2 played by Marc-André 

Hamelin (a fellow music student of his, 

By the way… 

at the U of M), fi rst with the Gryphon 

Mikado player, Callisto integrated 

amp and the Master speakers by Pierre 

Gabriel…and then, in the other room, 

with a Jadis JD3 player, DA60 integrated 

amp and the impressive Master Reference 

speakers. He seemed to like both 

versions but then added with a puzzled 

look “They’re completely different.” 

And we concluded our tour with 

the Quad ESL speakers, playing the 

same piano piece with an Arcam CD 33 

player and Conrad Johnson’s Premier 

17 LS preamp and MV60 power amp. 

“The sound is crystalline, so clear in 

the highs,” he noted. “There are more 

harmonics,” he added, and when he 

listened to the Hilliard Ensemble he 

pointed to the stage and said “I can see 

exactly where the singers are standing”. 

I smiled because I knew exactly what 

he meant and I agreed with all that he 

heard, here and in all the other rooms. 

I smiled because I also witnessed 

quite a change in Gaetan’s attitude, from 

an uncertain and unsure initial approach 

to the seasoned and confi dent appreciation 

of music that all audiophiles reach 

once they stop thinking and talking 

about specs, and discover beauty. 

* * * 

The next day, I welcomed Michael, a 

young and enthusiastic new audiophile 

who had thoroughly enjoyed the Montreal 

Sound Festival last year for the 

fi rst time. He had already been around 

this year’s with his friend Jimmy, a more 

experienced audiophile and reader of 

UHF Magazine. They were both eager 

to share the tour with me and, pulling 

out his notepad, Michael said “Naim”. 

We went straight to the entrance 

level all-Naim room — and I mean all 

Naim. “Why leave it to chance?” said 

You can read lots more about the Montreal show (and the Vegas show as well) on 

our Web site: www.uhfmag.com. 

the representative, a touch of humour 

in his eyes, pointing to the Naim cables. 

A CD5 player was linked to the NAIT 

5i integrated amp, featuring DIN and 

RCA connectors (and an optional silvercolored 

front adapter plate, for those who 

might tire of an all-black system). The 

speakers were the two-and-a-half-way 

Ariva. Michael remarked on the 

sound of the trumpet, and found 

great clarity in the percussion. 

From entry level to 

dreamland. Michael 

wanted to hear one 

of his CDs in the 

two Pierre Gabriel 

rooms. It was the 

final track of the 

Gladiator score by 

Hans Zimmer, We 

Live Forever, sung 

by Lisa Gerrard. 

“I heard sounds I 

hadn’t noticed before,” he said, after we 

emerged from the Jadis room. Then, 

emerging from the Gryphon room, he 

seemed surprised. “I heard other sounds 

in this room, some instruments appeared 

more clearly.” (Welcome to the club, I 

thought to myself.) 

“This is therapy,” therapy,” Michael said with 

a longing sigh, and Jimmy nodded. We 

were listening to Georgia On My Mind by 

Mari Nakamoto, followed by 

Sunfl ower 

on the Three Blind Mice label. The CD 

was played by Audio Aero, amplifi ed by 

a Tenor Audio amplifi er and came out of 

a pair of Lamhorn speakers. In the Linn 

room, we arrived just in time to hear 

the spectacular soundtrack of Don Juan 

de Marco by composer Michael Kamen. 

“It’s quite something,” said Michael, 

looking for words. “The soundfi eld is so 

vast,” he decided. “And it’s so airy,” added 

Jimmy. As we then listened to Neville 

Marriner conducting Rossini’s overture 

to The Barber of Seville, Jimmy noted 

that we were sitting right in front of the 


Feature

Feature 

orchestra. “The sound is dynamic, but 

without fatigue,” he explained. 

We entered another large room 

featuring the YBA CD player and 

amplifi ers, and massive JMLab speakers. 

“I don’t hear the speakers,” whispered 

Michael. I was startled. “It’s as if the 

music is right there, as if the speakers 

have disappeared”. I got it. 

We played the final song on the 

Gladiator soundtrack with the Living 

Voice OBX speakers, the Chord front 

end, amplifi ed by Conrad-Johnson, and 

the music suddenly fi lled the large room. 

“These speakers are not too big,” he said, 

“Yet they create a very wide image.” 

We spent a long time listening to 

different selections through the newlyintroduced 

Aurum Acoustics Integris 

300B active speaker system (including a 

stereo tube triamplifi er with six-channel 

output), with an Integris CDP playerpreamplifi 

er. Michael asked to listen to 

Sirens, a track on another of his CDs, 

called Mythos. Both Jimmy and Michael 

were impressed with the abundance of 

detail, the extended dynamic range and 

Illustrations: 

Above: The Totem “forest,” hiding an 

actual pair of Forest speakers. At right: 

The gorgeous Song Audio display, 

including the SA-1 line level preamp 

and the SA-300 MB single-ended tube 

monoblocks. 


the rock-solid impact. Jimmy was then 

particularly drawn to another room 

where the Creek CD player reached 

us through Epos speakers. “One of the 

best systems for the price,” he asserted. 

We listened to the haunting music 

of The Sea, the fi rst track on the Trio 

Morcheeba’s Big Calm CD. Both were 

speechless at the end. “We’ll 

wait here,” said Michael. 

Another one of his favorites 

was the Chord array of 

sculptured components, from 

the DAC 64 to the 500 watts 

monoblocs and high frequency 

power supplies, playing 

through Neat speakers. As 

Lisa Gerrard’s mournful voice 

rose in the quiet background, I 

could tell Michael was moved. 

“You can just close your eyes 

and…” He didn’t fi nish. 

We then had a superb 

example of quality LP reproduction 

with the Clearaudio 

turntable, playing Funkjazztical 

Tricknology through an Accustic 

Arts integrated amp and 

the stunning Acapella speakers. 

“Wow, that sounds great, 

we’re right here with them,” 

said both of my companions. 

“Turntables are back,” I said 

to them, echoing what I had 

suggested to Gaetan earlier. 

They looked around the room at the 

numerous turntable creations, including 

the sophisticated Clearaudio Master 

Reference. 

As though to confi rm that, we ended 

the audio tour with Austria’s Pro-Ject 

Audio Systems turntables for all budgets. 

Eric Clapton Unplugged was on and we sat 

quietly, facing the large Magneplanars 

1.6 QR panels. The sound was natural 

yet not spectacular, and my companions 

said nothing. The source was a Pro-Ject 

RPM9 turntable with its own carbon 

fi bre arm and an acrylic platter. Added to 

it, for precision, was a Pro-ject Speed Box 

SE (a high precision, quartz-generated 

electronic speed regulator), a Pro-Ject 

Tube Box (phono stage and voltage 

regulator) and Exposure preamp and 

power amp. “You know who are our 

best customers in Europe?” asked the 

representative as we prepared to leave. 

“They're 16-year olds.” 

As I’ve said, there was nothing in the 

sound that shouted “Here I am, look at 

what I can do, aren’t you impressed?” 

Nothing, except the music. 

And the fact that we could just 

reach out and touch Eric Clapton if we 

wanted.

Linn Unidisk 1.1 

If there’s one philosophical point 

that Scotland’s Linn Products is 

associated with, it is the importance 

of the source in a music 

reproduction system. Linn’s original 

product, still made after three decades, 

was the Linn LP12 turntable. Though it 

had precursors, Linn did the opposite of 

what nearly all its competitors were then 

doing. Today, Linn’s new fl agship is also 

a source component, and it may be every 

bit as revolutionary as the LP12. 

Linn has had other top source 

components in the intervening years. 

Its astonishing CD12 player was on 

the cover of UHF No. 56, in which we 

praised it as the very best CD player 

known to us. The same player was heard 

by the people at Sony Corporation, who 

came to the obvious conclusion: not even 

the vaunted Sony engineers could have 

built such a machine. 

The realization led to an unexpected 

collaboration. Sony invited the (comparatively 

tiny) Linn Products to collaborate 

on the development of a new player. 

It would have to play SACD, but also 

DVD-Audio, in order to end the format 

war. It would have to be a DVD video 

player as well, and of course it would 

have to be an exceptional CD player 

besides. Sony gave Linn full access to 

its proprietary technology. In return, it 

reserved the right to license the resulting 

technology to other companies. 

The collaboration was successful. We 

usually reserve our conclusions for the 

end of a review, but this is no ordinary 

product. Listening to it came as a shock, 

and less than 48 hours after it arrived 

we purchased it. Yes, it’s expensive. Yes, 

we had hoped to adopt a more afford- 

able SACD player. But what was almost 

instantly clear was that never, but never, 

had we heard any source component 

sound like this one. 

Does that include turntables? Let’s 

not get ahead of ourselves. 

Though the Unidisk is about the 

size of the CD12, it doesn’t look as 

massive, and it is surprisingly light, 

especially for a product costing over 

C$16,000. Like the CD12 (and the Ikemi 

player as well), it is built around Linn’s 

proprietary transport. On its denselypacked 

surface-mount circuit board are 

distinct electronic sections for all of the 

Unidisk’s functions: SACD, CD, DVD, 

and DVD-A. The machine plays ’em all, 

right down to Kodak Picture CDs. 

When we fi rst got our test machine 

(with a clear warning that the distributor 

would need it back in time for the 

Montreal show in early April), we fi rst 

tried it with our collection of SACDs, 

and specifi cally Eric Bibb’s Needed Time, 

familiar to us from countless listening 

sessions. Reine was stunned. “The last 

time I felt a shock like that,” she said, 

“was many years ago, when I fi rst logged 

on to a server with my computer, and it 

greeted me by name!” 

The next day we put on some conventional 

CDs, and that tipped us over the 

edge. We had known that we couldn’t 

go on using other people’s SACD play- 

Is this the source 

component 

audiophiles have 

been waiting for? 

ers, and that we needed to get our own, 

but which one? It didn’t take much to 

convince us: our choice couldn’t possibly 

be any player but this one. We called the 

distributor, and asked for extra quick 

shipment, so that we ourselves could use 

a Unidisk at the Montreal show. 

This is an expensive product, of 

course, but Linn has two other Unidisk 

“play everything” models. The Unidisk 

2.1, around C$10K (US$7500), is optimized 

for movies, and the even cheaper 

Unidisk SC includes what amounts to a 

multichannel preamplifi er. 

Though the player is not outlandishly 

sized, Linn has found a way to squeeze 

in a lot of jacks. There are several video 

outputs: composite, S-video, SCART 

(used in Europe), interlaced component, 

progressive component, and the new 

HDMI as well. The six audio outputs are 

phono jacks (of doubtful quality, alas), 

and the two main channels are available 

balanced as well. 

The transport is mechanically slick, 

the drawer sliding in and out with a 

velvety purr that reminds you this isn’t 

some rebadged mass-market player. 

However we wish the drawer were 

deeper. It’s all too easy to put in the 

disc slightly askew, which results in an 

“unknown disc” warning on the screen, 

or an actual jam. On two occasions we 

had to free a stuck disc by gently prying 

the drawer open with a paper clip…a 

sweat-inducing operation when one 

recalls what this device costs! 

Because the Unidisk has separate 

sections for different formats, it take 

the player more than a few seconds to 

determine what sort of disc you’ve put 

in, and therefore what circuits it should 

fi re up. That gets old real fast. 

There are other operational oddities 

too. Fast forwarding doesn’t work the 

way you expect. Instead of just whizzing 

forward, the Linn advances by 

six-second segments, pausing between 

each. Pushing the “previous selection” 

button really takes you to the start of 

the selection before, not to the start of 

the current one, as in other players. Push 

“play” to go to the start of the current 

track. 

It’s well-known that it’s impossible to 

play most DVD-A discs unless you have 

a video display connected to the player. 


Listening Room

Listening Room 

T h a t i s o f 

course the case 

with the Unidisk, 

but setting up initial preferences also 

requires a video display. Our solution: 

a tiny monochrome TV with a video 

input, C$14.97 at Wal-Mart. Visitors 

look quizzically at the tiny set, and we 

tell them they’re looking at our new 

home theatre setup. Long silences! 

Because the Unidisk is so many players 

in one, the test turned, inevitably, 

into several tests. 

The Unidisk as CD player 

We began with a disc that is new to 

us, a collection of wind band music by 

contemporary composer Norman Dello 

Joio (Klavier K11138), specifi cally his 

Fantasia on a Theme of Haydn. It opens 

with considerable percussive action, 

which shook the Alpha room when we 

heard it with our reference player. With 

the Linn, to our surprise, it was even 

more solid and powerful. “That tympani 

sure gets the job done!” remarked 

Albert. 

But there’s much more to this fascinating 

music than percussion, and the 

Linn made it all glow. The woodwinds 

were smooth and realistic, the bassoons 

particularly enthralling. The brass was 

bright in the right way, without a trace 

of annoying shrillness. All of the instruments 

were easier to identify within a 

space that seemed to acquire an extra 

dimension. 

Our favorite choral recording, Now the 

Green Blade Riseth, can sound superb, but 

we have heard certain players — not to 

mention some amplifi ers and speakers — 


turn it into an 

ear-shattering mess. 

Of course we knew the 

Unidisk wouldn’t do that, but 

it delivered rather more than we had 

expected. The challenge in reproducing 

choral voices is to keep them separately 

identifiable, and at the same time to 

meld them together into a whole as the 

conductor intends. The Linn handled 

the voices perfectly, and the music was so 

well served that we didn’t fi nd ourselves 

writing much. This is how the piece 

should sound. 

We continued with a Gospel blues 

piece, Ain’t No Grave from Doug 

McLeod’s Come to Find (Audioquest 

AQCD1027). Before McLeod begins 

to sing, there is an introduction by his 

guitar and various percussion instruments, 

and we were surprised to discover 

how much more we could hear with the 

Linn player. This wasn’t a matter of 

hearing some of the percussion more 

clearly, but of hearing it at all. “Come 

to fi nd” indeed! 

The rest of the song? It seemed to 

go by rather quickly, an impression 

we’d had with the previous two pieces 

as well. “McLeod’s voice seemed a little 

hoarse with our old player,” commented 

Gerard, “but not with the Unidisk.” The 

voices of the choral backup singers were 

clear but nicely velvety. 

We wound up this part of the test 

with Margie Gibson singing Soft Lights 

and Sweet Music, from her Irving Berlin 

album Say It With Music (Sheffield 

CD-36). The song exudes such magic 

you’d think no player could possibly get 

it wrong, but we have enough experience 

to know better. The Linn Unidisk made 

it sound better than we had ever heard 

it before, and indeed this had been the 

CD that had convinced us to clear all the 

other candidates off our shopping list. 

What adjectives to use? Magical? 

Sensuous? Voluptuous? “Listening to it 

made me wish I were a man,” said Reine, 

“if it would mean being sung to by a 

woman like that.” If Gibson’s voice was 

perfect, with no trace of the hardness 

it sometimes acquires, we were equally 

impressed with the eerily realistic sound 

of the piano, cello and double bass that 

accompany her. 

Is this the world’s best CD player? 

In any case, it can do much, much more 

than whatever is in second place. 

SACD takes on the CD 

We live in an age of conspiracy theories. 

Not only are there dark theories 

about the JFK assassination and the 

Apollo moon landings, but there is a 

current belief that companies making 

hybrid SACDs deliberately sabotage the 

CD Red Book layer to make the SACD 

layer sound better by comparison. Fortunately, 

it’s possible to compare an SACD 

with the same release on a conventional 

Compact Disc. 

And that was how we began our comparison. 

One of our favorite test pieces 

is Eric Bibb’s Needed Time Gospel song, 

found on his Spirit and the Blues album. 

We played the CD version (Opus 3 

CD19401) and then the SACD version 

(CD19411). The CD sounds excellent, as 

we have long known. What could SACD 

add? 

Lots, it turned out. The guitar licks 

in the opening fi lled a three-dimensional 

space most effectively. Bibb’s voice had 

a certain softness, and even a sweetness, 

that it lacked on the CD version, 

but the player certainly didn’t hide 

anything from us. The harmonica solo 

was gorgeous, and the second guitar, a 

bottleneck, was downright spectacular. 

“Musicians work so hard to give us these 

pleasing effects,” said Reine, “and I’ll 

bet they don’t suspect that it’s actually 

possible for us to hear them.” 

The Unidisk can be set to play the 

Red Book layer of an SACD, as can some 

other players. We pulled out Opus 3’s 

Showcase SACD (CD21000), and ran a 

comparison on the jazz number Comes 

Love. We should mention that this piece 

is also available on conventional CD, but 

that CD is processed in HDCD; unlike

most other Linn players, the Unidisk has 

no HDCD decoder. 

Indeed, because we are used to 

hearing the properly-decoded HDCD 

version, we thought the CD layer of 

the hybrid disc sounded a touch fl at, 

and Reine found the usually humorous 

sousaphone raspy and incoherent. 

Changing to the SACD layer brought 

a spectacular improvement, with the 

instruments moving apart in space. 

Despite the separation, the counterpoints 

— especially that between the 

clarinet and the saxophone — were 

considerably enhanced. The sound was 

warm, lyrical and detailed, and indeed 

the piece sounded better than we had 

ever heard it before. 

We continued with a classical recording, 

Rachmaninov’s Rhapsody on a Theme 

of Paganini (Pentatone 5186 114). This 

1974 Philips recording was copied 

directly from one of the original analog 

recorders into the Digital Sound Stream 

encoder. Even the CD layer was excellent, 

with none of the all-too-frequent 

Compact Disc nasties. 

The SACD layer, on the other hand, 

was… 

Well, here we go lapsing into impenetrable 

Latin again. But the entire report 

is available in the print issue. 







































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Listening Room












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Summing it up… 

Brand/model: Linn Unidisk 1.1 

Price: C$16,750/US$10,995 

Dimensions: 38 x 36 x 8 cm 

Most liked: Awesome performance 

with any disc that will fit 

Least liked: Slow reflexes, some 

operational rough edges 

Verdict: The Linn Sondek of the 

digital age 











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On the test bench 

At the moment we have no appropriate 

tools for testing SACD players, and 

so we had to settle for some measurements 

on the CD section of the Unidisk. 

The results were decent, certainly, but 

they did not even hint at the player’s 

remarkable sound. 

The 100 square wave on the previous 

page is far from the best we’ve seen, with 

considerable undamped ringing. The 

tilted top could suggest a misbehaving 

anti-aliasing fi lter. We say “could” 

because the way the music comes out 

contradicts the reading. Who we gonna 

believe? 

The low-level (-60 dB) sine wave, 

shown on this page, is pretty much 

perfect. 

Jitter was low, though we could see 

a bit of extremely low frequency noise 

I was thinking about the days when I 

was experimenting with my very first hi-fi 

system. I would make a major upgrade — or 

as major as one could make on a teenager’s 

allowance — and I’d want to listen to every 

one of my records over again. 

Of course it's been a long time since I've 

owned so few recordings this could possibly 

be an option, but listening to the Linn 

Unidisk reminded me of that era. For the 

first time in memory, I can pick any CD 

in in my collection, and I feel excited about 

hearing it again. The Linn Unidisk is that 

good. 

Of course, SACD is another matter entirely. 

With the best ones, I can finally forget 

that I’m listening to a digital reproduction. 

Producing this astonishing machine 

really really does propel Linn back where it once 

was: making the source component that can 

light the way for everyone else. 

Incidentally, Linn claims that the 

Unidisk Unidisk does not sound as good with CDs 

as its CD12 player does. I’ve looked over my 

notes from from our issue No. 56 listening session 

with the CD12, and you know what? 

I’m not sure Linn is right. 

—Gerard Rejskind 

of the sort we associate 

with tube gear. It 

was in no way audible, 

fortunately. The transport 

did not take well 

to CDs that were not 

perfect. It could play 

track 31 on our Pierre 

Verany test CD, the 

one with a 1 mm slice 

through it. The next 

track (1.25 mm) triggered intermittent 

muting. Unlike the bulletproof CD-12, 

the Unidisk is sensitive to vibration, and 

striking it even gently causes the laser to 

mistrack. 

Well over a quarter of a century ago, 

Linn earned fame and a permanent niche 

in the audiophile pantheon with the 

Linn Sondek turntable. It was expensive 

by the standards of that day, and yet it 

didn’t look expensive, with a plain wood 

plinth and a rather wobbly suspension. 

It had but one speed at a time many 

CROSSTALK 

What is high fidelity? What is the 

meaning of those two words juxtaposed? It 

should mean fidelity to the highest level…or, if 

you prefer, truth. 

In our tireless efforts to find that longedfor 

fidelity, that truth, we go through numerous 

hours of listening to components 

for quality systems. Oh, there are plenty of 

impressive products out there, CD players, 

turntables, and all the other parts that make 

up a serious audiophile’s music system, but 

this this one sets itself itself totally apart. 

So So here I am, once again forced to 

search for new words, adjectives I haven’t 

yet used to express my sentiments as precisely 

as possible. Loquacious, sensitive and 

emotional as I am by nature, I shouldn’t be 

surprised to find that I’ve pretty well exhaustedhausted 

the list. 

There There is but one adjective I had never 

yet dared to use: perfect! 

There There it is. Unless and until someone 

shows me a player superior to this one, the 

Unidisk Unidisk 1.1 is perfect. It is, I believe, the 

quintessence quintessence of high fidelity. 

—Reine Lessard 

The truth about the Linn Unidisk 

Is this the only review available of this new “everything” player? Hardly. But we 

dare to think that it offers more real-life information than those of…well, you 

know who. 

And when you’re even thinking of dropping this much money on a player, you 

want to get the best advice you can. Find out what we thought of the Unidisk as 

a CD player, as an SACD player, as a DVD-A player, and of course as a movie 

player. 

Oh yes…and can it take on a top-grade analog system? The truth in UHF. 

When can you really say “This is it, I 

turntables boasted four. Its arm didn’t 

even have a detachable headshell. What 

it could do, however, was play music in a 

more emotionally satisfying fashion than 

any turntable had done before. There is 

not a quality turntable made today whose 

designer does not owe thanks to Linn 

and the Linn Sondek. 

But we are in the digital age today. 

Amazingly enough, the little Scottish 

company that revolutionized the record 

player three decades ago has just done 

the same thing with digital. 

shall look no further, I’m calling off the 

search, I’m just going to settle down and 

enjoy the music”? Well, I felt like saying 

that after the listening session with the 

Linn Unidisk 1.1. 

The constant improvement in players 

I’ve witnessed over the years has brought 

us to levels I could scarcely have imagined 

when those first CD players offered a silent 

background but steely-sounding strings. I 

never expected such transparency and sheer 

presence, presence, such immediate contact with with the 

musicians, as I’ve felt here. Barriers I never 

suspected fell between me and the music. A 

haze lifted lifted where where no haze had been — and 

that was just with CDs! 

With SACDs, words falter, impressions 

are hard to render. What sounded so rich 

became…well, richer, fuller with even more 

detail and sweet refinement. The sound 

didn’t appear to come just from the speakers, 

it enveloped them and filled the air effortlessly. 

You haven’t heard what I heard, 

but you know how that feels with live music. 

With a player like the the Unidisk, one 

could live happily ever after. (Or, until…) 

—Albert Simon 


Listening Listening Listening Room Room Room


Shanling SCD-T200 

It can hardly help looking familiar. 

It is a near lookalike of the Shanling 

CD-T100 that turned heads on 

our issue No. 66 cover. We fi gured 

you could have bought it for looks alone, 

though in fact there were other reasons 

to consider it. 

The SCD-T200 is of course an 

SACD player as well as a CD deck. That 

extra functionality aside, the similarities 

are striking. The analog gain stage also 

uses four tubes, though with directoutput 

jacks allowing you to bypass the 

tubes if you want them just for show. 

The headphone jack is still there, and 

the build quality is still of a level that 

must give the competition nightmares. 

An electronic volume control is still 

included, allowing direct connection 

to a power amplifi er. This player still 

comes with an upscale power cord which 

includes a Schurter IEC connector and 

a Hubbell hospital-grade AC plug. 

Oh yes…and the jacks are still 

marked “made in USA.” We love the 

irony! 

There are some styling differences 

if you look closely. The rings around 

the tubes are now acrylic rather than 

resonance-prone sheet metal, and there 


are only two of them per tube, making 

them more easily removable for tube 

swaps. Though the metal fi nish of our 

player recalled that of the CD player, the 

distributor tells us more recent production 

models have an all-stainless fi nish, 

without those warm copper and brass 

accents. 

Shanling has recycled some aging 

Sony technology, including the transport 

Sony used in its original C$8000 

SACD player. Anything wrong with 

that? Just one thing: the Shanling is 

strictly a two-channel machine. Forget 

surround sound. 

When you read that, one of two 

things probably happened: either your 

turned the page, or you shrugged. For 

our part, we’re with the shruggers. The 

SACD standard, like the DVD-A standard 

for that matter, has made surround 

sound extraordinarily inaccessible. The 

It plays SACD. It plays 

CD too. It could even 

be the player you’ve 

been waiting for. 

digital output will feed you a Red Book 

data stream, but it will not give you access 

to the SACD info, which means you 

can’t have surround sound unless you 

own a preamplifi er, integrated amplifi er 

or receiver with at least one six-channel 

input. Yes, they make such things now, 

and some of them are even quite good. 

A lot of audiophiles, however, have been 

known to express the view that if God 

had mean us to have 5.1 channels, He 

would have given us more ears. Forgive 

us if we choose to avoid getting into 

theological arguments. 

By the way, the demo disc included 

with the Shanling does have several 

multichannel tracks. Go fi gure. 

The SCD-T200 has several options 

besides the ones already mentioned. It 

can upsample CD sound into SACD territory, 

for one thing. The older machine 

also did that, and we disagreed as to the 

value, if any, added by such juggling. And 

it has buttons on both the top panel and 

the remote that allow you to play the CD 

layer on a hybrid SACD. Unfortunately, 

on some discs the Shanling went right 

to the CD layer instead of the higher 

resolution layer. There are front panel 

lights showing which layer is being

played, and we wished they weren’t the 

same color. By the way, you can’t change 

between CD and SACD on the fl y. The 

player has to stop, get its bearings, and 

relaunch the track. This is true of all 

SACD players. 

Our machine was brand new, and we 

gave it about 100 hours of run-in time 

before installing it in our Alpha system, 

alongside our reference, the much more 

expensive Linn Unidisk 1.1 also reviewed 

in this issue. We then began the session 

with a set of regular Red Book CDs. The 

reason: we think most audiophiles will 

be reluctant to spend the money for this 

player unless it can do itself credit with 

the discs that make up the bulk of their 

collections. So how good a CD player is 

it? 

The first selection was Norman 

Dello Joio’s Fantasy on a Theme of Haydn 

(Klavier K11138), an unusually wellrecorded 

CD with impressive brass 

and percussive effects. The opening 

tympani salvo didn’t quite push us back 

in our chairs the way it did on the Linn 

player, but it had plenty of power all the 

same. Everything was a bit reduced, 

with the woodwinds less realistic, and 

notably with less energy in the lower 

midrange. On the other hand we heard 

neither shrillness nor confusion. “This 

wouldn’t be too different from what our 

old reference player would have done,” 

said Gerard. 

We continued with an old favorite, 

Now the Green Blade Riseth (Proprius 

PRCD9093), an exceptional choral 

recording that can turn nasty in the 

wrong hands. It didn’t. It began well, 

with the solo fl ute especially attractive. 

The female choral voices were smooth 

and attractive as well, with the single 

exception of rather prominent (but 

happily undistorted) “S” sounds. We 

had some doubts about the bottom end. 

Certainly it wasn’t thin, as it often is with 

inadequate CD players, but male voices 

had somewhat less body. Both the string 

bass and the organ in the fi nale suffered 

somewhat as well. 

Despite that, we were willing to give 

the Shanling good marks, aware as we 

were that our Linn player is a tough act 

to follow. “It’s an honorable result” said 

Albert. 

Our third and fi nal CD selection 

was Soft Lights and Sweet Music from 

Margie Gibson’s Say It With Music disc. 

The song opens with an introduction 

by the piano, which sounded very good, 

if not quite as subtle and refined as 

with the Linn. Gibson’s voice still gave 

us goosebumps as she slid among the 

notes. She was very much present in 

the room with us. Most players give her 

“S” sounds a little too much emphasis, 

and the Shanling did that too. Still, we 

were pleased with what we heard. “It’s 

honorable,” suggested Gerard, smiling, 

and we all laughed. 

So far so good. Now for its talents as 

an SACD player. 

Sorry, but here comes the Latin 

again. Check out the complete print 

issue, which can be ordered on line. 

Gerard was a little less pleased, 

findi Adigna facidunt nullamet, se 

delesti ncidunt prat, veliquis at. Ute 

digna augue delis nim volore tat. Ure 

corem velis adiam, sequisl euis augiam, 

quat non henim vel ullaorem er am nos 

nonsenis at aliquatuero. 







































si. 















Listening Room



si. 



wisi. 













augait augait velestie faciduis nummy nonsed 





This Shanling can be a terrific deal, or 

a really poor buy, depending on your situasituations. If you want surround sound, or if you 

think you may want surround sound in the 

next few years, you might as well scratch 

this unit off your list right now. And if you 

also need to have it play movies, this is not 

the player for you either. 

But there’s another possibility. Perhaps 

you’re looking for a reasonably good modern 

player for your (possibly) vast CD collection, 

and yet you’re thinking that you 

want to be ready for any future deluge of 

Super Audio recordings. Here’s a player 

that will do justice to those superior discs, 

and will possibly play CDs better than your 

present player can. 

As if that weren’t enough, it can look 












Brand/model: Shanling SCD-T200 

Price: C$3499/US$2695 

Dimensions: 43 x 30 x14.5 cm 

Most liked: Very good performance 

on both kinds of discs 

Least liked: No provision for 

multichannel 

Verdict: Take away the SACD 

capability, and it’s still a contender 

Looking at SACD? Need advice? 

You probably do, as did we until we adopted a reference player and began exploring 

for ourselves. 

CROSSTALK 

great doing it. Of course, its looks is not a 

factor…or is it? 


It’s comforting to know that you can 

have a grasp on the future, that you can enjoy 

your CD collection with a marked improvement 

over previous generation players, 

while already nibbling at the edges of 

the coming SACD harvest. 

You can probably find other CD players 

with that special definition and excellent 

rendition of voices, with bass as solid and 

midrange as sweet, but with this one you 

can just replace your CD that just played 

with an SACD, and without a blink this 

player will leap forward in quality and let 

you hear the wonderful sound of things to 

come. 







autat. 












nosto coreet lor lor sustrud duissismod tatetummy 



Ut wiscin henis eum. 

This is the fi rst of the SACD and universal players to be wrung out by UHF, 

with advice of the sort we would give to our best friends. With technology 

changing so fast, this would be a terrifi c time to pick up a subscription to UHF. 

The information is one page 3 (page 5 of the PDF), and you can order on line 

for faster delivery. 

You’ll probably find it hard to wait for 

more SACD selections to appear, but you’ll 

be ready. 


Comparing this player to our reference, 

I certainly noted some imperfections, but 

they are slight enough not to affect musicality. 

There is a bit bit of restraint in the lower 

frequencies, and also a touch of sibilance in 

vocal passages. 

On the other hand, I can talk about a 

good image, interesting depth, and an excellent 

dynamic range. What I think makes 

it especially appealing is its ability to reproduce 

a multitude of details and the remarkable 

energy with all music. It got me totally 

involved. 

—Reine Lessard

Equation 25 MkII 

S 

mall speakers are often better 

than big speakers, but what 

you should know about this 

tall loudspeaker from the Belgian 

company Equation is that this is 

its small speaker. Actually, there is a 

slightly smaller one (the model 7) but 

even it’s tall. Want a mini-monitor? See 

somebody else. 

However the imposing cabinet can’t 

hide the fact that it is not one of those 

huge speakers that could fi ll a meeting 

hall. It is a two-way speaker, with 

an 18 cm woofer cone, not enough to 

give you bragging rights in the locker 

room. The cone’s grey color suggests 

polyethylene, though in fact it is an alloy 

of magnesium and titanium. The highs 

are provided by a German-made ceramic 

A contender for one 

of our reference 

systems, and you 

know what? It nearly 

made it. 

tweeter. The series crossover requires 

only a single pair of binding posts, which 

are from WBT. 

If the components suggest luxury, 

so does the cabinetry. No lightweight 

stuff here. Each speaker weighs close to 

50 kg, though it is considerably lighter 

once you remove the grille unit (the 

speakers is designed to sound best with 

it in place, however). The remarkable 

fi nish on ours was what is described as 

“pinched maple,” whose distinctive dots 

are the result of an insect parasite. 

The Equations arrived at a propitious 

time: we were searching for a speaker 

to replace our long-time Alpha reference, 

the 3a MS5. The sheer size of the 

speakers gave us pause, but even a casual 

listen revealed that there was magic 

coming from those big boxes. We knew 

what we wanted from our new reference 

speakers, and we knew we were hearing 

it. Perhaps… 

But a lot of listening was needed 

before we could arrive at what would 

have to be an anonymous decision. 

We had been warned that the ceramic 

tweeter would require a lot of breakin 

time. We interpreted that to mean some 

200 hours, and then we proceeded to our 

fi rst listening session. 

We started with the LP version of 

Façade, William Walton’s remarkable 

tone poem, which has so many solo 

instruments that it could serve as a test 

all by itself. We listened eagerly for the 

piccolo in the opening tableau, since it 

sounds shrill on all but a very few speakers, 

and it is very shrill on our reference. 

Alas, it was sharper than it should be 

on the Equations too, with the soloist 

seeming to take fi ve giant steps toward 

us as he moved up the scale. 

But there was good news to report 

as well. After its solo trills, the piccolo 

continues to play behind the clarinet, 

where it is completely hidden on nearly 

all speakers. Not on the Equations. 

“There’s more of the piccolo," said 

Reine, “There’s more of the bassoon 

too.” 

Indeed, nearly all of the instruments 

were admirably rendered, but it was the 

interplay of them all that was especially 

thrilling. This highly accessible but 

modern musical suite is full of surprising 

dissonances, complex counterpoints and 


Listening Room


ironic twists. The Equations seemed to 

understand it all. 

The music was helped by the fi ne 

detail emerging from the Equations. 

We could hear way, way back to the 

rear of the hall, and the fi nesse of the 

reproduction also gave plausibility to the 

instrumental timbres. “Even the snare 

drum manages to sound lyrical,” said 

Gerard. 

We continued with Gossamer from 

Amanda McBroom’s West of Oz directcut 

album. “It’s just as you said about 

the snare drum,” said Albert. “Even 

the percussion is musical” As for the 

singer, she was like a spectre emerging 

from the shadows and walking toward 

us. Eerie…and wonderful at the same 

time. 

Another of our recordings demonstrates 

dramatically how much raw 

acoustic energy can be produced by a 

single grand piano. Chopin’s Scherzo 

No. 2 (on an RCA Japan direct-cut LP) 

can sound startlingly realistic, and that’s 

how the Equations made it sound. “You 

can follow all those tiny little notes in 

among the powerful chords,” said Reine, 

who plays Chopin herself and knows 

this piece well. “If he were here in the 

room, this is exactly what you’d hear.” 

The others two nodded in agreement. 

We know that what most people identify 

as “clarity” can actually be an artifi cial 

hardness, but that wasn’t the case here. 

Can the Equations rock? 

In a room like the one our Alpha 

system is in, they sure can. We slipped 

the original pressing of Pink Floyd’s Dark 

Side of the Moon onto our Audiomeca J-1 

turntable, to determine how the speakers 

handle power. 

You may recall that using this recording 

has in the past shown up limitations 

in our previous reference speakers, the 

3a MS5’s. Though the 3a’s are matchless 

in reproducing deep bass and impact, 

they are less convincing in the midrange, 

where the top layer of music hides the 


other layers…and Lord knows there are 

lots of layers on that famous recording! 

We had heard how the Living Voice 

speakers could “peel back” the layers 

so we could hear what was underneath. 

The Equations are good at this too. A 

lot happens back there, and not much of 

it remained a mystery. 

This recording also contains plenty 

of powerful bass, some (though not all) 

of it from synthetizers. It’s easy for that 

stuff to take on an artifi cial “hi-fi ” character, 

or even to boom like an empty beer 

barrel. The percussion did not have the 

sheet impact it had with the 3a speakers, 

but it certainly wasn’t thin, nor was it 

anemic. The sound was spacious, full, 

and even vast, seeming to extend way 

beyond the room’s physical boundaries. 

Reine appreciated the voice effects 

for their clarity. Gerard found the voices 

a little too bright, and even surprisingly 

sibilant, but the overall effect was…well, 

impressive! 

Switching from the turntable to 

our CD player, we listened to the celebrated 

Stravinsky Firebird on Reference 

Recordings. We fi gured the Equations 

would handle the fi nale all right, including 

that now legendary bass drum, but 

what we wondered was whether it could 

render the ethereal magic of the soft 

passages. 

It could, and it did. We held our 


Brand/model: Equation 25 MkII 

Price: C$9790/US$7390 


Sensitivity: 89 dB 

Impedance: 7.2 ohms 

Most liked: Clarity and magic 

Least liked: Dynamic limits greater 

than the size would suggest 

Verdict: Give it the right-sized room, 

and expect great things 

breaths during the sequence that sees 

the Firebird rise up from its ashes. “You 

can see the bird,” said Reine. 

We ended the session with Karina 

Gauvin’s astonishing Alleluia from 

her Analekta CD of Vivaldi motets 

(FL 2 3099). There wasn’t much to say, 

beyond the long-known fact that Gauvin 

has an awesome voice (in the true sense 

of that overused word). The Tafelmusik 

orchestra sounded majestic. Albert 

thought that the height of the speakers 

helped Gauvin sound as though she were 

in the room rather than shut into a little 

box. 

By now you know that fi nally we did 

not select the Equations as a new reference. 

They are, fi nally, too large for our 

room. What’s more, this is a room with 

a dormer window, which means the top 

part of the outer wall is canted. The 

ceramic tweeter in the tall Equation 

was rather close to that canted wall. 

Indeed, the height of the speakers kept 

us from placing them the way we would 

have liked. We brought back the Living 

Voice speakers, and we were unanimous: 

the Equations are very good, but they 

weren’t quite right for the room. 

But how would they do in a larger 

room? “You know,” said Albert, “if we 

hadn’t been considering them as a possible 

Alpha reference, we never would 

have brought them into this room. 

We really need to listen to them in the 

Omega room. They’ll be more at ease 

there.” 

Not quite, as it turned out. If the 

Alpha room is small for them, the 

Omega room is a little on the large side 

(about 4.9 x 10 meters, with 3 m ceiling). 

For the fi nal session we pulled out 

three SACDs, which we ran through our 

Linn Unidisk player. The fi rst selection 

was Needed Time from Eric Bibb’s Spirit 

and the Blues (Opus 3 CD19411). The 

Equations did well, though with a bit 

less bottom end than our Reference 3a

Suprema speakers. “These are tough 

speakers to beat,” mused Reine. Still, 

the Equations, at about half the price, 

did not disgrace themselves. 

They did less well with Beethoven’s 

Symphony No. 5 (Pentatone 5186 102). 

Through our own speakers this disc 

came awesomely close to yielding the 

impression we had bought expensive 

seats in a good hall. We were surprised 

to hear the Equations straining to fi ll the 

space. Yet the reason was clear: despite 

their generous cabinet size, these are 

two-way speakers, better suited to rooms 

perhaps half the size of ours. Or perhaps 

to more reasonable levels. Or perhaps to 

sources with less energy. 

We ended with a jazz piece, Comes 

Love, from the SACD version of Opus 3’s 

Showcase (CD21000). This is a number 

that stops conversations whenever we 

play it for visitors. How would the Equations 

handle it? 

The first time I heard music through 

these speakers, one word came to my mind: 

refinement. I think it was the wealth of 

details that appeared, or it could have been 

the delicate treatment each sound seemed 

to receive — including the numerous nonmusical 

sounds which helped locate the 

performers in space. There was depth well 

beyond what I had expected. 

I have since discovered they are finicky 

too. Expecting the best, I was surprised 

to hear them treat some voices and large 

orchestral textures with a certain amount 

of hardness, especially when they reached 

a higher pitch. And then, unexpectedly, 

the next piece sounded just fine, and I was 

impressed again with their ability to reveal 

the finest details, creating a firm image and 

uncovering the depth of the stage on which 

the recording took place. Their height is a 

definite advantage, especially if you prefer 

to hear singers and musicians standing tall 

and proud. 

My feeling is that they seem to be 

extremely sensitive to the rest of the audio 

components they are linked to. They have 

the potential to be truly great speakers but 

you’ll have to hear them with audio equipment 

that closely matches yours before you 

Not perfectly in fact. Once again we 

could hear that the speakers would have 

preferred a smaller room. What’s more, 

the clarinet in the left channel didn’t 

sound like the real thing. “Is there a 

phase error?” Gerard wondered. “Let’s 

get a look at the results of the technical 

tests.” 

Sure enough, the 100 Hz square 

wave (shown in the middle graph on the 

previous page) didn’t look quite right, 

with a doubling of the vertical riser that 

suggests that the signals from the woofer 

and tweeter are not arriving together. 

But if that’s the case, why did we not hear 

the effect in the Alpha room? Could it be 

that the superior resolution of our SACD 

player (which we had not used in the 

earlier test) was showing up artifacts that 

had not been evident before? Yet, the 

earlier test had been done in part with 

LPs, not exactly a slam dunk either. 

The Equations did well on the other 

CROSSTALK 

can form an opinion, and with your music 

too. The key words, in this case, are: you’ll 

have to hear them. They do possess a unique 

personality worth discovering. 


Before me is a pair of tall, svelte, elegant 

speakers. Impressive, in short. 

The first sounds to reach my ears charm 

me by their exemplary clarity, the way sound 

spreads out in every dimension. But my pleasure 

doesn’t stop there. I feel as though the 

musicians and singers are right there, before 

me. On every recording, impact is striking, 

and rhythm is flawless. A thousand modulations 

and inflections take me by surprise, as 

does a bevy of other, subtle, effects that lesser 

speakers could never reproduce. 

On human voice, to select an example, 

you don’t just divine a musician’s sensitivity, 

you can actually feel it. Timbres are so gorgeous 

they make your spine tingle. Percussion 

is incisive, and that is especially true of 

the snare drum, which came and touched me 

with a power that is all too rare. 

I must also praise the exceptional midrange. 

These advantages help compensate a 

hint of brightness on a violin or a piccolo that 

has wandered into the upper registers. Too 

tests. The trace at the extreme left shows 

a 37 Hz sine wave, looking much cleaner 

than we are used to seeing at this very 

low frequency. Overall response (shown 

at right) is generally excellent, with only 

two notable dips, one at 600 Hz, and the 

other an octave up at 1200 Hz. 

Clearly, these speakers are made by 

people who don’t follow the usual rules. 

Speakers this big, the rules say, have to 

be able to play loud enough to fi ll an 

amphitheatre. They need more drivers. 

They need to accommodate biwiring. 

They have to be made to sound best 

with the grilles off. That’s not the way 

the Equation designers see things. 

To tell you the truth, we never cared 

much for those rules either. But what we 

heard from these unusual speakers was 

very good at worst, thrilling at best. 

Though they didn’t make it into our 

reference system, it would be easy to rate 

them as reference quality. 

bad for them! I must admit my ear is rather 

sensitive to those high notes, but it isn’t on 

all recordings that the problem even exists. 

I’d have to add that, following the sessions 

in two different rooms, it seems evident 

that they would be at their peak performance 

in an average-sized room. 


I suppose I need hardly mention that 

these speakers are not for everyone, or rather 

not for every room. Small rooms will make 

them sound overly bright. Very big rooms 

will make them work harder than they really 

want to. 

But oh, the way they could sound in 

those in-between rooms, the sort most 

people have! The bottom end is clean and 

full, drawing maximum advantage of that 

large cabinet. The top end can be sweet and 

limpid, and the midrange can delight you 

with its transparency. 

Lots of speakers can do that, of course. 

What makes a great speaker is what appears 

to be magic: music that somehow seems 

greater than the sonic elements that make 

it up. In the right room, the Equations have 

it. 



Listening Room

We just look at this speaker, 

and already it seems 

familiar. Our Omega 

reference system uses 

Reference 3a’s Suprema speakers. This 

new model looks for all the world like the 

top part of the Suprema, lacking only the 

subwoofer base. 

On the other hand, it also looks like 

the company’s MM De Capo (see UHF 

No, 67), which costs about half the price. 

The natural question for a wary shopper 

to ask is whether the extra money is just 

for the fancy Corian fi nish, and possibly 

for the chromed road cases the speakers 

come in? 

The answer to that question, we may 

as well tell you right off, is no. Despite 

the evident similarities, this is a different 

speaker, and its performance is pretty 

much in line with its price. But let’s begin 

at the beginning. 

The fi rst version of this speaker was 

developed some 15 years ago in France 

by Daniel Dehay for a then-inexpensive 


model known as the MM (which stood 

for Mini Monitor). Simplicity was its 

hallmark. The cabinet was small — 

though not as small as it looked in 

pictures — and could therefore be made 

rigid. The front was canted forward, 

partly to reduce the formation of internal 

standing waves, and partly to compensate 

for time differences between the 

two drivers. The woofer was relatively 

large and therefore robust, but its cone 

was made from light materials (namely 

carbon fi bre) so that it could move and 

stop fast. The crossover network was 

reduced to the absolute basics: a single 

series capacitor (split into two capacitors 

in the modern version) to keep low-frequency 

signals from blowing the tweeter. 

The woofer was direct-coupled to the 

amplifi er, with nothing in between but 

cable. 

The original MM had astonishing 

performance, with dynamic and even 

explosive performance, and bottomend 

fl owthrough that actually caused 

some show visitors to accuse Dehay of 

having concealed a subwoofer behind a 

curtain. 

Years passed. Dehay’s company was 

sold to Spanish interests, which didn’t 

make a go of it. He started his new company 

(actually his third), Reference 3a, in 

Switzerland. It was there he designed the 

Suprema speaker we use in our Omega 

system. The top part of the Suprema 

looked rather like the MM, though its 

performance was in a totally different 

category. Looks ain’t everything. 

When Dehay retired, the company 

became Canadian. It relaunched the 

Mini Monitor as the MM De Capo. And 

now the Royal Virtuoso appears to be 

a resurrection of the Suprema…less its 

subwoofer base. 

Listening Room Reference 3a Royal Virtuoso 

A renewed version of 

an old favorite. And 

we do mean favorite!

What determines the price of a 

speaker? The two major factors are the 

materials and the labor. The Reference 

3a’s distinctive (and once unique) 

carbon woofer is hand-built. The central 

“phase plug” (which reduces cancellation 

of signals from different sides of the 

cone) is also hand-crafted. The tweeter is 

individually matched to the woofer after 

each has had 72 hours of burn-in. The 

cabinet is even more rigid than the original, 

with Dupont’s synthetic marble-like 

Corian all around (our Supremas had 

Corian sides). The internals have been 

further braced, with a damper called a 

Vibra-Puck behind the woofer. Internal 

wiring is from Van den Hul. 

The Cardas connectors work well 

only if your cables have spades. The 

instruction manual refers to “binding 

posts,” and the company’s Web site 

shows the speaker with what resemble 

WBT posts. Because our cables have 

bananas, we used a set of Prisma goldplated 

spades as adapters. Not ideal. 

The company recommends not 

toeing in the speakers. In a departure 

from common practice, the Royal Virtuosos 

are meant to be placed with the 

tweeters displaced toward the outside, 

rather than the inside as one would 

assume. 

Despite the claim of 72 hours of burnin 

at the factory, we gave our speakers as 

much time again, before placing them 

on our Foundation stands and listening 

to them in our Alpha system. The 

61 cm (24") height of the stands is about 

right for the Royal Virtuosos, which are 

slanted up toward the listener. 

We opened the session with some 

LPs, starting with a frequent favorite, 

William Walton’s Façade (RR-16). Not 

only do its shifting tableaux include 

a lot of different solo instruments, 

but its explosive introduction, which 

includes a cymbal, snare drum and piccolo, 

is enough to make most speakers 

stumble. 

The Royal Virtuosos…well, we’d like 

to tell you how they did, and if you check 

out our print issue we will. 

We now return to our regular Latin 

text! 







































si. 















si. 



wisi. 


















Listening Room


















autat. 










Faccum eugiat, voloborero eugue veliqui 

tet, sim velendreet loborem dolortis 

dunt laor inis digna feugiat. Em ad molore 

dolorem velit wisl dolese do exeriustrud eros 

ea commodit ip eugait luptat nibh endre do 

conullaore estie magniat. Adio od tem del 

dio dit ad eu faciduipit adiamet dolesequat 

lor sit ad dolorpe rostie mod dio odiamet 

umsandre tem dolorer susci blandrem iril 

utet et velenim nonsectet, verit laor sustrud 

dolorero duis accumsan vel utat, venit landips 

ustrud eu feuisci blan ulput velit luptatet 

aute del ea feum vel utpat. Ut lore commy 

nulla faciduisi. 

Patue euismolorem ad te consequat 

lumsan vulla at lor se feum il etum iusci 

blaore modolenim dolor ad dolutpat, commodolorem 

quatum zzrit wis nim at alit at 

adiamco nulluptat. Ut lore do enisl exeros 

del esto ex ea core tisit vel dolese faciliquate 

veliquisci tion ea cor autatem dipit aute 

feum aut ad tincipit utat luptat illuptat, qui 

te tatinci psummy nulputatio ex et iriurero 

core velisse quiscidunt am quipit vulla facilit 

landre consed magna augue molor il ero del 

utpat utpat la feugait lutet niamet wisi. 









autat. 




Brand/model: Reference 3a Royal 

Virtuoso 

Price: C$5600/US$4000 



Impedance: 8 ohms 

Most liked: Borem zzriuscipsum 

dionsenim zzriliq uamconulla consed 

dolor sendreros nostrud tet alis 

augiam dolummy nostrud mod modo 

exerius cillut vel duismod ming eros 

nullupt. 

CROSSTALK 

Wis eu feu faccum zzrillaore do dolent 

aciduipit lobore commolut augue magnismod 

modolen. 


Faccum eugiat, voloborero eugue veliqui 

tet, sim velendreet loborem dolortis 

dunt laor inis digna feugiat. Em ad molore 

dolorem velit wisl dolese do exeriustrud eros 

ea commodit ip eugait luptat nibh endre do 

conullaore estie magniat. Adio od tem del 

dio dit ad eu faciduipit adiamet dolesequat 

lor sit ad dolorpe rostie mod dio odiamet 

umsandre tem dolorer susci blandrem iril 

utet et velenim nonsectet, verit laor sustrud 

dolorero duis accumsan vel utat, venit landips 

ustrud eu feuisci blan ulput velit luptatet 

aute del ea feum vel utpat. Ut lore commy 

nulla faciduisi. 

Patue euismolorem ad te consequat 

lumsan vulla at lor se feum il etum iusci 

blaore modolenim dolor ad dolutpat, commodolorem 

quatum zzrit wis nim at alit at 

adiamco nulluptat. Ut lore do enisl exeros del 

esto ex ea core tisit vel dolese faciliquate veliquisci 

tion ea cor autatem dipit aute feum aut 















autat. 











duismod ming eros. 

ad tincipit utat luptat illuptat, qui te tatinci 

psummy nulputatio ex et iriurero core velisse 

quiscidunt am quipit vulla facilit. 


Wis eu feu faccum zzrillaore do dolent 

aciduipit lobore commolut augue magnismod 

modolen iamconsed eniatumsan 

hendreet nulla feummod dolorer sit in utpat 

lum dolessed te tat, sequat lortis dolorper 

in hendrem nos at vulputpatem alit lutatie 

magnisl dolore te do eum volestin hendipi 

smolutatum veliquisl ullamet volore tis et 

nulla faccum venis adit, sequipis at, sim 

volorer augiam. 

Erillam, velenit nim eugiat, con eraesse 

te conummy nosto et, qui tat prat ip el el do 

do doloborem zzrilis dolobore vel il ullumsan 

eu facil enisi. 

Aliquam etuerit ulla faccumsan elestrud 

minci blandre miniamconse vulla adit at irit 

acilit diam ipis dit, consequ ismolobortio 

consequipit vero commy nullamet pratie 

volore feu feugait. non henibh etuero consed 

dionse 

—Gerard Rejskind

Wilson Benesch Curve 

We recall hearing a pair of 

Wilson Benesch speakers 

some years ago at the 

Montreal show, and it 

was the sort of experience that one talks 

about after: “Have you heard the…” 

This British company was originally 

known for turntables, not speakers. One 

aspect of its turntables that had grabbed 

everyone’s attention was the tone arm. 

It wasn’t steel, or aluminum, or even 

titanium, it was made from carbon fi bre. 

Truth to tell, Wilson Benesch was not 

alone in having fi gured out the advantages 

of carbon. 

Carbon is of course the building 

block of terrestrial life. It can also take 

on other forms, from coal to diamonds. 

It offers a rich portfolio of attractive 

qualities. It is light (in the sense that for 

a given volume it has low mass), it can 

be made very rigid despite its low mass, 

and it is self-damping (it will not store 

energy for a long period, nor release it 

at audible frequencies). 

And carbon fi bre is fi nding its way 

into a lot of modern products. Race cars 

use carbon fi bre parts, as do some road 

cars, notably the Jaguar XKR. Motorcycle 

panels and entire bicycle frames 

can be made of carbon. So are photo 

tripods, fishing rods, sailing masts, 

flutes, violin bows, pens and battery 

plates. The tail of the Airbus A380 is 

made from carbon fi bre, and there is a 

radar-proof carbon stealth yacht on the 

drawing boards. Rumors have it Apple 

will make the next Mac PowerBook from 

Diamonds are made 

from carbon. So are 

these loudspeakers. 

the stuff. Architect Peter Testa even 

wants to build an entire skyscraper from 

carbon fi bre. 

Of course the material has been 

incorporated into high end audio products 

too. Tone arms aside, a number 

of manufacturers use woofer cones of 

woven carbon fi bres, including another 

speaker reviewed in this issue. And you’ll 

recall that Van den Hul brought out an 

entire line or audio cables using carbon 

fi bre instead of metal. 

The Wilson Benesch Curve uses 

this miracle material in two ways. Both 

its midrange driver and its woofer have 

cones made of woven carbon fi bre. The 

two drivers are the same diameter, 

17 mm, but the weave is coarser on the 

woofer than on the midrange. And then 

the cabinet’s structure is shaped from a 

carbon fi bre matrix imbedded in epoxy. 

In this composite form, it is fi ve times 

stronger than steel, weight for weight. 

The Curve’s tweeter uses a silk dome, 

with a 2nd order crossover between it 

and the midrange. A gentler fi rst-order 

crossover separates woofer and midrange. 

Crossover frequencies are not 

stated. The crossover uses polypropylene 

capacitors, and air-core inductors that 

are not prone to saturation. 

The speaker is certainly handsome. 

It might be easy to tip over were it not 

for the cast aluminum base which is permanently 

fastened to the speaker body. 

The spikes themselves are gorgeously 

machined, with knurled knobs to make 

them easy to adjust from the top. The 

locking nuts can then be tightened with 

the supplied wrench. 

Because the Curves are of manageable 

size, it seemed possible to try them 

within the reduced confi nes of our Alpha 

room, and that’s what we did fi rst. 

We began with one of our favorite 

test LPs, William Walton’s Façade, and 

we wondered whether we might have 

made a mistake bringing the Curves 

here. The piccolo in the introduction 

was shrill, but we’ve learned to tolerate 

that, at least if what follows is worth 

waiting for. And it was…to an extent. 

The amount of detail the Curves dug out 

was impressive, and Walton’s intricate 

counterpoints came out beautifully. So 

why weren’t we happy? “The impression 

it leaves me,” said Albert, “was that they 


Listening Room


have a certain liveliness, but a total lack 

of warmth.” 

We moved to a second LP, with a 

female voice, Mary Black’s No Frontiers. 

Something still wasn’t right. The richness 

of detail was breathtaking, and the 

song’s message came through well, but 

Black’s voice was hard and cold. Yes, 

the bongos and the other percussion 

instruments were gratifyingly lifelike, 

but there had to be more. Should we 

change the speaker placement? 

We We tried, but the dimensions and 

shape of the room don’t give us a lot 

of of possibilities, and nothing we tried 

helped. We gave up, and decided to 

schedule another session with the 

Curves…in the much larger Omega Omega 

room room this time. 

And we quickly concluded that this 

was where these speakers belonged. For 


one thing, they have the dynamic capability 

even for this very large room, and 

at no time did we hear the Curves sound 

as though they were straining. They 

had clean and nearly endless punch. 

They still didn’t sound right when we 

positioned them the way we run our 

Suprema reference speaker, but a little 

experimentation allowed us to fi nd the 

sweet spot, nearer the wall. We pulled 

out some LPs and other recordings, and 

listened again. 

We began with The Song of Bernadette 

from Jennifer Warnes’ celebrated LP 

of Leonard Cohen songs, Famous Blue 

Raincoat. This wonderful recording can 

easily turn shrill, and that was what it 

did. Warnes’ voice was hard, the highs 

Drop by The Audiophile Store 

It’s a service of UHF, and unlike most stores offering recordings and accessories, 

it has a difference. 

Everything in it comes recommended. If we wouldn’t suggest it to our best 

friends, we won’t suggest it to you. 

rather too prominent. One good mark 

came from Reine, who preferred the way 

that the Curves reproduced the piano. 

We then returned to the Façade 

recording that had largely disappointed 

us in the smaller Alpha room. It was still 

brighter than we we would have liked, but 

both Reine and Gerard found positive 

aspects. The The counterpoint between the 

fl ute and the clarinet was breathtaking, 

and the recording’s sly humor came 

through through unimpeded. “I got right into 

the music,” said Reine. Albert was less 

happy. “It’s like reading a book in which 

somebody has underlined all the interesting 

passages.” 

We turned to our SACD player, and 

slipped on the second last movement of 

Tchaikovsky’s Symphony No. 6 (Pentatone 

5186 107). We quickly realized we 

had been wrong to suppose, after the 

brief session in the Alpha room, that 

the Curve might be weak in the extreme 

bass. On the contrary, the lower strings 

and the tympany were startlingly realistic 

even at very loud level. There was not 

a trace of the annoying low-end “bloom” 

we often hear, the result of cabinets 

storing energy and smearing what comes 

after. One result was that the rhythm of 

this agitated symphonic movement was 

quick and unimpeded. Nor were we able 

to venture anywhere near the speakers’ 

dynamic limits, short of risking structural 

damage to the building. 

Yet the lower midrange remained too 

discreet, we judged, robbing the music of 

its warmth. The brass was impressive in 

its power, though with some sharp edges. 

We would have liked more substantial 

lower midrange, if we could have had it 

without also getting the opaque muck 

that speakers with lesser enclosures 

contribute. 

We were nervous about trying our

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choral recording, Now the Green Blade 

Riseth (Proprius PRCD9093), but we 

need not have been. The fl ute in the 

opening passage was somewhat shriller 

than with our reference speakers, but the 

female and male voices were a revelation. 

We have heard this fi ne recording turn 

to annoying mush with some surprisingly 

expensive systems (“I’m going to 

start taking it with me to shows,” said 

Gerard), probably because so many 

speakers and amplifi ers can’t handle its 

quick dynamic peaks. Once again, the 

Curves showed that powerful signals 

are no challenge at all. We had little 

diffi culty distinguishing the individual 

voices, always a good sign. Only the fi nal 

crescendo was…well, hard. It often is, to 

be fair. 

Back to the turntable for The Secret of 

the Andes, whose dazzling succession of 

exotic percussion instruments is a tough 

test of the rigidity of a speaker enclosure. 

Would the Curves pass the test? 

Well of course they would, but we 

were pleasantly surprised to note that 

their competence extended to far more 

than just the percussion. Everything at 

the very bottom end, including the left 

hand piano chords, was superb, with 

power, control and quickness. There 

I’ll tell you what. Take the time to listen 

to your music music through these speakers. 

Carefully. Use most of your other components, 

if at all possible. If your music improves 

(compared to live, of course), and 

you discover discover real tight bass, a wealth of additional 

details and an impeccable rhythm, 

then get them. You need them, them, your system 

needs them. 

Ours didn’t. didn’t. I noticed all the qualities 

I mentioned above, but they brought along 

other less desirable traits. “It’s a matter of 

taste,” an audiophile audiophile once said to me, about 

some some other speakers. I don’t think so. Check 

what your system needs, not your taste. 


I found some excellent qualities in these 

elegant speakers. The image is good, the 

lateral space generous, the depth excellent. 

The bottom end is at once solid and ample. 


was little sign of distortion. Individual 

sounds were pure and gorgeous. “It was 

worth listening this far,” commented 

Reine. 

We ended the session by returning to 

our SACD player, and Eric Bibb’s Needed 

Time (Opus 3 CD19411). We were happy 

with what we heard. The high resolution 

version of this recording is loaded with 

fi ne details, and the Curves reproduced 

them meticulously. The clarity made the 

song’s text all but telepathic. 

Of course, the recording didn’t 

really sound the way it did with our 

reference speakers. Bibb’s voice was a 

little brighter, and a little thinner too, 


Brand/model: Wilson Benesch Curve 

Price: C$11,000 



Impedance: 6 ohms, 4 ohms minimum 

Most liked: Brilliant design, brilliant 

results 

Least liked: Perhaps a tad too brilliant 

Verdict: A potential giant-killer, still 

in training 

Why UHF reviews are different 

Let us count the ways. 

CROSSTALK 

1) UHF maintains high quality reference systems, chosen for their exceptional 

transparency. They are used for all of the reviews, not some, but all. 

The speakers have an exemplary clarity that 

can no doubt be attributed to the carbon 

fibre cabinet’s anti-resonant properties. 

They can manage an exceptionally good 

separation of timbres. They’ve got impact, 

energy, flawless rhythm. Even in very fast 

music filled with varied and plentiful instruments, 

I heard no confusion. They can 

do justice to complex counterpoints. 

So, So, with with such a long list of qualities, 

why am I still unsatisfied? How can they let 

through such searing highs? The spectral 

balance is imperiled, with a lower midrange 

that seems seems nearly absent. It’s really too 

bad, and I’m convinced the designer could 

fix this. That would be enough to tip the 

Curves from their nearly perfect score to 

outright perfection. 


2) UHF uses three reviewers, not just one. You get more than one point of view. 

3) Each review includes a section in which the three reviewers can provide their 

own point of view. Do we disagree? Not often, but there is no pressure to conform, 

and an occasional disagreement can shed new light on what we’ve heard. 

4) UHF makes a signifi cant amount of its revenue by recommending and offering 

recordings and accessories through The Audiophile Store. That means 

we can say no to an advertiser who theatens us. This hardly ever happens…any 

more. 

I’m perplexed by these speakers. I lis- 

despite the quick and deep bottom end. 

The bottleneck guitar sounded changed, 

as well, but there was nothing going on 

that escaped our ears! 

Then it was off to the lab. We wondered 

whether the frequency response 

curve, measured in our Alpha room, 

would show an imbalance. It didn’t, 

though curiously Wilson Benesch’s 

own graph (the blue one below ours) 

does show lower midrange rather below 

the top end. On the other hand, we did 

confirm that the speaker can handle 

lows with little effort. The photo at left 

on page 46, shows a 40 Hz tone at our 

reference level! 

Then again, the second photo on the 

same page shows a 220 Hz tone. The 

roughness, which was intermittent, is 

probably caused by a problem with an 

internal connection. 

The square wave (the third photo) is 

not bad, though the phase doesn’t look 

quite spot on. 

Wilson Benesch has gone to a good 

deal of trouble and expense to slay the 

age-old dragon of cabinet resonance. It 

has been successful, too, and we were 

left with the feeling that a little more 

tweaking would have brought up some 

real magic. 

tened to them casually during their breakin 

period, and I heard what seemed like 

good reason to look forward to the review. 

And that’s despite the fact that we don’t use 

our best source to do equipment run-ins. 

There was such a sweetness to the music, 

and such control of the bottom end. This 

was going to be great! 

But in the end I wasn’t satisfied. Yes, 

the carbon fibre cabinets are wonderful, 

producing a sound that is tightly controlled 

without going all the way over to constipated, 

as with some other other speakers I could 

name. The detail is superb. Only I always 

had the feeling the speakers were never 

quite quite placed right, or that they weren’t suited 

to the room. 

We tried. Perhaps they’ll deliver their 

exciting promise in your room. We couldn’t 

get what we wanted in either of ours. 


So our reviews are highly useful to audiophiles. And they are useful to manufacturers 

and distributors as well, because audiophiles believe what we say.

muRata Super Tweeters 

Does frequency response 

matter, even if we’re talking 

about response above and 

beyond where your ears 

leave off? That question has been discussed 

a lot. It was back in the 50’s that 

a study was done with subjects unable 

to hear above 18 kHz, seeming to show 

that they could sense if frequencies above 

20 kHz were fi ltered out. Of course, we 

know fi lters are never inaudible, so… 

But interestingly enough, CD players 

do fi lter out everything beyond 20 kHz. 

Of course, SACD and DVD-A players 

don’t (and neither do turntables for that 

matter). Is there something up there to 

reproduce? 

The muRata company thinks the 

answer is yes. These gorgeous ES103 

piezoelectric ceramic super tweeters, 

which look as though they’ve just been 

unbolted from the wing of a jumbo jet, 

are meant to start where many an ear 

leaves off, namely at 15 kHz. No crossover 

network needed, just plug them 

across the regular speakers, and go. 

We had some serious doubts about 

this. For one thing, how can you build 

such a tweeter without knowing the 

effi ciency of the main speakers? Aren’t 

add-on tweeters bound to add noise or 

distortion? Well, it wouldn’t hurt to 

give them a few minutes, would it? We 

put them atop our Suprema speakers in 

our Omega system and dug out some 

SACDs. 

What we heard left us with our 

mouths agape! 

We began with a selection we had 

used several times in the current tests, 

Needed Time from Eric Bibb’s Spirit and 

the Blues (Opus 3 CD19411). At fi rst all 

three of us wondered whether we were 

letting our imaginations run away with 

us…had we really heard more things with 

the muRatas connected? We listened 

again, without and with. No, there really 

was a change, and it was neither noise nor 

distortion. 

So what was it? “A little something 

extra,” was all Gerard could come up 

with. Reine and Albert pointed to extra 

little guitar notes and percussive effects 

that were all but hidden until we connected 

the tweeters. We’re not talking 

major transformation, but perhaps a 

pleasant addition to an already outstanding 

system. 

We continued with another piece 

we had heard several times lately, Comes 

Love from Opus 3’s Showcase SACD 

(CD21000). All three of us noted — still 

Speakers that take 

up where your ears 

leave off. 

with some surprise — the enhancement 

of several instruments. The clarinet, 

already beautifully reproduced had 

superior articulation. The piano, notably, 

no longer sounded quite the same, 

and detached itself more clearly from 

the foundation laid down by the sax, the 

banjo and the sousaphone. 

Yes, the effect was subtle, not the 

sort of thing you would notice in a noisy 

setting such as an audio show (where we 

had heard the muRatas more than once). 

What’s more, we hadn’t yet spotted any 

down side to using these tweeters. 

“But I want to hear them with a 

female voice,” said Albert. “If it adds any 

screechiness or unnatural sibilance, that’s 

where we’ll hear it.” Well, we did have a 

sealed copy on hand hand of FIM’s SACD version 

of Cantate Domino (PRSACD7762). 

We selected the Christmas Song (aka 

O Holy Night), with its wonderful solo 

by soprano Marianne Mellnäs. By the 

way, we had actually never heard the CD, 

contenting ourselves with the LP. The 

SACD transfer compared well. 

No, the tweeters added no harshness 

or noise. Indeed, Albert and Reine 

thought they added little to this recording. 

Gerard disagreed. He thought 

Mellnäs’ voice had more of a sheen to it, 

though by no means an unpleasant one, 

and a superior articulation of the smaller 

(and higher) pipes of the organ. 

Our conclusion is that we were wrong 

to be so offhanded about this product, 

relegating it to a brief and fi nal listening 

session. But we had no more time before 

we put the magazine to bed, and no more 

space for a longer report if we had chosen 

to prepare one. 

Which means the muRata super 

tweeters will return in our next issue, 

this time with a full-fledged report. 

We will try them with a wider variety 

of SACDs, and in both of our reference 

systems. We will try them with analog 

as well, since our high performance 

moving coil pickups can easily extend to 

65 kHz or more. And we will make some 

measurements. We will need to revert 

to analog instruments, since our digital 

instrument suite stops dead at 20 kHz. 

For most systems, this add-on makes 

no sense at all. But if your system already 

works outstanding well, what then? 

More to come… 


Listening Room

Moon W-5LE 

for Limited Edition, an indication 

that, after the 250 units 

have been built, there won’t 

be any more. You might wonder why 

we’d bother reviewing an amplifi er that 

will be built in such small numbers. The 

truth is that a lot of high end products 

are built in tiny quantities…even if that’s 

not the company’s hope. For some high 

end manufacturers, making 250 of an 

expensive product would indicate nothing 

less than dangerous overoptimism. 

Simaudio, on the other hand, probably 

will sell that many. 

We are fully familiar with the W-5, 

since we have been using one in our 

Omega reference system since 1998 

(it was reviewed in UHF No. 49). We 

have long considered it to be among the 

world’s very best high-powered solid 

state amplifiers. Still, we knew that 

Simaudio had made a lot of upgrades to 

it, and we had been thinking it as time 

we listened to a newer one. When this 

Limited Edition came out, we jumped at 

the chance to hear for ourselves what the 

Simaudio gang could do with its original 

fl agship technology. 

It looks not unlike our original. It’s 

the same size, with the same framelike 

handles, though there are no longer 

dimples atop to allow stacking. The front 

panel is actually thinner, but still solid. 

Listening Room The “LE” designation stands 


The rear panel is identical to that of the 

original, but for one welcome change: 

the “on” button has been moved around 

to the front. 

The numbered name plate aside, 

the LE version uses some exotic (read: 

more expensive) parts, with one effect 

being that the claimed power output 

now reaches 200 watts per channel. Even 

the power cord is better than the usual 

molded cord set. Simaudio supplies a 

Cardas cord. Curiously, it’s a 16 gauge 

cord, one that Cardas itself recommends 

for low-current gear, not power amps. 

Our amplifi er was fresh from the 

assembly bench, and though we would 

give it plenty of burn-in time before the 

review, we couldn’t resist a quick listen. It 

sounded superb, with only a minor etching 

of high end sounds. Within 15 hours, 

even that was gone. We pushed on to an 

estimated 100 hours before reinstalling 

our own W-5 so we could compare. We 

pulled out three SACDs, plus an LP. 

The fi rst selection was Rachmaninov’s 

Piano Concerto No. 2 (Pentatone 

5186 114). We weren’t quite happy with 

its sound using the older W-5. The piano 

was somewhat less than natural, especially 

in the powerful left-hand chords 

Built for you and 249 

lucky others. 

at the beginning. The strings had an 

attractive sheen, but they didn’t sound 

the way they would in a real concert 

hall. But that couldn’t be the fault of the 

amplifi er, could it? 

Well…it could, and it was. The new 

amplifi er lifted a veil from the music, one 

we hadn’t really been aware of, we should 

stress. The piano took on a far more 

natural tone, and it no longer got lost 

even during busier orchestral passages. 

Not only were the piano chords clearer, 

but a number of quick notes from the 

right hand emerged for the fi rst time. 

The sheen on the strings? Gone. 

That much was enough to surprise us, 

though we suspect that the differences 

would be less dramatic on lesser systems 

than our Omega reference. 

The W-5LE is very much of a muscle 

amplifi er, more so than the usual toprated 

audiophile amplifiers. Organ 

music, if it is well recorded, is a challenge 

for a power amplifi er, and especially for 

the capacity of its power supply. We 

turned next to Bach’s most famous organ 

work, the Toccata and Fugue in D Minor, 

found on Opus 3’s Organ Treasures 

(CD22031). 

The older W-5 rendered this exceptional 

recording with clarity and brio, but 

it was simply outmatched by its younger 

descendent. The very low-pitched notes 

from the big pipes seemed even deeper, 

and leaner too, but it was the higher 

notes that surprised us. “With the older 

amplifi er you could distinguish the different 

small pipe sets by their position 

in the sound fi eld,” said Gerard, “but 

with this one you hear all the harmonic 

differences among the different sets. And 

they’re very melodic even in those top 

octave passages.” 

Actually, we judged that all aspects of 

the music were superior. The increased 

clarity let us hear “the notes between the 

notes,” as Reine put it. We could also 

hear more clearly the space in which this 

excellent recording was made. 

We wanted to hear a human voice, 

and we selected Eric Bibb’s Gospel Blues 

song Needed Time (from Spirit and the 

Blues, CD19411). The SACD version of 

this favorite is eerily natural, but with 

the W-5LE it is even more so. It made 

the old amplifi er sound electronic, and 

quite honestly we didn’t think that was

possible. Our W-5 was, after all, one of 

the world’s great amplifi ers. Yet we could 

hear more detail, without the addition 

of any unnatural brightness. The lowest 

guitar notes were well fi lled out, which 

didn’t slow the rhythm any. Although a 

good image can be pretty much taken 

for granted in any Opus 3 recording, 

the W-5LE added both breadth and 

depth to what was before us. “It sounds 

almost like a tube amplifi er,” commented 

Albert. 

Our fourth and fi nal recording was 

an LP: the Chorus Line suite from the 

Dallas Wind Symphony’s impressive 

Beachcomber double album (Reference 

Recordings RR-62). This is a busy recording, 

with an endless profusion of brass, 

woodwinds, and heavy-duty percussion. 

It sounded wonderful with our W-5, and 

with the W-5LE, it was… 

“It’s as though the clouds have 

parted and the sun has come out,” said 

Albert. “Listen to the way the brass 

shines.” Once again, though, the shine 

did not come at the expense of naturalness. 

Smaller woodwind instruments, 

which can easily be buried under the 

rest, emerged intact, a testament to the 

Compare the second-generation Moon 

W-5 to its latest incarnation? Some challenge! 

Well, I was stunned by the differences 

in performance. With the new version, 

everything is cleaner and clearer. An abundance 

of detail emerges, and at the risk of 

repeating myself I can say that I heard elements 

I had never noticed before. I can’t say 

I had been missing anything, since I hadn’t 

known those sounds were there, but after 

comparing this amplifier to its ancestor I 

can’t settle for less. 

It’s at moments like this I realize how 

our hearing can refine itself with time, 

making us more demanding, to make us 

seek ever greater joys. 

To add another word would be redundant. 


I never thought a power amplifier could 

make such a difference in such unexpect- 

amplifi er’s true transparency. “It doesn’t 

leave anything trailing in its wake,” said 

Reine. The tympany solo was breathtaking, 

with the tubular bells especially 

impressive. 

We then put the W-5LE through 

our technical evaluation, and discovered 


Brand/model: Simaudio Moon 

W-5LE 

Price: C$7800/US$6000 

Dimensions: 49 x 48 x 16.5 cm 

Power: 200 W/channel into 8 ohms 

Most liked: Astonishing clarity, no 

“solid state” character 

Least liked: Is the “better” power 

cord superior enough? 

Verdict: In every sense a reference 

CROSSTALK 

ed areas. I knew this amp was better than 

our reference, and I expected more of the 

same quality I have been used to, with some 

subtle improvements here and there. More 

of an appreciation of refinement, say. 

I was not prepared for this level of life 

and presence. It seemed as if I had moved 

to much better seats in a much better hall. 

No loss of trailing sounds, no vagueness, no 

blur whatsoever. Everything was precise, 

clearly defined in width, height and depth. 

It reminded me more of the differences 

I’ve noticed with excellent preamps than 

with power amps. There was a natural feel 

to the music that is hard to describe, where 

I found myself thinking less about amplification 

and more about the beauty of the 

music itself. 

How do you explain hearing better contrast? 

I don’t know, but I did. And I don’t 

know how I could have heard more sunshine, 

but it was there. 


that you can blow the amplifi er’s easilyaccessible 

6 ampere fuse…if you make a 

wrong move with the volume control. It 

isn’t easy, though, and we can’t imagine 

doing it in a real-life listening situation. 

There’s no spare fuse packed with the 

amplifi er, though you can fi nd a fuse 

that size nearly anywhere, including 

garages. An electronic protection circuit 

shuts down the amplifi er if there is direct 

current at the input. 

Though the W-5LE can easily be 

driven to 200 watts and beyond, ours 

clipped around 187 watts over much of 

the range. At very low level, where some 

gear does nasty stuff, the Simaudio 

behaved fl awlessly, which made us suspect 

the limit is the driver stage, not the 

output. An occasional noise spike came 

from our own test setup. With just the 

spectral analyzer connected, the amp’s 

noise was down where the trolls live. 

The W-5 was an astonishing product 

when its trek began. As for W-5LE 

amplifi er No. 16, it has taken the place of 

the original W-5 in our Omega system. 

Which leaves you another 249 chances 

to get your own. We’d hurry if we were 

you. 

I have no choice but to acknowledge 

that Simaudio’s “Renaissance” circuit was 

a brilliant innovation. What’s significant is 

not just that it produced a wonderful first 

amplifier (the W4070, originally reviewed 

in UHF No. 37 a dozen years ago), but that 

it continues to be used in what may be the 

world’s best high-powered solid state amplifier 

in 2004. 

What’s truly significant about the 

W-5LE is this. In the case of nearly all solid 

state amplifier lines, the small amps sound 

better than the big ones. Cascading extra 

transistors means making the sound opaque 

and a little heavy, not quite natural. That is 

not true of the Moon amps, and it never has 

been. The W-5 has always sounded superior 

to the smaller W-3. 

Even the first W-5 was one of the world’s 

best big amps. That Simaudio has found 

this much room to improve it is nothing 

short of astonishing. 



Listening Room

Goldring GR1 Turntable 

to dismiss what this 

British company does. 

Years ago, we tested 

Goldring’s top phono cartridge, and we 

liked it so much we bought it. Today we 

own two of them, the now-discontinued 

Goldring Excel. Still, building a turntable 

is a long way from just making a 

cartridge. 

The turntable looks oddly familiar, 

too. Change a few minor details, and it 

could be a Rega P2. There’s a reason for 

it. Both the table and the arm really are 

made by Rega. That makes the eye-popping 

price seem even more astonishing. 

To put it into perspective, last time we 

looked the P2 cost some $200 more…and 

it comes without a pickup. 

The GR1’s plinth is different from 

that of the P2, though it is also a solid 

block, with rubber feet. Rega’s approach 

is not to keep vibration out of the plinth, 

but to make the plinth rigid yet too light 

to store energy for long. The mount 

under the arm, which looks like a Rega 

RB250, is also different, made of some 

sort of composite rather than steel. The 

motor is the same single-speed synchronous 

model used in the P2 (you play 45’s 

by moving the belt to a different pulley 

step). The subplatter appears to be fi berglass, 

while the platter is machined high 

density fi berboard covered by a black felt 

Listening Room We k now better than 


mat. Tap it, and you don’t hear much of 

anything. 

The hinged polystyrene cover is not 

shown, because we removed it before listening, 

and we suggest you do the same. 

No one needs a hunk of vibrating plastic 

feeding energy right into the plinth. 

The Elektra pickup supplied with the 

GR1 is from Goldring’s own lineup. It 

is of course a moving magnet cartridge, 

equipped with an elliptical stylus. You 

can’t get a line contact stylus at anywhere 

close to this price. 

The one really cheap detail is the 

ratty output cable, a dead ringer for 

the free wires you get with Asian-made 

mini-component systems. The connectors 

are dreadful, and the shielding 

(loosely-wrapped spiral strands, if we are 

right about which wire this is) isn’t very 

effective either, and unless we placed it 

very carefully we got a nasty buzz. The 

cable is captive, though anyone who can 

It’s hard to find a 

good phono cartridge 

at this price. This 

one comes with a 

turntable and tone 

arm thrown in 

solder and owns a set of screwdrivers 

could no doubt swap this glorifi ed string 

for something better. 

Setting up the GR1 is not a major 

job. Remove the cardboard wedge from 

under the subplatter, cut off the tape that 

holds the tone arm in place for shipping, 

and adjust the stylus pressure (which can 

be done with no gauge, though we did 

use our gauge…which by the way bears 

the Goldring name). 

We began the listening session 

with the Moorside Suite from one of 

the Dallas Wind Symphony’s LPs of 

music by Gustav Holst (RR-39). This 

is a high-energy recording with more 

than generous bass, and we expected it 

to be both thinner and lower key with 

the Goldring. To some extent we were 

right, but a lot of the energy remained, 

and that included power at the bottom 

end. “This is a surprise,” said Albert. 

“Sure, there’s some loss of richness 

and depth, but listen to the textures of 

those brass instruments!” Reine was less 

enthusiastic, disappointed by the loss of 

presence and especially impact. 

We continued with a well known 

segment from Act One of the original 

cast version of The Phantom of the Opera, 

the one in which Christine takes over 

Carlotta’s role. Now this is defi nitely not 

an audiophile recording. Indeed, with 

our reference turntable an occasional

sibilant would sound more like a police 

whistle. The piece has great dramatic 

impact, however, and we wondered how 

much of it would survive. 

Quite a lot of it, in fact, and sibilance 

was even improved somewhat, as was 

Christine’s voice in general. Dynamics 

were less impressive, of course, and 

surface noise was increased. This is to 

be expected with a cartridge with no 

line-contact stylus. 

Reine found the piano rather displeasing 

too. That would put us on the 

track of a quick improvement we could 

make before the session was over. 

The GR1 did a surprisingly good job 

with Limehouse Blues from the celebrated 

Jazz at the Pawnshop LP. The ambient 

sound fi eld was well recreated, though 

Reine complained that some distant 

sounds, such as that of the cash register, 

were buried. The clarinet solo was especially 

excellent, as was the vibraphone. 

The percussion was altered , with a rather 

hollow sound (“pots and pans," sniffed 

Reine), and the snare drum was not quite 

natural. But the ensemble sound was very 

good, and even the applause was natural, 

something we might not expect with a 

low-cost turntable. 

Some years ago, I brought a Revolver 

turntable, not wildly different from this 

one, to the home of a friend who owned 

a a Pioneer table. She was happy with her 

turntable and saw no reason to change. We 

listened to an entire entire LP by a then-popular 

then-popular 

singer. When we were through, I plugged 

her old turntable back in and played the LP 

at the same volume. And she realized she 

could no longer understand the words! 

What this Rega-built Goldring can do 

is let you understand the words, and also 

the other elements that make up music. In 

short, it can do what most of those $5 turntables 

in the garage sales cannot hope to 

do. 

The cartridge surprised me too, because 

it doesn’t massacre the highs, as too 

many economy pickups can and do. 

The bargain price is an important element, 

because it can convince some younger 

audiophiles who have never known vinyl 

We ended with another audiophile 

classic LP, Amanda McBroom’s Gossamer 

from West of Oz. Once again the piano 

sounded way wrong. We liked Amanda’s 

voice, though. But for an occasional 

wayward sibilant, it was quite natural. 

But what about that piano? “I’ll bet I 

know why it’s not right,” said Gerard. 

He got out a product we use on our 

own turntables, and which we now stock 

on the shelves of our Audiophile Store. It’s 

a treatment for rubber surfaces called 

Rubber Renue. Unlike those sticky fl uids 

that can be used to resurrect a dying belt, 

this one is a cleaner, removing oil and 

oxidized rubber. It was disconcerting to 

see how much black gunk came off the 

Goldring’s little belt. We let it dry for 

30 seconds and then reinstalled it and 

listened to Gossamer again. 

It worked. The piano tones at the start 

of the song were now dead steady, and 

McBroom’s voice was even more natural. 

The piano at the start of Phantom was 

vastly improved too. The veiling we had 

noted vanished along with the wavering. 

The GR1’s rating rose by several points! 

Indeed, Reine, who had been ready to 

warn you off this turntable, changed her 

mind completely. 

Yes, we still review analog 

CROSSTALK 

that perhaps there’s something to all this 

LP talk, talk, and it might be worthwhile having 

a non-digital source as a backup. The GR1 

is good enough to keep them interested. 


What a refreshing surprise! 

I’ve now now found a way to recommend 

LPs to many audiophiles who bypassed that 

stage altogether. Get them to discover some 

of the hidden treasures recorded in the 60’s 

and 70’s while listening to them on a better 

turntable than the average table available 

during those years. Not everything 

was good within those grooves, of course, 

but some remain masterpieces of skilful recording 

techniques and — with this turntable 

— you’ll be able to experience the best 

and the worst, and hear the difference. 

You might end up doing what you never 

imagined, ordering brand new LPs, or foraging 

through countless piles of used ones 

The Elektra pickup appears to be well 

matched to the Rega arm. On the Shure 

Obstacle Course disc, we had diffi culty 

judging the resonant point: it may have 

been around 11 Hz, which would be 

a good indication, but it was so well 

damped we weren’t sure. The GR1 did 

surprisingly well on our M&K recording 

of very low end material. The signal was 

clean and full, and the cartridge even 

tracked the organ track, which includes 

a 16 Hz continuo pipe. Some expensive 

cartridges will click or even derail on this 

track, but not this one. We did note some 

warbling of the midtones, the result of 

modulation by the big pipe, but that 

actually came from our speakers, not the 

turntable. It vanished when we turned 

the volume down a few decibels. 

There are a lot of reasons to like this 

Goldring, even aside from its eye-catching 

price of C$499 (about US$375 at 

current exchange rate). It sounds musical 

in a way that mass-market turntables 

cannot. It is as close as a turntable can 

get to plug’n’play. 

And — heads up CD fans — the 

bazaars are fi lled with great LPs that 

are barely more expensive than Internet 

downloads. It’s a no-brainer. 

The fact is that we still maintain two superb turntables. We use them to review 

other turntables, we we have here. And we often do other equipment reviews 

with vinyl, because… 

Well, keep reading us and you’ll see. 

for that “special” version. Yet all of that, including 

the turntable, might cost less than 

what you might spend for a pair of interconnects 

(which you’ll end up doing anyway). 


It’s a real tour de force to expect a piece 

of equipment to compete with a reference 

component whose price tag is in four digits 

if not five. That said, I expected to find this 

inexpensive turntable pretty shabby. 

In fact, despite a less than solid bottom 

end and impact that was less striking, I was 

struck by the multitude of details it could 

dig out. The human voice is well reproduced, 

without hardness, sibilance is natural, 

and indeed varied sounds are pleasant 

to listen to. Reason enough to consider this 

turntable by an audiophile on a budget. 

It goes to show that it’s not nice to have 

prejudices. 



Listening Room

scarcely needs a n 

introduction. There 

used to be a million 

portable music players out there. 

Now there’s the iPod, with some 

35% of the market (Apple is only 

getting used to this), and…oh, 

a few others you probably can’t 

name. 

Because we’re audiophiles 

we don’t usually go around with 

headphones welded to our ears. 

Apple wasn’t thinking of us — or 

you possibly — in coming up 

with either the iPod or its now 

famous music store. Like all 

other online stores, Apple sells 

music in compressed form. True, 

it uses Dolby’s AAC (Advanced 

Audio Codec) instead of MP3, 

but a quick comparison confi rms 

what we expected. Neither is 

meant for music lovers. 

Fortunately there’s more to 

the iPod. 

Unlike most such players, the 

iPod is format agnostic. 

For all it 

cares you 

c a n lo ad 

it up with 

your photos, your 

address book or your 

doctoral thesis. You can also load it with 

uncompressed music, in either WAV 

or AIFF formats, which are the audio 

formats of Windows and Macintosh 

respectively. What’s more, it has gotten 

big! The top model now has a whop- 

ping 40 gigabytes of space, with 60 Gb 

rumored to be on the way. The average 

CD contains about 600 Mb of data, 

which means about 67 of them can be 

loaded onto a 40 Gb iPod. Better yet, in 

late April Apple announced a new lossless 

codec, possibly based on the open source 

FLAC format. That doubles the capacity 

again. Not bad for a battery-operated 

unit that weighs under 200 grams. 

The software is as important as 

the hardware, though. The iPod was 

originally made to operate with iTunes, 

a program that comes free with the Mac’s 

OS X operating system. A Windows version 

also exists, and can be downloaded 

from the Apple Web site. Both work the 

Listening Room Apple’s ubiquitous iPod 


iPod: 

a Poor 

Man’s 

Server? 

same way. You import music from CD 

to iTunes, organizing it among folders 

as you see fi t. A preference window lets 

you pick a compression method…or no 

compression at all. You can then arrange 

your music into playlists, and ask iTunes 

to play the pieces you’ve chosen either in 

sequence or randomly. 

Note that this is enough to turn 

your computer into a digital jukebox. 

You don’t need to own an iPod 

to use iTunes, though if you 

do things get interesting. Each 

time you plug the iPod into your 

computer (with FireWire on a 

Mac, FireWire or USB on a PC), 

iTunes synchronizes the iPod 

with your computer. Imagine 

having 67 CDs in your pocket. 

Imagine hearing them through 

headphones, or (with the little 

Griffi n FM transmitter) through 

your car radio. 

And now imagine this. Some 

people are spending thousands 

of dollars, or even tens of thousands, 

on music servers that 

can stock music from hundreds 

of discs and produce them on 

demand. Can the iPod serve 

some 70 discs on demand…for 

well under a thousand? The 

answer is yes. What we set out to 

discover is whether it can do that 

with what an audiophile would 

consider adequate quality. 

The picture, by the way, 

was supplied by Apple. 

Our iPod had 

been t h rough 

the hands (and 

perhaps the claws) of 

several reviewers, of which 

the National Post was the 

latest, and was too scratched to 

photograph. 

For this test we loaded three selections 

into iTunes running on a Macintosh 

iBook: 

1) Bist du bein mir, from The Little Notebook 

of Anna Magdalena Bach (Analekta 

FL 2 3064). Properly reproduced, this is 

a fi ve-goosebumps recording. 

2) Now the Green Blade Riseth (Proprius 

PRCD9093), a delightful or hideous 

choral recording, depending on what 

you play it on. 

3) The Master’s Plan from Doug 

McLeod's blues recording Come to Find 

(Audioquest AQCD1017). 

We synchronized the iPod, and then 

listened to the three selections through 

our Linn Unidisk reference player, 

before plugging in the iPod. The player 

has a standard minijack, to which we 

connected an adapter, and a pair of Atlas 

Navigator All-Cu interconnects.

We won’t keep you in suspense. 

From the fi rst sounds of soprano Karina 

Gauvin’s voice, we knew we were on to 

something. Gauvin’s voice is naturally 

smooth and controlled, though it’s more 

than a lot of digital players can handle 

without getting downright unpleasant. 

The iPod mostly made her sound right, 

with only an occasional high note seeming 

out of place. The articulation of the 

German text, which gives Gauvin little 

Yes we know… 

trouble, didn’t give this player much 

trouble either. 

Oh, there were things missing, to be 

sure. Some of the subtle cues that reveal 

depth and make the stereo image explicit 

had become less distinct. The bottom 

end had diminished impact — we could 

just make that out on the harpsichord 

passages. Rhythm was not quite as quick. 

“But we’ve heard a lot worse than this,” 

said Reine. 

The choral recording, which we 

heard sound hideous in some rooms at 

the Montreal show, was more than satisfactory 

coming through the iPod. The 

fl ute solo was attractive, though we lost 

track of it once the singers came in. The 

plucked bass had considerable weight, 

though less than Reine would have liked. 

The high notes of the sopranos were a 

little shriller and more grainy than with 

our player, but there was nothing radi- 

Fact: the Apple iPod is the hot electronic product. It’s of no interest to audiophiles, though, unless… 

Well, unless it is. We know you’ll want to read this audiophile-oriented review of the Apple iPod, the 

very fi rst as far as we know. 

The UHF Reference Systems 

UHF maintains three reference systems. Power cords: Gutwire, Stratus The Kappa system 

All equipment reviews are done on at least AC fi lters: Foundation Research LC-2 This is our home theatre system. As 

one of these systems, which are selected to be (power amp), Inouye SPLC. 

with the Alpha system, we had limited 

working tools. Their elements are changed 

space for the Kappa system, and that pretty 

only after long consideration, because a The Omega system 

much ruled out huge projectors and two- 

system that changes is not a reference. It serves for reviews of gear that cannot meter screens. We did, however, fi nally 

The Alpha system 

easily fi t into the Alpha system, with its 

small room. Summing We didn’t it set out up… to make an 

come up with a system whose performance 

gladdens both eye and ear, and which has 

Our original reference is installed “A” (best system) and a “B” (economy) 

in a room with extraordinary acoustics Brand/model: 

system, and we didn’t 

Apple 

want 

iPod 

to imply that 

(originally designed as a recording studio). 

Price: 

one of 

C$699/US$499 

the two systems is somehow 

(40 Gb 

better 

version; Canadian price includes a $25 

The acoustics allow us to hear what we than the other. Hence the names, which 

“piracy” levy) 

couldn’t hear elsewhere, but there’s a down don’t invite comparisons. Unless you’re 

Dimensions: 6.1 x 10 x 1.7 cm 

side. Not only is the room too small for Greek of course. 

Mass: 176 g 

large speakers, but it is also at the top of a 

Most liked: Compact, versatile, 

particularly unaccommodating stairwell. astonishing CD player: sound shared with the Alpha 

Least systemliked: 

No digital out 

CD Transport: Parasound C/BD2000 Verdict: Turntable: Sure Alphason it’s cool, but Sonata that’s not 

the needed resolution to serve for reviews. 

HDTV monitor: Hitachi 

43UWX10B CRT-based rear projector 

DVD player: Simaudio Moon Stellar 

with Faroudja Stingray video processor 

Preamplifi er/processor: Simaudio 

Moon Attraction, 5.1 channel version 

Power amplifi ers: Simaudio Moon 

W-3 (main speakers), Celeste 4070se 

(belt-driven transport designed by the Tone half arm: of it. Alphason HR-100S MCS (centre speaker), Robertson 4010 (rear) 

CEC). 

Phono preamp: Audiomat Phono-1.5 Main speakers: Energy Reference 

Digital-to-analog converter: Coun- Pickup: Goldring Excel 

Connoisseur 

terpoint DA-10A, with HDCD card. 

Turntable: Audiomeca J-1 

Preamplifi er: Copland CTA-305 tube 

preamp CROSSTALK 

Centre speaker: Thiel MCS1, on 

UHF’s own TV-top platform 

Tone This arm: little Audiomeca box is good. It SL-5 is, in fact dis- Power We’ll amplifi need to er: adapt, Simaudio yes. It Moon will take Rear And speakers: then I started Elipson listening, 1400 and I was 

concertingly Phono preamp: good. Why Audiomat can it Phono-1.5 reproduce some W-5 getting used to, some humility too, so Subwoofer: charmed by 3a the Design results, Acoustics even alongside 

music Pickup: this Goldring well when Excel so many “real” CD but Loudspeakers: don’t underestimate Reference this trend. 3a We’re our Cables: reference, Equinox that I figured and Atlantis, I ought Star- to give 

players Preamplifi sound er: thin Copland and screechy CTA-305 and down- tube on Suprema our way to II new and amazing sources — some light thought video cables to the usefulness of this gimright 

preamp boring? It isn’t quite audiophile quality, 

though even so it could be. 

Power amplifi er: YBA One HC 

The iPod of course wasn’t designed to 

Loudspeakers: Living Voice Avatar 

be a high end component. But good design 

doesn’t 

OBX-R 

happen by accident. 

Interconnects: Pierre —Gerard Gabriel Rejskind ML-1, 

Equinox/WBT 

full Interconnects: of promises. Pierre Gabriel ML-1. 

I kept looking at the little iPod, dwarfed 

Wireworld Equinox 

by its connecting cables, producing such 

Loudspeaker cables: Pierre Gabriel 

surprisingly good music, and I realized the 

truth: 

ML-1 

we’re 

(formerly 

on our way… 

L3), for most of the 

range, Wireworld Polaris —Albert for the Simon twin 

subwoofers. 

mick. Power Once cables I had done and that, line I fi could lters: think Gut- of 

a thousand occasions on which I’d be happy 

wire cables, Inouye SPLC fi lter 

to have one. 

All three of the systems now have their 

It’s an attractive object, easy to pack 

away 

own 

because 

dedicated 

it’s 

power 

so small, 

lines, 

that 

with 

can 

Hubbell 

warehouse 

hospital a lot grade of your outlets. favorite All music, extensions to be and listened 

power to bars in public used places are also without equipped disturbing with 

Loudspeaker “You remember cables: the time Eclipse when II we with lis- Power I’m not cords: in the Wireworld habit of hiding Aurora my feel- your hospital-grade neighbors, but connectors. also capable of throwtened 

WBT to bananas music through CD players?” ings AC when fi lters: I write Foundation for you. So Research I have to LC-1 tell ing up a terrific musical backdrop when 

I can just hear an audiophile saying just you that I wasn’t even lukewarm about re- re- you’ve got work to do. 

that, someday, after pocketing an iPod and viewing this tiny portable gadget that can As for its audiophile qualities, let me 

preparing to leave his or her friend’s place. fit in your palm. What, yet another gadget just say that they deserve to be underlined. 

Some day. Soon. 

that will become “essential”? 



Listening Listening Room Room

Software 

Gershwin Forever! 

by Reine Lessard 

A 

destiny cut short by a premature 

death that strikes at the 

heart of the musical world, 

and indeed of America itself. 

His America, which he made talk, sing 

and dance, and fi nally weep as he left 

the dance fl oor too young. What was so 

exceptional about this composer who, 

almost 70 years after his death, remains 

alive in the collective memory, his melodies 

still so new and so poignant? 

A child in the crowd 

New York is a stimulating milieu 


in which to grow up, when George 

Gershwin is born on September 26, 

1898. The city already carries the seeds 

of the gigantism that will soon make it a 

vertical community. Its fi rst multi-storey 

constructions hint at the skyscrapers to 

come. 

New York is Brooklyn. It is the 

Bronx. It is Harlem. It is the Bohemian 

Greenwich Village. It is Manhattan, 

temple of success and money. It is Broadway 

and its theatres and concert halls 

that communicate the stuff of dreams to 

the avid crowds that frequent them. For 

Broadway is the meeting place for countless 

musicians, artists and composers 

who have come to search for inspiration 

and hope to fi nd glory. It is the musical 

capital of the New World. They come 

from the four corners of the planet to 

produce their shows, or to applaud the 

most prodigious composers, artists and 

musicians. For millions, New York is the 

city of magic. 

At the end of the 19 th Century, an 

unequalled wave of immigration brings 

some two million Jews from eastern 

Europe to the US. Moshe Gershovitz is 

part of that enormous contingent electing 

domicile in New York, where Liberty 

lighting the world holds high her torch. 

Immigration authorities Americanize 

his name to “Morris Gershwin.” 

Both determined and courageous, 

Morris easily fi nds work in a shoe factory 

in his adopted city. As soon as he has 

built a small nest egg, he proposes to a 

young woman he had known in Russia, 

Rose Brushkin. She bears him four 

children, of which two — the eldest, Ira, 

and the second, George — will become 

famous. 

High fashion shoes sell well in New 

York, and Morris prospers. Having 

overcome the language barrier, he goes 

into the restaurant business, buying a 

restaurant chain that is soon bankrupt. 

His optimism is not affected, and he 

undertakes other projects in different 

fi elds, in which he scores uneven success. 

The Gershwins move often, for Morris 

always insists on living close to his current 

business. Never will the family be 

poorly housed and fed. Rose will later 

confi rm that her husband made a good 

living, and that his family never wanted. 

The family homes, kept up by domestics, 

are further confi rmation. 

This runs counter to the legend of 

George Gershwin’s birth in poor circumstances 

and his miserable childhood. 

If little George grows up largely in the 

street, it is by choice. That is where he 

is happy. He is an urchin, unruly and 

undisciplined, quick with his fi sts, who 

spends a lot of time on roller skates with 

his Black friends, begging for change and 

stealing an occasional candy. He cannot 

guess his destiny awaits him on one of 

those streets. 

One day the lad of six hears a sound

that stops him in his tracks. Entering the 

building from which the sound comes, 

he fi nds himself before a player piano. 

He listens, delighted, until the mysterious 

machine abruptly stops playing. He 

leaves, disappointed, but he is forever 

changed by what he has heard…Anton 

Rubinstein’s Melody in F, as he will later 

learn. 

It has been written that this incident 

is but a prelude to another momentous 

event. One day he plays hooky, preferring 

playing ball to school, when his ear 

is attracted by a delicious melody on the 

violin, Dvorak’s Humoresque. He melts 

before the beauty of the music. Having 

discovered that the violinist is one of his 

own schoolmates, Maxie Rosenzweig 

(who will later become famous under the 

name Maxie Rosen), George rushes to 

the school exit, hoping to congratulate 

him. Alas, Maxie has gone out the other 

door. George gets his home address, but 

his idol has already left. However the 

Rosenzweigs are charmed by the unusual 

initiative of this young boy, and they 

arrange a meeting that will be decisive 

for George’s future career. 

The two youths become fast friends. 

As often as he can, Maxie talks to George 

about music, composition and musical 

technique. He tells him tales of famous 

composers and their masterpieces. He 

introduces George to a friend whose 

parents own a piano, which he is allowed 

to play. The need is created. George 

must have a keyboard. 

It so happens that the Gershwins 

have already decided to buy a piano, with 

Ira in mind. Yet destiny loves irony. No 

sooner is the instrument delivered than 

George plays with the greatest assurance 

popular tunes he has memorized. 

Stunned by his musical aptitude, his 

parents send him for piano lessons with 

Miss Green, next door. George is 12. He 

spends hours at the piano, improvising 

and even composing. Astonished by her 

pupil’s remarkable pianistic ability, she 

sends him to a Hungarian pianist, who in 

turn introduces him to another pianist, 

Charles Hambitzer. 

Now, Hambitzer is much more than 

an ordinary music teacher. He learned 

the piano, the violin and the cello from 

his father, who owned a music store. He 

taught at the University of Wisconsin 

before settling in New York, where he 

has become a prestigious professor. He 

knows the difference between a merely 

talented pupil and a prodigy. 

Classics or jazz? 

Though the fi rst music to conquer 

Gershwin was classical, he has an unconditional 

love of jazz, which he has heard, 

also by chance, coming from a club near 

which he would spend long hours. Hambitzer 

understands his passion for jazz, 

but puts the accent on classical music. 

“If there is someone who is capable 

of making his mark in music,” writes 

Hambitzer to his sister, “it is surely this 

child. He is crazy about music, and he 

can hardly wait for his next lesson. He 

wants to study it all, popular music and 

jazz included, but he must fi rst learn the 

principles of classical music.” 

Hambitzer teaches Gershwin the 

technique of the piano, putting him 

through long hours of exercises and 

scales. He initiates him into a veritable 

musical culture, still unusual in early 

20 th Century America. Bach, Beethoven, 

Chopin, Liszt, Debussy and Ravel are 

on his curriculum, as are the study 

of harmony and instrumentation. He 

encourages George to go to concerts, 

and Gershwin does not resist, especially 

when the concert features a pianist. At 

home he attempts to play the pieces 

he has heard, transforming them with 

improvised variations. 

In 1913 he writes his fi rst two songs, 

Since I Found You and Ragging the Traumerei. 

The latter is a natural choice, 

given his enthusiasm for songs, ragtime 

and jazz, overheard outside that club 

in Harlem. They will not be great successes, 

but they are already marked by 

his strong personality. 

At the crossroads 

In his free moments George reluctantly 

helps his father in one of his 

restaurants, but he is happier playing the 

piano in hotels for small pay. His mother 

has higher ambitions for her son than 

that of an artist, and to please her he 

enrolls at the High School of Commerce, 

but he cuts classes to play the piano. 

How happy he is in those days on 

28 th Street between Broadway and 5 th 

Avenue, visiting the music publishers 

who have set up next to the new music 

hall theatres. He passes hours listening 

to “song pluggers” playing the latest 

tunes on the often tinny pianos that 

give the area the nickname of “Tin 

Pan Alley.” So impassioned is he by all 


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he hears that his professor insists with 

severity on keeping him on the track of 

classical music. Hambitzer is convinced 

that, without a classical base, Gershwin’s 

talent cannot fully develop. 

One day George, weary of lying to 

his mother and dabbling in activities 

he detests, whips up his courage to tell 

her he is quitting school. Hambitzer 

introduces George to Edward Kilenyi, 

who will teach him harmony and composition. 

The two professors encourage 

George in his musical experiments. 

An agent of the Jerome H. Remick 

& Company publishing house, Moses 

Gumble, hears Gershwin playing and 

is delighted. Especially astonished by 

George’s ability to sight-read, Gumble 

hires him as a song plugger. George is 

only 15. The salary is meagre, but he 

must accept it if he wants to succeed. 

In any case he knows that both Irving 

Berlin and Jerome Kern did the same 

work before becoming known. 

There is still no radio and no jukeboxes, 

and even home phonographs are 

rare. To get songs noticed, publishers 

must hire pianists to get them heard. It 

should be added that song plugging will 

continue long after more modern methods 

emerge. These musicians must be 

able to sight read in order to accompany 

singers trying a new song. George is 

perfect for this work, adding to his sightreading 

skill the ability to transpose a 

score to the key chosen by the singer. It 

gives him a major advantage. 

The work is not truly stimulating, but 

it makes him familiar with all the new 

music. It is at the Remick offi ce that he 

meets Fred Astaire and his sister Adele, 

who will become faithful friends. Each 

day George is in contact with music by 

composers of many different styles and 

origins. In the evening, he frequently 

tours cabarets and theatres with Gumble 

to play newly-published music and check 

its popularity with artists looking for 

songs. Contacts with journalists and 

artists of different disciplines come naturally. 

Gershwin is now in a privileged 

position to observe the world of music. 

Despite his long hours at the keyboard, 

the money rolls in slowly. To get 

enough money to abandon song-plugging, 

Gershwin agrees to record Edison 

cylinders, precursors to records, for $5 


“Music must refl ect the thouhts and 

aspirations of the people and the time. My 

people are American. My time is today.” 

George Gershwin 

apiece. Perhaps wanting to make it seem 

as though the cylinders were made by an 

entire stable of musicians, he uses several 

pseudonyms for the recordings. 

The composer emerges 

The more he plays the better he 

becomes. Even other pianists are dazzled. 

“He was in a musical world totally 

different from the rest of us,” will later 

say Harry Ruby, who is also destined for 

fame. “I think we were all a little jealous.” 

Ruby will remain a close friend. 

Gershwin’s daily successes cannot 

make him deviate from his ultimate 

dream: to write songs for Broadway. 

Yet he is every bit as certain that he will 

someday write symphonies and even 

operas. A magic fusion of jazz and classical 

music…such is his dream. 

In 1914, at a wedding, he is astonished 

to hear two songs by Jerome Kern. He 

has found his model, and he will analyze 

all of Kern’s songs. He will even imitate 

them, as he will never deny. 

George quickly becomes Remick’s 

top pianist, but he wants to get his own 

songs known, and Gumble turns them 

down one after the other. “We’re paying 

you to play, not write songs,” he says. 

In 1916 he signs a contract with the 

Harry von Tilzer Publishing Company. 

He gets fi ve dollars for When You Want 

’em, you Can’t Get ’em, When You’ve Got 

’em, You Don’t Want ’em, with words by a 

friend, Murray Roth. For the fi rst time, 

George Gershwin’s name is on a published 

score. Doors have begun to open 

for him, and they will never close. 

He meets Sigmund Romberg, composer 

of such already famous operettas 

as The Student Prince. Impressed by 

Gershwin’s virtuosity, Romberg invites 

him to contribute songs to some new 

productions at the Winter Garden. In 

fact Romberg uses only one of his songs, 

and without credit even so, but what 

does it matter? George has been paid a 

sumptuous $7 for it, and he knows he 

now has one foot in the stirrup. 

All the while he pursues his lessons 

with Hambitzer, continuing until 

Hambitzer’s death in 1918, and also 

with Kilenyi, who gives him two lessons 

a week. To complement his brilliant 

pupil’s musical education, Kilenyi invites 

a variety of orchestral musicians, that 

Gershwin might learn the rudiments 

of each instrument. During rare free 

moments at Remick, George studies 

Bach’s Well Tempered Clavier. 

His popularity grows without interruption. 

In 1917 he meets his idol, 

Jerome Kern, who hires him as rehearsal 

pianist for his production Miss 1917. He 

is eventually introduced to Max Dreyfus, 

editor of Harms, Tin Pan Alley’s top 

publisher, who has attracted numerous 

hot composers to its stable. He offers 

Gershwin $35 a week against the option 

on all his future songs. Songs that are 

actually published will earn a 3% royalty. 

It is an honorable contract, and it elevates 

Gershwin to the top ranks of the trade. 

At the heart of the industry 

This young pianist-composer will 

henceforth be a force to be reckoned 

with, placed as he is at the centre of 

Broadway, mixing with celebrities and 

the money men who control music 

publishing in the United States. 

Jerome Kern appreciated Gershwin’s 

work as a rehearsal pianist, and hires 

him again for his new show Rockabye 

Baby. George doesn’t turn down work, 

but he always fi nds time for his favorite 

occupation, writing songs. In October 

of 1914, at the Broadhurst Theater, the 

premiere of Ladies First includes two 

Gershwin songs: Some Wonderful Sort of 

Someone and The Real American Folk Song. 

Sung by the show’s star, Nora Bayes, the 

songs are warmly received, but the public 

recalls only the main composer’s name. 

Disappointed, Gershwin has learned his 

lesson. From now on he will write entire 

shows, and the name on everyone’s lips 

will be his. 

The year 1919 announces a rich 

period in his life. On May 26 th , the 

Henry Miller Theater premieres Gershwin’s 

La La Lucille, with lyrics by 

Irving Caesar. It’s a success, with such 

memorable songs as Nobody But You and 

There’s More to the Kiss Than the Sound. 

Thus encouraged, Caesar and Gershwin 

compose a song destined for the top of 

the hit parade, Swanee. That autumn, the

already-famous Al Jolson 

sings it in his Capitol Revue. 

The song is recorded by 

Columbia the following 

year and will sell a million 

copies in its fi rst year. Its 

success sweeps the planet, 

and it is played on the 

radio, on the stage, in the 

music hall, and even in the 

living room. At any family 

or friendly get-together, 

there is always someone 

with a fi ne voice ready to 

imitate the popular singer: 

the lights are turned down 

low, he smears his face 

with bootblack, and he 

goes into Swanee. In the 

half light you see only the 

white gloves and the roll of 

the eyes. The effect never 

misses. 

In his early twenties, 

George Gershwin earns 

$10,000 in the fi rst year for 

that song alone. 

The appearance of the 

phonograph and the radio revolutionizes 

the music industry in the early 20’s, as 

will the talking pictures not long after. 

Gershwin meets the dance producer, 

George White, known for his fl air for 

fi nding talent. He includes six Gershwin 

songs in George White’s Scandal of 1920. 

It is only the beginning. Two years later 

White includes eight Gershwin songs 

in the new version of his show. Among 

them: I’ll Build a Stairway to Paradise. 

The song will be reused in the 1951 fi lm 

An American in Paris, where it is sung by 

Georges Guétary. 

On the same evening as the premiere 

of the 1922 show, Gershwin presents 

a mini-opera, Blue Monday, a slice of 

American life set to jazz-inspired music 

with a touch of ragtime. The audience is 

lukewarm, though the next day one critic 

calls it “the fi rst glow of a new American 

musical art form.” 

The elite crowd gravitates about 

Greenwich, and the East Side beckons. 

There Gershwin meets Charlie Chaplin, 

Jascha Heifetz, Groucho Marx, the 

Astaires and Douglas Fairbanks. George 

seems unmannered in this tony company. 

He boasts of frequenting brothels 

Gershwin (at the piano) rehearsing for Rosalie, with fellow 

composer Sigmund Romberg (behind him), and performers 

Jack Donahue and Marilyn Miller. 

and he greets ladies with a cigar clenched 

between his teeth. His social shortcomings 

are noted by one of his admirers, 

jeweler Jules Glaenzer, who undertakes 

to show George more worldly ways. 

Gershwin takes note of the comments 

of this person who clearly admires him 

and considers him a friend. He is soon 

elegant in both speech and dress. 

Sophisticated jazz 

Gershwin’s muse is tireless. He turns 

out six songs a day “to get them out of 

my system,” as he says. In April 1923 

in London, he launches his musical 

comedy The Rainbow. In November, he 

accompanies at the piano the Canadian 

mezzo-soprano and much admired classical 

recitalist, Éva Gauthier. An apostle 

of Poulenc, Milhaud, Stravinsky and 

Bartok, she is a friend of Ravel, to whom 

she introduces Gershwin. Eclectic and 

bold, she champions the cause of modern 

music, as she will do until her death in 

1958. At New York’s Aeolian Hall, she is 

accompanied by Gershwin as she sings 

Purcell, Bellini, Bartok and Schoenberg, 

to which she adds songs by Gershwin and 

Kern. She is the fi rst classical singer to 

incorporate jazz in a classical 

recital. The audience, taken 

aback at fi rst, applauds warmly 

at the end. 

Which brings us to the 

Rhapsody in Blue. 

It is a smash hit at its premiere 

on February 12, 1924 in 

that same Aeolian Hall. The 

evening, organized by famed 

bandleader Paul Whiteman, 

is billed as “an experiment in 

modern music.” In Whiteman’s 

mind it is the realization 

of a dream to which he 

is convinced Gershwin holds 

the key: giving jazz the status 

of serious music. Whiteman 

has not only commissioned 

the work, but also pays Hugh 

C. Ernst a goodly sum to write 

a text for the program on the 

necessity of proper instrumentation 

to improve American 

music. In the audience on 

that evening are a number of 

sophisticated music luminaries 

and composers, such as Rachmaninov, 

Heifetz, Efrem Zimbalist and 

Leopold Stokowski. 

The program is long, with Gershwin’s 

piece at the very end. Before the concert 

is over some audience members grow 

restless and start to leave, when the long 

and troubling clarinet glissando literally 

freezes them in their tracks. 

On stage there is tension. Gershwin 

has not had time to complete the work, 

and he has left blank the solo piano parts. 

He has simply told Whiteman that he 

will nod when it is time for the orchestra 

to come in again. One can imagine the 

exaltation of the composer, not to mention 

the bandleader, and to understand 

their relief when the piece ends and 

they are rewarded by an ovation. The 

Rhapsody in Blue has been consecrated, 

and Gershwin has become legend. 

It is only a few days later that he will 

fi ll in the missing piano part on his score. 

The following summer he will “record” 

the Rhapsody on a reproducing piano (see 

Record Reviews in this issue). 

It is bold and full of energy, with a 

blues fl avor and a clear jazz infl uence, 

written in a single movement for piano 

and orchestra, orchestrated by Ferde 


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Grofé at Whiteman’s request. It will 

become a cornerstone of the American 

musical heritage. It will be played at 

the 1984 Olympics on 84 white pianos, 

to extraordinary acclaim, and in 1990 

Warner will spend a small fortune to 

purchase the rights to it. 

By the way…about the famous 

clarinet introduction that continues 

to astound audiences, it was actually 

improvised by Whiteman’s clarinetist, 

Ross Gorman. It was a happy fi nd, for 

no matter how many times we hear it, it 

remains most impressive. 

It is at about the same time that the 

conductor of the New York Symphony, 

Walter Damrosch, commissions a concerto 

from Gershwin. That same year, 

George and Ira collaborate for the fi rst 

time on a musical, Lady Be Good, marking 

the start of a durable partnership. 

In September Gershwin leaves for 

Europe. Disappointed by the tepid 

success of The Rainbow, he returns to 

London with Primrose, with his own 

orchestration. The new show is greeted 

warmly. 

On December 1 st of the same year 

comes the New York premiere of Lady 

Be Good, starring Fred and Adele Astaire, 

with extraordinarily novel jazz numbers, 

hailed by the critics as “the best musical 

in town.” One of the original songs from 

the show is dropped, judged too intimate 

for a large venue. As fate would have it, 


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the song becomes a Transatlantic hit! It 

is The Man I Love. 

It is only the following July that he 

will fi nally begin the concerto Damrosch 

has requested. 

What about the ladies? 

Handsome, brilliant in sports, 

wealthy, with the halo of the successful 

composer, an amateur painter, a collector 

of art objects, Gershwin has a retinue of 

women about him. He is not ashamed 

to say that he would happily maintain 

a mistress if the practice were not so 

expensive. Though he is not interested 

in marriage, we do know he had an 

affair with the ravishing Kay Swift, 

herself a talented pianist and composer 

for Broadway, one of the fi rst women to 

attack this hitherto masculine domain. 

The affair will lead to Swift’s divorce 

from composer James P. Warburg. 

After Gershwin’s death, she and Ira 

will fl esh out some of his fi nal sketches 

to create a score for the 1947 fi lm The 

Shocking Miss Pilgrim, which will feature 

Betty Grable and the warm voice of Dick 

Haymes. The songs refl ect Gershwin at 

his best: For You, For Me, Forever More, 

and Aren’t You Glad We Did. 

The name of Gertrude Lawrence, 

screen star and fi rst lady of the musical 

comedy in both New York and 

London, is inextricably linked with 

that of Gershwin. She stars in Oh Kay!, 

a musical dedicated to Kay Swift. In it, 

Lawrence sings Maybe, Do-Do-Do, and 

Someone to Watch Over Me. 

Exterior Signs of Fame 

The Gershwin family has moved 

into a luxurious fi ve-storey house on 

103 rd Street near Riverside Drive. It has 

space for his parents, and his siblings 

Arthur and Frances. The great living 

room serves for family meals and for 

Rosie and Morris’s passion, poker. There 

is a gymnasium, and a top fl oor that is 

entirely George’s. It is his kingdom. 

The period from 1925 to 1931 will 

be en exceptional one for the Gershwin 

brothers. 

December 3, 1925 sees the Carnegie 

Hall premiere of the New York Concerto, 

which George has himself orchestrated. 

Music lovers wait in a downpour for the 

doors to open. The program includes 

Glazunov’s Symphony No. 5, Henri 

Rabaud’s Suite anglaise, and the New York 

Concerto, later more commonly called the 

Concerto in F. Gershwin has rehearsed 

the concerto numerous times, even with 

orchestra the week before, recording it 

so he could make corrections. Yet he 

struggles to conceal his nervousness. 

The moment has arrived. An elegant 

George Gershwin prepares to showcase 

his music. Barely has he touched 

the keyboard that already the audience 

is mesmerized. The work itself is 

not immediately acclaimed by critics, 

perhaps put off by its very American 

character. It will, however, eventually 

earn praise from many of the greatest 

composers of the age, and it will enter 

the standard concerto repertoire. It will 

even twice be reworked into ballets, in 

Vienna in 1969 and at the New York City 

Ballet in 1982. 

At the end of 1925, the music of Tip 

Toes is applauded by the critics, and it 

launches the career of one of its youngest 

performers, Jeanette MacDonald, who 

will become a major fi lm star. Two days 

later, the 44 th Street Theater sees the 

premiere of Song of the Flame, considered 

either an operetta or a romantic opera. 

A year later, Gershwin is accompanist 

at a recital at the Roosevelt Hotel in 

New York, and ends with a premiere of 

his Preludes for Solo Piano. He steals the 

spotlight from the soloist of the evening,

Marguerite d’Alvarez. 

In 1927 the premiere of Strike Up the 

Band at Philadelphia’s Shubert Theater, 

is but a modest success, though its title 

song becomes a hit. Based on a book by 

Morrie Ryskind, it is the fi rst collaboration 

of George S. Kaufman with the 

Gershwins. The show will be revived at 

the Times Square Theater in 1930. 

January of 1928 sees the premiere of 

Rosalie, produced by Florenz Ziegfeld, 

a huge hit. It includes seven Gershwin 

songs, including How Long Has This Been 

Going On? 

The following March George begins 

a three-month visit to Europe, accompanied 

by his sister Frances, a singer, his 

brother Ira and his wife Leonora. They 

are in the spotlight as soon as they arrive 

in London, thanks to a revival of Oh 

Kay! Gershwin revisits Ravel, Milhaud, 

Poulenc and Prokofiev in Paris, and 

Alban Berg in Vienna. The Rhapsody in 

Blue is played by the Pasdeloup Orchestra, 

and in April a ballet based on it is 

performed. 

He returns from Europe with enough 

material to compose an orchestral work 

inspired by his stay in Paris. An American 

in Paris is premiered in December in 

Carnegie Hall, with Walter Damrosch 

conducting the New York Philharmonic. 

The gulf between the classics and jazz 

has fi nally been fi lled. Gershwin will 

reuse the music for a ballet scene in Show 

Girl, at the Ziegfeld Theatre in 1929. It 

will later be performed integrally in the 

1952 fi lm bearing the ballet’s title. 

The economic crash of 1929 shakes 

both Europe and America. Banks close 

their doors and worldwide unemployment 

soars. During this dark period, 

Gershwin begins composing Of Thee I 

Sing. 

Girl Crazy, the following year, will be 

one of Gershwin’s best musicals. What 

makes it memorable, despite its idiotic 

script, is a series of remarkable songs 

from the Gershwin brothers, including 

Singin’ in the Rain, Embraceable You and 

I Got Rhythm. 

Like so many other artists, actors 

and musicians, George Gershwin cannot 

resist the allure of the West Coast, 

taking Ira with him. They leave New 

York in November of 1930. The fi lm 

Delicious, with their songs, opens just 

over a year later. The same month, back 

in New York, Of Thee I Sing opens. It 

is a brilliant satire by three lyricists on 

Gershwin’s superb music. The following 

year the show is accorded a Pulitzer 

Prize. Because the Pulitzer has no category 

for musical comedies, the prize is 

given the lyricists…who publicly deplore 

the injustice. 

In January 1932 in Boston he premieres 

his Second Rhapsody for Piano and 

Orchestra, with Koussevitsky conducting 

the Boston Symphony. During a short 

stay in Havana, he is inspired by the 

rhythm and percussion of the island, and 

he writes a Cuban Overture (originally 

titled Rumba). The New York Philharmonic 

premieres it. A month later, 

Simon and Schuster publishes The George 

Gershwin Song Book. 

October 1933 sees the premiere of Let 

’em Eat Cake, a logical successor to Of 

Thee I Sing, confi rming Ira Gershwin’s 

taste for satire. 

In 1934 Gershwin plays the solo part 

in his I Got Rhythm Variations. You have 

to hear these variations on a familiar 

melody to appreciate fully the genius 

of Gershwin. When the time came to 

improvise, his prodigious imagination, 

so well served by the agility of his fi ngers, 

knew no bounds. 

But the Great Depression is showing 

no signs of ending, and its effects on 

Broadway are disastrous. The theatres 

and music halls are empty. A long list 

of artists must fight against despair, 

for so many are without work. And yet, 

on October 10, 1935, Gershwin’s opera 

Porgy and Bess opens on Broadway. It 

is Gershwin’s longest work, though 

it is staged in abbreviated form. To 

soothe music lovers not yet used to his 

innovative style, Gershwin avoids the 

word opera altogether. The libretto is 

by DuBose Heyward, with lyrics by 

Heyward and Ira Gershwin. This African-American 

story is set on Catfi sh 

Row in Charleston, SC. Later considered 

a masterpiece, Porgy and Bess is not an 

immediate success, though strangely 

some of its songs will become immensely 

popular even among people who had 

not yet seen the show. The song lineup 


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includes the deathless lullaby, Summertime. 

Much can be said about Porgy and 

Bess, whose music will be reused in 

a symphonic suite orchestrated by 

Gershwin, and in the instrumental suite 

Catfi sh Row. For a long time the opera 

will be performed more frequently in 

Western Europe and in Russia than in 

the United States. It will be the fi rst 

American opera to be staged in La Scala 

in Milan. It will be made into a fi lm, 

whose music will win an Oscar. It will 

take 50 years for Porgy and Bess to be 

staged by the Metropolitan Opera. 

Hollywood calls 

The Talkies have swept Hollywood. 

Music is now an integral part of a fi lm, 

to the detriment of the pianists who used 

to play while silent pictures rolled, but 

offering new opportunities for composers. 

Gershwin anticipates the riches that 

will surely fl ow for himself and for Ira 

from a second trip to Hollywood. 

RKO Pictures is growing rapidly, and 

offers the Gershwin brothers $55,000 to 

work on the fi lm Watch Your Step, which 

will be rebaptized with the name of a 

Gershwin song, Shall We Dance. George 

and Ira move into a Beverley Hills mansion 

complete with tennis court, pool 

and billiard room. George writes music 

worthy of Ira’s lyrics: Let’s Call the Whole 

Thing Off, and They Can’t Take That Away 

From Me, which gets an Oscar nomination. 

Yet George is not happy. He misses 

the contact with his audience, and in late 

1936 he undertakes a concert tour. For 

some time he has not been at his best. 

He suffers from frequent headaches, 

and seems to be running out of energy. 

During his fi nal concert with the Los 

Angeles Philharmonic, in the midst of 

playing the Concerto in F he is surprised 

to smell what seems to be burning 

rubber, before passing out. 

His doctor can fi nd nothing wrong. 

Still with Ira at his side, he returns 

to his writing, composing music for A 

Damsel in Distress, a vehicle for his old 

friend Fred Astaire, dancing this time 

with Joan Fontaine. Then there is a new 

fi lm which promises to be a blockbuster 

hit, the Goldwyn Follies. Gershwin calls 

on the talents of the famed Russian 


choreographer George Balanchine. 

But the headaches are getting worse, 

accompanied by dizziness and perception 

of strange odors. Consultations 

with top specialists bring no defi nite 

diagnosis. In June he undergoes a complete 

checkup: blood and urine tests, 

electrocardiogram, and a neurological 

exam. They turn up nothing. George 

is impatient as his condition worsens. 

Increasingly weak, he naps often and 

can no longer stand bright light. He 

cannot walk without aid. Worried but 

powerless, Ira and his wife place George 

at the home of a friend with a nurse to 

care for him. 

On July 9, 1937, he falls into a coma. 

Rushed to hospital, he is examined by a 

neurosurgeon. It is only the next day that 

doctors discover what they had suspected 

for some time: a brain tumor. 

He goes into the operating room at 

the Cedars Lebanon Hospital in Los 

Angeles on July 11 th , but he does not 

survive the operation. He dies without 

regaining consciousness. 

The man behind the artist 

Gershwin’s rise was not without 

detours. It was because he was well ahead 

of his time in his attempt to create a 

fusion of jazz and the classics, because 

he was a school dropout in a country 

where diplomas had replaced titles, 

because it seemed impossible to reach 

the top echelons as a composer without 

a solid classical background — and 

Gershwin had studied at no university, 

and with no European master. He was 

also hampered by his very fame, for he 

was more popular than many a composer 

supposedly better schooled in harmony 

and composition. 

On top of it all, he was Jewish. Certain 

articles in contemporary musical 

journals by supposedly broadminded 

critics have an anti-Semitic tone whose 

virulence is downright disconcerting. 

There was, around George Gershwin, 

an impressive cohort of women, admirers 

or potential lovers of whom we know 

little. A few names are mentioned here 

and there: Kay Swift, Paulette Goddard, 

Julie Adams. But what good would it do 

us to know the intimate details of the 

great? I can say only that Gershwin was 

courted by the great of this world, who 

hoped to have him at their table, as well 

as by women who hoped to receive him 

in their beds. 

“Why should I limit myself to one 

woman,” he is purported to have said, 

“when I can have as many women as I 

want?” 

In praise of Gershwin 

George Gershwin was a phenomenal 

melodist and a composer of genius, the 

most illustrious of the New World, 

and — one can affi rm without fear of 

contradiction — the creator of a distinctively 

American music. He leaves a 

priceless heritage of fusion, classic jazz, 

and eternal melodies that have entered 

the American soul, with works such as 

the Concerto in F and Rhapsody in Blue. 

As for opera, his arias are recognizable 

even to those who don’t know who wrote 

them. We have all been exposed to these 

sublime melodies, immortalized by their 

spontaneity, their enthusiasm, their 

freshness, their passion, and their deeply 

human qualities. 

As a pianist he was prodigious. It 

was at the keyboard he was happiest, 

spinning melodies or variations on those 

melodies. Ira, his brother and collaborator, 

wrote that he had been especially 

astonished by his brother’s left hand. We 

might regret that he left us only three 

works for piano, but such works! They 

are the Three Preludes of 1926. 

Very much influenced by Afro- 

American music, he was also an admirer 

of Rachmaninoff, Schoenberg, Poulenc 

and others. They in turn much admired 

him and sometimes quoted his music. 

Ravel became close to Gershwin, and 

the two exercised a mutual infl uence. 

Gershwin’s orchestrations became more 

refi ned, while Ravel became infl uenced 

by the Gershwin manner. Traces of 

Gershwin can be heard in his Sonata for 

Violin, his Concerto in G for Extroverted 

Piano, and the Concerto for the Left Hand, 

composed for a friend who had lost an 

arm in the war. 

Darius Milhaud, for his part, was the 

fi rst composer to sign a major classical 

work in the jazz idiom. It was La creation 

du monde of 1923. 

But why ma ke compa r isons? 

Gershwin was Gershwin. There will 

never be another.

Mendelssohn: Complete Works for 

Cello and Piano 

Elizabeth Dolin/Bernadene Blaha 

Analekta FL 2 3166 

Lessard: Felix Mendolssohn occupies a 

considerable place on the musical scene 

of 19 th Century Germany. He was a 

pianist, organist, violinist, recitalist, 

conductor, composer, pedagogue, and 

co-founder, with Schumann, of a music 

conservatory of enviable reputation. 

And he left a large number of admirable 

works, such as the ones included on 

this CD. To put them on show, here are 

extraordinarily talented cellist and pianist, 

possessing a perfect understanding 

of the master’s very soul. 

From the fi rst notes of the Allegro 

vivace of the Sonata No. 2 in D Major, 

op. 58, from 1843, we are overcome by 

the sheer beauty of the melody and the 

energetic rhythm of the musicians. After 

an Allegretto scherzando, the Adagio opens 

with a series of piano arpeggios, to which 

the cello adds its warm but troubling 

tone, giving way to the piano which picks 

up the melody. The sonata ends with a 

lively Moto allegro e vivace, whose cello 

ostinato made me think of The Flight of 

the Bumblebee. Further along we come to 

the Variations concertantes, op. 17, which 

Mendelssohn composed when he was 20. 

It contains nine themes, in which cello 

and piano alternate in the spotlight, 

ending in an Assai tranquillo. Next there 

is a Lied of rare tenderness in a somewhat 

melancholic vein…just the thing to listen 

to at the end of the day when you and a 

Record Reviews 

loved one exchange whispers rather than 

words. 

A second sonata, the Opus 45, in B 

Flat Major this time, ends this musical 

session of exceptional quality. 

I always like to recall that it is to 

Mendelssohn that we owe the rediscovery 

of the works of Johann Sebastian 

Bach, whose reputation as an organist 

had so eclipsed Bach the composer that 

his works were hardly ever played. 

Nota del Sol 

Similia 

Analekta AN 2 9817 

Lessard: From their fi rst album, Cantabile 

(UHF No. 64), the twin Labrie 

sisters, fl utist Nadia and guitarist Annie, 

won over their audience. The pieces on 

this, their second CD, includes some 

of the most beautiful music from the 

contemporary composers of South 

America. 

From the celebrated Argentine 

guitarist and composer Maximo Diego 

Pujol come two selections, the Suite 

Buenos Aires and Dos aires candombreros. 

The opening section, the first four 

tracks, brings us to various picturesque 

corners of the city, each with its local 

color and special accent. The Palermo 

section takes us into a romantic dream 

with a heady tune. We would stay there 

gladly, but we take a detour into the old 

San Telmo quarter, with its cafés and 

by Reine Lessard, 

and Gerard Rejskind 

public markets, where we are engulfed by 

the exuberant joie de vivre well evoked 

by a short but astonishing percussion 

passage. In Microcentro, our next listening 

point, an exquisite duo recreates the 

atmosphere of downtown. There is no 

better music to appreciate the virtuosity 

of the two musicians, and the perfect 

osmosis that unites them. The suite ends 

with a reprise of Palermo and a frantic 

fi nale. 

The second Pujol piece opens with 

Nubes de Buenos. Brought to Argentina by 

Black slaves from Africa, the candombe 

is a dance with rapid tempo and a 

well-syncopated rhythm, with highly 

romantic fl ute passages. The playing is 

fi ery. 

There are excerpts from Celso Machado’s 

Musiques populaires brésiliennes, 

with delicious rhythms and melodies. 

Between then comes a lascivious Tango 

by Eric Marchelie, which opens with an 

air on the fl ute that develops with fervor 

and passion to the energetic accompaniment 

of the guitar. 

But without a doubt the pièce de 

résistance is Histoire du Tango, with four 

pieces by Astor Piazzola: Bordel 1900, 

gay, catching, almost insolent, a touch 

disreputable; Café 1930, dreamy and 

tender; Night Club 1950, recalling the 

rise of the tango to ballroom status; and 

Concert d’aujourd’hui, a hybrid product of 

two infl uences elevating the tango to the 

classical level. 

A guitar that goes to our head by its 

formidable sound and virtuosity, subtle 

rubato full of tenderness to touch our 

senses, melodies that run through our 

minds despite us, and two accomplished 

musicians playing with matchless virtuosity 

and sensitivity, as well as a verve 

which plunges us into a joyous session, 

from which we emerge all too soon to a 

duller reality. 

The recording was done in the old 

Saint-Augustin de Mirabel stone church, 

north of Montreal, which for several 

years has been used by Analekta for some 

of its best recordings. The sound, from 

Analekta’s usual engineer. Carl Talbot, 

is impeccable. 


Software

Software 

Bells for Stokowski 

Junkin & Univ. of Texas Wind Ens. 

Reference Recordings RR-104CD 

Rejskind: The title puzzled me right off. 

Famed conductor Leopold Stokowski 

has been dead for nearly 30 years, even 

though he lives on through his countless 

recordings. Actually the album 

title is drawn from its fi nal piece, that 

of Michael Daugherty. Daugherty’s 

forte is commissioned music suites. He 

has written evocative music in praise 

of Baltimore, Detroit, Los Angeles, 

and even places that don’t exist, such as 

Superman’s home town of Metropolis. 

The subject in this case is Philadelphia, 

and it is one of three commissioned 

pieces in honor of that city. 

It’s got bells, as the title promises: 

two large bells on either side of the stage, 

plus a variety of other bells and bell-like 

percussion instruments. The result is 

most attractive and even refreshing, 

but…why? 

Daugherty explains that he has imagined 

Stokowski — one-time conductor 

of the Philadelphia Orchestra as of so 

many others — “visiting the Liberty 

Bell at sunrise, and listening to all the 

bells of the city resonate.” He includes 

various bell sounds throughout the 

piece, including occasional tolling by 

the two big bells, and his multilayered 

orchestration is also meant to evoke the 

variety of music Stokowski conducted, 

from Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier and 

Goldberg Variations (which he quotes) to 

20th Bells for Stokowski 

Junkin & Univ. of Texas Wind Ens. 

Reference Recordings RR-104CD 

Rejskind: The title puzzled me right off. 

Famed conductor Leopold Stokowski 

has been dead for nearly 30 years, even 

though he lives on through his countless 

recordings. Actually the album 

title is drawn from its fi nal piece, that 

of Michael Daugherty. Daugherty’s 

forte is commissioned music suites. He 

Century atonal music, and ending 

with a full-orchestra roar Stokowski 

loved. I do think Stokowski would have 

enjoyed conducting this. 

The other works are unrelated. They 

include an English folk song suite by 


Ralph Vaughan Williams. It seems odd 

to hear his music played by a wind band, 

since he himself very much favored lush 

strings, but this suite really was composed 

for band. I have reservations about 

his rather amorphous, rambling music, 

but he had a talent for arranging good 

melodies in a new setting: his Fantasia 

on Greensleeves remains, deservedly, his 

best-known work. Vaughan Williams 

collected many folk songs to keep them 

from being forgotten, and this suite 

contains several. 

The first and third selections are 

surprisingly bold and brassy. The middle 

one, an arrangement of My Bonny Boy, is 

quieter, more introspective, but with a 

strong architecture. 

Most unusual is a suite of old music 

from 16th best-known work. Vaughan Williams 

collected many folk songs to keep them 

from being forgotten, and this suite 

contains several. 

The first and third selections are 

surprisingly bold and brassy. The middle 

one, an arrangement of My Bonny Boy, is 

quieter, more introspective, but with a 

strong architecture. 

Most unusual is a suite of old music 

from 16 Century Belgian composer 

Tielman Susato. I had never heard of 

him, nor have most people. One of 

his few pieces that have survived is a 

collection of songs and dances called 

th Century Belgian composer 

Tielman Susato. I had never heard of 

him, nor have most people. One of 

his few pieces that have survived is a 

collection of songs and dances called 

Your source for Klavier and Analekta 

Not all of the recordings reviewed in these pages are available from our Audiophile Store. But 

some are. Check our Web site, because some of the best recordings available are only a few 

clicks away. 

The Danserye, originally composed for 

the instruments of the time —sackbut, 

krumhorn and the like — and adapted 

for modern wind band by Patrick Dunnigan. 

Jerry Junkin’s excellent University 

of Texas Wind Ensemble is much larger 

than any orchestra of fi ve centuries ago 

would have been, with the result that, not 

withstanding the period dance rhythms, 

with their symmetrical development and 

characteristic repetitions, the suite has 

a decidedly modern sound. This is by 

no means a bad thing, and I enjoyed it 

immensely. 

The collection, finally, includes a 

highly contemporary work by David Del 

Tredici, titled In Wartime. Del Tredici 

completed it while he sat in front of the 

TV, watching the US “shock and awe” 

invasion of Iraq. Many composers have 

written music on the theme of war. It is 

generally joyous and bombastic if it is 

written early in the war, sad and tragic 

if written after. This piece was written 

before, but was fi nished in front of the 

TV images. Would Del Tredici have a 

point of view? 

In Wartime begins with a hymn, 

the part most war requiems end with. 

It then continues with a Battlemarch, 

well-crafted but whose sense I strove 

to discern. Perhaps the war is still too 

close, and I was working too hard to 

make intellectual sense of it, though I 

was somewhat shaken by the ending, 

whose sound suggests an air raid siren. 

I wondered whether Del Tredici will 

ultimately feel compelled to add a third 

movement to his suite. It is too soon to 

guess what its title will be. 

The sound, as usual with this company, 

was done by Keith O. Johnson, 

and is mostly outstanding, but for some 

rather shrill peaks on trumpets and 

fl utes. It sounds especially good if you 

have a player with an HDCD decoder. 

Proper decoding adds explosive dynamics, 

a bottom end that borders on scary 

and great depth to what is already a 

pretty good recording. 

Celebration 

Les violons du roy/Gauvin/Roschmann 

Dorian DOR-90024 

Lessard: The reputation of this ensemble 

long ago overfl owed local frontiers 

to emerge in only a few years as one of 

the world’s most appreciated chamber 

orchestras. Its founder and conductor 

has found a way to be respected rather 

than feared. Much as he is appreciated by 

the public, he shows surprising modesty 

before the ovations at his concerts. As for 

the 15 musicians he leads, they are virtuosos 

of their respective instruments. 

Bernard Labadie has a particular 

penchant for Handel, Bach, Vivaldi and 

Mozart. Handel’s Concerto Grosso op. 6 

No. 5 in D Major opens this 78 minute 

CD of musical and auditory joy. 

The Allegro assai from the Sinfonia in 

D Major is from J.C.F. Bach, possibly the 

least-known member of the celebrated 

dynasty, though that should not be 

taken to imply a lack of talent. In fact his 

output, nearly all composed at the court

of Bückenburg, is immense. 

There is a superb arrangement by 

Labadie of a part of J.S. Bach’s Art of the 

Fugue, in which he doses the harpsichord 

and the organ with remarkable discernment. 

On track 12 there is the gift of a 

sublime aria drawn from Handel’s 

Dafné, sung by the divine soprano 

Karina Gauvin. When her voice rises, 

no matter what you’re doing she will 

command your attention. Indeed, all of 

the voices on the recording — not only 

Gauvin but also Dorothea Roschmann 

and Russell Braun — are magnifi cent, 

and they touch us to our very hearts in 

pieces by Handel and Bach. 

After that come two remarkable concertos 

by Vivaldi, rendered in dazzling 

fashion. In the midst of it, a fi rst violin 

enthralls us with the utter beauty of a 

Largo e spiccato. 

Bach’s Goldberg Variations follow, in 

an orchestral arrangement by Labadie, 

and finally three movements from 

Mozart’s deathless Requiem, with a contribution 

from the choir and soloists of 

the Chapelle de Québec. 

I feel it would be redundant for 

me to say much about these works so 

well-loved for centuries. Except for the 

J.C.F. Bach piece, they are staples of 

both recordings and concert halls, all 

for our greater pleasure. I’d rather praise 

the dynamic playing of the musicians, 

always perfectly coordinated, but whose 

discipline in no way banishes a healthy 

dose of sensitivity. 

The sound? Dorian at its best. 

Obseción 

Trio Amadé 

Klavier K11134 

Rejskind: The meaning of the title is 

evident, though not why the Amadé Trio 

chose it. The music is eclectic, covering 

Aaron Copland, Leonard Bernstein, 

Astor Piazzola and Emilio Colón. I’ve 

run across Colón’s music on several 

recordings in the last short while, but 

this recording is signifi cant for a particular 

reason: the cellist of this superb piano 

trio is none other than Colón himself. 

So let me begin by his own contribution, 

a tango with the enigmatic title N. 

Written specially for this ensemble, it 

opens with a gentle piano solo, followed 

by a ravishingly beautiful violin passage 

that is well supported by the graver tones 

of the cello. It is in the second half of 

the piece, running six minutes, that 

you recognize that yes, this is indeed a 

tango. 

This worthy piece is followed by a 

suite from the late Argentinian tango 

master, Astor Piazzola, titled Las Cuatro 

Estaciones Porteñas, a clear reference 

to Vivaldi’s Four Seasons. One doesn’t 

expect to be able to dance to Piazzola’s 

tangos, of course, though one almost 

could to the Verano Porteño, the Summer 

sequence. It alternates between fiery 

brio and heartrending nostalgia. Spring 

is deliciously melodic, while Autumn 

is lyrical and hints tantalizingly at the 

tango rhythm, which then bursts out 

in full fl ame. Winter is another delight, 

whose mood changes blindingly fast, 

revealing its dance nature. It can be 

surprisingly easy to make Piazzola sound 

dull and confused, but even he didn’t 

often make his music sound as delightful 

as it does on this recording. 

The other half of the CD is more diffi 

cult to recommend. Copland’s Vitebsk 

(Study on a Jewish Theme) is inspired by 

a folk song Copland heard during a New 

York performance of The Dybbuk by the 

Moscow Arts Theater. It is angular and 

austere, not at all like Copland’s bestknown 

works, which often themselves 

sound like folk music. It seemes dated 

today. And I was left cold by a 1937 trio 

composed by Leonard Bernstein when 

he was 19. 

The Amadé Trio, in case I haven’t 

already made it clear, is absolutely fi rstclass. 

Violinist Felicia Moye in particular 

has a penchant for lyricism that can 

bring you close to tears, as she does on 

both the Piazzola and the Colón. Pianist 

Heather Coltman is excellent, and I need 

hardly add that the group’s composercellist 

understands this music perfectly. 

Best of all, the whole adds up to even 

more than the sum of its parts. 

The microphones were placed close 

to the instruments, and so the actual 

sound you hear will depend in large part 

on the acoustics of your own room. Yet 

it never sounds unpleasantly forward, 

or shrill and edgy. The transfer to CD 

is spot on. 

Norman Dello Joio 

Stamp & Keystone Wind Ens. 

Klavier K11138 

Rejskind: My first reaction: I was 

delighted to learn that Norman Dello 

Joio was still alive. Indeed, the last cut 

on this disc is a 23 minute interview with 

him, part of Klavier’s The Composer’s Voice 

series. I became a fan of his orchestral 

and choral music many years ago. Not 

only is he a master melodist, but he 

has a natural understanding of how to 

use variations on a theme to surprise 

and delight the ear. Clearly, he himself 

delights in the sheer sound of the orchestra. 

And I must add that this delight has 

never been more evident than in this 

stunning recording, a topic I shall return 

to in a moment. 

Dello Joio is musically eclectic. He 

studied composition with Hindemith, 

but he also spent part of his youth 

playing jazz, and he acknowledges Fats 

Waller as one of his infl uences. It seems 

to me he was always drawn to the use of 

percussion and brass to fi ll the space of 

a hall, and it appears natural for him to 

compose for wind band, as he has in all 

of these pieces. I was surprised to hear 

that he wrote his fi rst work for wind band 


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only in 1963, when he was 50. That work, 

Variants on a Medieval Tune, is the very 

fi rst piece on the CD. 

The medieval tune in question will 

be familiar to most listeners as In Dulci 

Jubilo, the tune to the Christmas carol 

Good Christian Men Rejoice. Dello Joio 

exposes it undisguised in the fi rst of six 

movements, and then starts work to reuse 

it in ever more inventive forms, played 

fi rst by the bassoon, then the clarinet, 

and later the brass, then different mixes 

of brass and woodwinds: fl ute, French 

horn, and so on. The percussion is used 

as tasty condiment. He adds a number of 

original melodies to the cauldron, some 

of them unrelated to the main theme, 

though sometimes more closely related 

than one might guess. 

Also on the CD is another set of variations, 

the Fantasies on a Theme by Haydn. 

The theme is drawn from Haydn’s String 

Quartet No. 2, op. 76. Dello Joio had 

borrowed the theme once before, for 

his orchestral Homage to Haydn of 1969, 

premiered by the Philadelphia Orchestra 

no less! He later reworked it as this wind 

band piece, and it sounds as though it 

was originally written that way. There 

are four movements, which have their 

own track numbers on the CD, but are 

played without pause. This suite alone is 

worth ordering the record for. 

The other pieces are less familiar, but 

are worth discovering. City Profi les is a 

wind band adaptation of his New York 

Profi les of 1949, with constantly shifting 

moods in which he uses the band to 

excellent advantage. From Every Horizon 

is also for New York, adapted from his 

score for a fi lm about the 1964 World’s 

Fair. 

The members of the Keystone Wind 

Ensemble are drawn from faculty, 

students and administration of Indiana 

University of Pennsylvania, which barely 

hints at what an outstanding ensemble 

this is. The playing is flawless, very 

much together, and it is full of life and 

enthusiasm. They play with obvious and 

communicative pleasure that does justice 

to the music. Bruce Leek’s engineering 

is entirely up to the task, and indeed 

appears to push the envelope of what can 

be put onto a Red Book CD. The clarity 

is wonderfully satisfying, and the percussion 

rings with a power that is often 

startling. Dello Joio loves the sound of 

the orchestra, and Leek has captured it. 

This is a truly great recording. 

Note to the competition: before you do 

your next 24-bit recording, have a listen 

what Leek does with only 16. 

Kickin’ the Clouds Away 

George Gershwin 

Klavier K77031 

Lessard: At this moment I am hearing 

George Gershwin at the piano. 

Gershwin himself! After hearing his 

music interpreted by so many other pianists, 

by so many singers, by orchestras 

large and small, by so many bands, after 

having read thousands of comments on 

his dazzling piano performances, I have 

Gershwin himself in my Linn player, 

nearly 70 years after his death. Such 

emotion! That pleasure alone is enough 

to justify getting this recording. 

But that’s not all. It’s a chance to hear 

once again his many moving melodies: 

I Was So Young, You Were So Beautiful, a 

gorgeous love song, Drifting Along With 

the Tide, and So Am I. Better yet, I was 

able to gauge for myself his inimitable 

virtuosity, his brilliant playing. On this 

CD he plays not only his own works 

but also those of other composers he 

admires: Jerome Kern, Irving Berlin 

and others. I can’t believe it! And whence 

comes this magic? 

Starting in his twenties, Gershwin 

played a number of compositions on a 

reproducing piano, a more sophisticated 

version of the player piano once common 

in bars and saloons. Popular from 1903 

to 1930, it could record on a paper roll 

not only the actual notes played, but 

also the dynamics and the pedal position. 

The makers of these machines 

were willing to pay good money to sign 

up the fi nest pianists of their time. To 

make this recording, a reproducing 

piano was placed in a concert hall, stereo 

microphones were suspended over it, 

and Gershwin’s piano rolls were played. 

Gershwin…in modern stereo! 

But I won’t reveal all of the secrets of 

this fabulous machine, since you’ll fi nd 

them explained in detail in the booklet 

accompanying the CD. I can add only 

that this recording is a must in any 

serious eclectic record collection, and 

that you’ll listen with renewed pleasure 

to Swanee, Shilkret’s Make Believe, 

Donaldson’s Rockabye, Lullaby Mammy, 

Rhapsody in Blue, and of course Kickin’ 

the Clouds Away. 

Piano Rags 

Richard Dowling 

Klavier K77035 

Lessard: Like many a new music form, 

the rag was initially condemned by the 

Establishment and considered suitable 

for clubs and brothels. Its rapid 

spread and huge popularity indicate 

that, notwithstanding the disapproval, 

it captivated music lovers everywhere, 

and composers as well. Among those 

who wrote ragtime music were John 

Philip Sousa, the king of band marches 

and inventor of the sousaphone, George 

Gershwin, Sigmund Romberg, Jerome 

Kern and Irving Berlin. You can also 

fi nd ragtime in the music of Dvorak, 

Debussy and others. 

Though ragtime was shouldered aside 

by jazz in the 1920’s, it was never totally 

eclipsed, and there was renewed interest, 

starting in the 60’s, in this music, 

originated by itinerant pianists, mostly 

Afro-Americans and mostly from the US 


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won awards not only for best picture but 

also for best musical score…for the rag 

The Entertainer. 

Do I like rags? Yes I do, for one of the 

benefi ts of being eclectic is the ability to 

fi nd happiness with many different musical 

styles. I envy the composers, who can 

express so many fi ne sentiments using 

this very complex music that merely 

sounds easy, if only because it is played 

by pianists with astonishing talent. The 

originators of ragtime were all magicians 

of the keyboard. 

The present recording features Richard 

Dowling and his Steinway, playing 

rags by such celebrities as Joseph C. 

Northup, Artie Matthews, James Scott, 

Joseph F. Lamb, Gershwin, and Scott 

Joplin — dubbed the king of ragtime. 

Included are Joplin’s Bethena, Maple Leaf 

Rag and A Mexican Serenade. This last is 

as sentimental as you could wish, with 

rubato, pregnant pauses…the works. 

Except for William Bolcom, who was 

younger, the others were born before the 

turn of the century. 


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The CD opens with Bolcom’s The 

Cannon Ball of 1905, a highly original 

blend of classics and ragtime. The 

booklet says that it recalls (What? Did 

I read right!) Franz Liszt. Begging your 

pardon, I don’t agree. And yet… Listen 

to those rapid cascades of arpeggios, 

staccatos and clever repetitions, blended 

with the syncopated rhythm typical of 

ragtime, and tell me this is not a virtuoso 

piece! What we call light music is not 

necessarily music that is easy to play, 

as this disc demonstrates. Dowling has 

the knack for broad chords, thirds and 

octave jumps, delivered with remarkable 

precision, without ever breaking the 

luminous rhythm that make the hours 

seem short. 

Then come two rags by arranger 

Artie Matthews, believed to have also 

written the fi rst blues, Baby Seal Blues, in 

1915. Joseph E. Lamb’s American Beauty 

Rag is especially attractive and a bit sentimental, 

though without sacrifi cing the 

joyousness of the genre. Lamb’s Ragtime 

Nightingale has touches of rubato here 

and there. James Scott’s tongue-in-cheek 

Hilarity Rag is irresistible. Jay Roberts’ 

Entertainment Rag is full of contagious 

humor, and contains some easily-spotted 

quotations. Kitten on the Keys is absolutely 

divine, and represents very well a cat 

choosing to dance on the black and white 

notes. 

The list could go on. In short all of 

the pieces on this CD are dazzling, both 

by their style and by the pianist’s exciting 

play. I recommend it warmly. 

One Life 

Katinka Wilson 

Opus 3 CD22032 

Rejskind: It seems you can’t go to an 

audio show without fi nding a new CD 

by a new female jazz singer. Most would 

sound fi ne if you ran across them in a 

smoky club late at night, but buying the 

CD is another matter. A number of these 

singers come from the Far East, particularly 

Hong Kong. Do they understand 

what they are singing? On the primary 

level, sure, but… 

Now and again you get a hit. Sheffi 

eld’s Margie Gibson is such a prize. 

And remember Thérèse Juel, who sang 

so gorgeously in Swedish on the Opus 3’s 

original demo disc? 

Katinka Wilson is also from Opus 3, 

and I’m sorry to say I can’t put her in 

the hit category. Despite her un-Swedish 

last name and her fl awless English 

phrasing, she was born near Stockholm. 

She is multitalented, not only singing 

but playing guitar, and writing her own 

music and lyrics. She has good backup, 

which includes Janne Petersson, one of 

Eric Bibb’s people. 

I tried to get into this music, I really 

did, but neither the melodies nor the 

words kept me from thinking about 

things other than music. Wilson has 

studied some pretty good singers, and 

she has learned all the tricks well, but 

really good singing is not a trick. It is 

an art, or should be. 

Even the sound left me cold, something 

I don’t often say about Opus 3 

recordings. It is a hybrid SACD, yet its 

sound is oddly fl at and one-dimensional. 

Perhaps it’s the fact that this is a multitrack 

mix, as given away by the fact that 

Wilson sometimes adds in overdubbed 

choral effects. I can’t think of a reason 

to recommend it.

Though Blue Circle was originally 

known for tube gear, it has been moving 

extensively into solid state…including its 

new BC27pi phono stage. 

The unit has been made slim so it 

can be tucked behind the turntable 

or preamp, to keep cables short. The 

second chassis is the power supply, 

which includes a whopping 200,000 mF 

of fi lter capacitors…enough for a pretty 

good power amp. The BC27pi costs 

US$1395. The BC27, which has a more 

conventional power supply, is US$595, 

and is upgradable to the “pi” version. 

* 

We reviewed the Creek CD50 player 

just in time…before Creek replaced it 

with the Mark II version. It looks the 

same, and reportedly sounds similar too, 

but it is radically different. 

Instead of using the usual upscale 

Philips transport favored by most manufacturers, 

Creek uses an inexpensive 

computer-grade computer-grade CD-R drive, which 

loads data into into a block of computer 

memory. memory. The The memory buffer then plays 

the data, with what what we can assume is 

minimum jitter. 

There are potential problems: Europeanpean 

record stores are full of discs 

mucked up with copy protection schemes 

aimed at foiling their use in computers. 

Creek claims the CD50 MkII will play 

all current discs, and that the player’s 

fi rmware is on an easily-changed plug-in 

device. 

* 

Among new products from Benz 

Micro is a line of new titanium watches. 

Says the company: “Swiss precision, style 

and it’s analog!” 

Gossip&News 

News From the Trenches 

Swedish radio has gone to 5.1 channels. 

No, not on the air, but on the 

Internet. The experimental service 

offers surround sound music concerts 

you can download, burn to CD, and then 

play through a home theatre system. 

Both DTS and Dolby Digital versions 

are included. 

This is not for dialup connections: 

fi les run up to 729 Mb! Try them at 

http://www.sr.se/multikanal/english/ 

e_index.stm. 

* 

The upsampling stakes keep being 

raised. Numerous CD and DVD/SACD 

players now offer upsampling of CDs 

from the usual 44.1 kHz to 96 kHz. Now 

MSB goes one better: 192 kHz. That’s 

available in the company’s new Super 

DVD player. 

This is another in the growing 

category of “play anything” machines, 

handling DVD, DVD-A, SACD, etc. It 

costs US$7995. 

An add-on for some earlier MSB 

players adds the upsampling capability 

for US$699. 

* 

Naim will soon release its new DVD5 

player, which will include an onboard 

Faroudja video processor. 

DVD player. The DVD5 has been designed for 

use with very large displays, and can 

upscale images to 1080 lines…the video 

counterpart to audio upsampling. 

The new player, whose price has not 

yet been announced, will play DVD- 

Audio, but not SACD. 

Gossip that is more than gossip 

Even before the Internet, gossip was easy to come by. But you don’t have to have 

sent your bank account number to a former Nigerian dictator to know that a lot 

of information fl oating around is of little value. 

Beastly CDs 

What’s different about the gossip you’ll fi nd in the pages of UHF is that it 

comes with comment. In short, it’s not just cut and pasted, it’s also thought 

about. 

In late June there was a flurry of 

angry Internet postings about the new 

CD by The Beastie Boys. Not only was it 

copy-protected, but if you inserted it into 

your computer drive, it would automatically 

install a “worm,” a malicious piece 

of software that would prevent you from 

copying the contents. The postings got 

rather vicious, with some Beastie Boys 

fans (oh, they’ve got them) calling for 

lawyers, or even a mob with torches. 

We couldn’t check this out, because 

copies made in the US or the UK don’t 

contain the virus, if indeed that’s what it 

is. But this may turn out to be be much 

ado about nothing…or at least nothing 

we haven’t seen before. 

The Beastie Boys themselves blame 

Is it still just gossip? Perhaps we should come up with some other term. 

their record company, EMI, for imposing 

the protection, but deny that the 

CD contains either a virus or spyware. 

Rather, they say, it is the same Macrovision 

CDS-200 CDS-200 copy protection system 

used used on numerous European discs. 

If that’s true, what the disc does is 

bypass the normal music player built 

into Windows or the Macintosh OS, and 

install its own music player instead. So 

the music will play, but it can’t be copied 

in the usual way. 

Of course that doesn’t really mean it 

can’t be copied. Our view: any executive 

who thinks gadgets like this will protect 

his company from the 21st Century 

should be checked for transplantable 

organs. 


Gossip&News

Gossip&News 

Errata 

It’s Latin for “errors,” and this is 

where we make corrections to items in 

issue No. 69 of UHF Magazine. 

First the title (page 34) of the Creek 

CD player: the one reviewed is not the 

MkII version, unlike what we wrote. The 

text made it plain that the forthcoming 

MkII will be quite different from the 

player we reviewed, using a computer 

ATA drive and reading the music from 

memory. 

In the review of the Audiomat Opéra 

integrated amplifi er (page 40), we said 

that one of the two toggle switches on 

the front panel is for the tape loop. It is in 

fact a muting switch…as we would have 

realized had we looked more attentively 

at our own cover photo! 

The same review suggested somewhat 

ambiguously that the Opéra is 

supplied either with an Actinote power 

cord, or with “the usual junk power 

cord.” Though our test unit did have an 

Actinote in the box, neither is standard 

issue with the Opéra, which comes with 

a Belden cord fi tted with a Hubbell wall 

plug. 

“Piracy” 

In the US, more than in any other 

country, content providers (i.e. makers 

of recordings and movies) are aggressively 

fi ghting “pirates,” meaning anyone 

making a copy of protected material. 

Here’s the next round. A bill now 

before the US Senate would make make it 

legally actionable to encourage people 

to “steal” copyrighted material. What 

this means, as bill sponsor Sen. Orrin 

Hatch (R-UT) explains, is that copyright 

owners could sue not only those who 

steal music or fi lms, but also “parties 

who intend to induce others to infringe 

copyright.” copyright.” Note the word intend. 

The main target is clearly the fi le 

sharing networks such as Grokster Grokster and 

KaZaa. Critics, however, however, claim that 

Hatch wants to reverse the Betamax 

decision of two decades ago, and that 

the measure could be used against such 

devices as the iPod 

70 ULTRA HIGH FIDELITY Magazine 

Do Record Companies Cheat? 

For years record companies have 

wrung their hands over music downloading, 

but not all their artists are singing 

from the same hymn book. Courtney 

Love and Janis Ian have been extensively 

quoted on the subject in UHF. 

Now add David Crosby, of Crosby, 

Stills, Nash and Young, who in March 

opened up to PBS about the record business. 

There’s a lot of cheating and lying and 

stealing that goes on in any major business, 

and the music business is no exception. I 

don’t think that there’s much we can do 

about it. They built their business model in 

an era when they could make, I don’t know, 

on a million-selling album, they’re making 

10 million bucks or something, and they do 

eight of those in a year. That’s what they 

built their business model on. And it seemed 

reasonable to build huge buildings and hire 

hundreds of people…and get a corporate jet 

or two. What a very grandiose idea of how 

to go about things. 

Now they’re going in the tank, because 

the world has changed, and they did not 

change with it. They bit the poison pill, 

without realizing it, when they went digital. 

Once a thing is in the digital domain, it can 

be copied as many times as you want. And 

there is no system that can keep it from being 

It’s one of those brand names you 

don’t have to be an audiophile to know. 

Do you follow Formula 1 racing? Then 

you’ll spot the McLaren McLaren name right 

away. What’s the connection with Tag 

McLaren’s audio products? It’s hard 

to say. McLaren cars sometimes win, 

whereas Tag McLaren can’t win for 

losing. 

One One of the company’s exploits, when 

it started up in 1998, was purchasing 

Audiolab, and then dumping the 

company’s products in favor of a new 

line that — according to a distributor 

who said thanks but no thanks — cost 

double. 

In July of last year, company CEO 

Udo Zucker announced that TMA 

would cease all development of new 

copied. You can devise the most clever one you 

want, and I will bring some little geek with 

a pen protector in his pocket into the room 

and he will fi x it in a minute. 

Crosby told PBS he and his former 

band members would never have made 

it under today’s system. 

And there’s more. I think one of the 

most glaring examples of what they do 

wrong is they cheat as a matter of policy on 

paying, because they know that you’ll have to 

hire an accountant and audit them. Then, 

when you get the audit figure and they 

owe you $486,000, they’ll offer you 30% 

in settlement, knowing full well you’ll ask 

for 100% and that you’ll settle somewhere 

around 50. The other 50% is free money. 

They knew it going in. They intended to do 

it from the beginning, so that they could get 

the other 50% for free. Hence, just a little 

bonus thing, thank you very much, and it’s 

from heaven. 

And they all do it as a matter of policy. 

They know they’re going to cheat, going in. 

Crosby has praise for Apple iTunes 

Music Store, which he says is selling lots 

of his music…with no expenses. 

You can view the full program, The 

Way the Music Died, at: 

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/ 

frontline/shows/music/ 

Last chances to get a subscription… 

Tag McLaren Goes East 

…at the old price. Check out page 3 of this issue (page 5 of the PDF), for the current 

price. On February 1st 2005 the price rises sharply. And so will tbe price of back issues. 

products…not the sort of event that 

brings dealers dealers rushing to your door. 

Indeed, the company added that it would 

henceforth henceforth concentrate on home theatre, 

not audio. 

Good move? Or perhaps not. 

Here’s the bright side: Tag McLaren 

has found a buyer. It is now owned by 

a Chinese firm, International Audio 

Group, Group, which also owns Quad and 

Wharfedale. The new company Web 

site does show show audio products as well as 

the home theatre stuff, but there’s no 

indication what the new management’s 

tilt will be. 

The international Audio Group, by 

the way, has not purchased the F1 racing 

company, one of whose major shareholders 

is DaimlerChrysler. 

If you’re reading this after Fabruary 1, 2005…we hope you agree that UHF is still worth 

every penny. We live in a world of too much information, but you know what? 

That makes good information even more valuable!

Does DVD Have a Future? 

It’s no secret that CD sales are down 

worldwide. But while record companies 

blame fi le sharing, there may be 

another culprit: the DVD. CD and DVD 

purchases come from the same family 

budget, and it seems natural that the rise 

in one would be accompanied by a drop 

in the other. 

And the DVD is booming. One of 

the world’s major producers of both 

DVDs and CDs is Cinram, based in 

Toronto, with plants worldwide. Cinram 

distributes what it makes, too. It got the 

distribution rights to Warner products 

last year and Universal this year, with 

BMG (RCA Victor, etc.) coming aboard 

shortly. No wonder Cinram’s profits 

in the fi rst quarter of this year jumped 

105%. That should have made the stock 

price soar. 

But in fact Cinram stock bled 10% 

of its value since the start of the year, 

because some analysts are nervous. Sure, 

DVD is big right now, but what if there’s 

something else that will replace it? 

Like what? Well, several technology 

companies have been showing possible 

successors to the current DVD. A high 

defi nition disc using a blue laser is one 

possible replacement, though for the 

moment there are two incompatible 

systems on the table. And Microsoft 

fi gures you’ll be watching movies on 

your computer. That was enough for 

Cannacord Capital to put Cinram shares 

under review “with negative bias.” 

Hmm, let’s see now. Cinram started 

out making CDs, but transited seamlessly 

to DVD. If there’s something beyond 

DVD, won’t someone have to make it? 

We Wood, Wood You? 

How did we miss this one? 

We were in Vegas, and so was the 

JVC EX-A1, a “desktop entertainment 

system that includes a DVD player, and 

these intriguing speakers, with woofer 

cones that seem to be made of… 

Yes, they’re wood. 

Perhaps that’s not as outlandish as 

it sounds. Lots of speakers use paper 

cones, and what is paper 

but wood that has been 

chewed or something? 

But JVC hasn’t chewed 

the birch that is used for 

its new speakers. The 

cones are made of actual 

birch layers. 

W hy? Because it 

“brings out the natural 

beauty of music by providing 

the ideal combination 

of high sound 

propagation speed and 

high internal loss.” We 

ourselves would probably 

have gone for low 

internal loss (or a good 

proofreader), but JVC 

is a lot bigger than our 

company, so perhaps they know something 

we don’t. 

Wood can crack, of course, but JVC 

says its woofer cones are specially treated 

to be at once strong and resilient. To 

accomplish this, JVC soaks the cones in 

Japanese sake. You can’t make up stuff 

like this. 

Who says audio design isn’t art? 

ADVERTISERS 

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Audiophileboutique.com . . . . . .60 

Audio Room . . . . . . . . . . . .68 

Bluebird Music . . . . . . . . . . .46 

Blue Circle . . . . . . . . . . . . .10 

Boyz on a Wire . . . . . . . . . . .20 

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Charisma Audio . . . . . . . . . .17 

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Diamond Groove . . . . . . . . . .10 

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Totem Acoustic . . . . . . . .Cover 4 

UHF Back Issues . . . . . . . . . .25 

UHF Books . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4 

Venus Hi-Fi . . . . . . . . . . . . .21 


Gossip&News

Large record producers are 

crying the blues, and their 

sobbing is so loud hardly 

anyone on the planet can 

sleep through it. The executive résumé: 

pirates (i.e. music lovers who own computers) 

are taking the bread from the 

mouths of the creators (A&R people, 

record company vice-presidents and 

indie fl acks). Curiously, not even the 

recent upswing in CD sales has stemmed 

the fl ow of tears. Or the threat of lawsuits 

for that matter. 

It’s really too bad that the large 

companies whose continued hegemony 

depends on people buying recordings 

have ignored what could have helped 

them immensely: hi-fi . Let’s see how. 

The problems of the recording 

industry with “piracy” are not new. 

More than 20 years ago, in our pages, a 

record industry spokesman was crying 

about the record world being threatened 

by copying on cassette (curiously, the 

same spokesman is still around, and 

guess what he’s crying about now). That 

situation brings smiles today, because 

cassette copies seem so primitive by 

today’s standards. 

But are they? I seem to recall that 

tapes made from our reference system 

using our Nakamichi deck sounded 

pretty good, better indeed than the 

typical MP3 download fi le…including 

the MP3’s that actually cost money. Of 

course few non-audiophiles had decks 

like that. Back then, cassettes were made 

either on boomboxes, aka “ghetto blasters,” 

or on minisystems. Few of those 

systems used Dolby noise reduction. 

Copies were run off for friends using the 

unit’s high-speed tape copier, which also 

didn’t use noise reduction. Ugly! 

Today these systems feature CD 

players rather than cassette decks, 

prominently labelled as compatible with 

CD-R and CD-RW. But that isn’t all 

that’s changed. Not so many years back 

a minisystem was actually composed of 

separate components, albeit not very 

good ones. It then cost perhaps $700. 

But notice what happened next. The 

“components” became a solid box styled 


State of the Art 


to look like a stack of components. That 

allowed manufacturers to reduce the 

price, as did a million shortcuts. The 

$700 mini became a $500 mini, which 

made it impossible to sell the $700 

system. Then it dropped to $300, and 

$100, and to $89.97 at Wal-Mart. 

That much is known to everyone, 

but consider this. The mainstream 

audio manufacturers, such as Sony and 

Philips, coinventors of the Compact 

Disc, set out to convince the public that 

you could greatly reduce the quality of 

the music source, and it wouldn’t matter. 

They launched new digital systems, 

respectively MiniDisc and the DCC 

digital cassette, which discarded more 

than 80% of data, yet were referred to 

as “near-CD quality.” Tech journalists, 

many of whom appear to have slept 

through high school physics, quickly 

shortened that to “CD-quality.” 

Interestingly enough, Sony and 

Philips were then two of the world’s largest 

record companies! Did they not understand 

what they were doing, telling people 

the source quality didn’t matter? They 

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were preparing the way for the success 

of MP3, which typically contain as little 

as 8% of the original digital data. 

And the popularity of the increasingly 

cheaper and trashier minisystems 

did the rest. When the CD player, amplifi 

er and speakers are so poor, do you need 

more than 8% of the data? And note the 

brand names on those systems. Sony is 

a major record company. Philips was 

Polygram until it (wisely) sold its stake 

in an industry it was helping to strangle. 

Panasonic owned MCA Records during 

those critical years. Why were they doing 

this? 

While the typical system was sinking 

well below mediocrity, some record 

producers were actually helping make it 

the norm, by mixing their albums so that 

they would be optimized for what among 

themselves they refer to as “shitboxes.” 

Listen to a well-made CD on a good 

modern system, or even on the $700 

minisystem of a decade ago, and you’ll 

perceive MP3 as what it is: no more than 

a low-quality teaser for the real thing. 

The development of SACD makes the 

difference even more obvious. If Sony 

and its competitors were smart — and 

there is room for doubt — they would 

bring out all future releases as hybrid 

SACDs, and they would trumpet the 

sonic superiority of their discs, using 

MP3 in the same way they use radio 

airplay: free promotion. 

And since some of these companies 

are still well-connected with hardware 

manufacturers, they should start making 

affordable little systems with SACD 

players built-in. They wouldn’t cost 

$89.97 and that’s for sure, but not all 

buyers of cheap systems choose them 

because they can’t afford better. They 

choose them because no one has told them 

it makes any difference. 

Want to snare younger music lovers? 

Bring out more portable players that 

can carry uncompressed music. The 

iPod can, though Apple doesn’t bother 

pointing it out. 

Nobody with any of these products 

is going to think KaZaA downloads are 

good enough anymore.

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UHF No 70 (Net).indd - Ultra High Fidelity Magazine

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