tas 182, The Absolute Sound
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S T E R E O • M U LT I C H A N N E L A U D I O • M U S I C
Special RepoRt:
inSide the
SPEAkERS fROM
SpendoR
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Bat and paRaSound
& CD PLAYER
ITALIAN
SEDUCTION
PLUS:
HI-RES SOUND ON BLU-RAY DISC
chineSe audio induStRy
PATHOS AMP
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Contents
29
2008 Golden
13 Pages of the Best in
High-End Audio
76
Cover Story
SeducTion
Pathos’ Logos Integrated Amp
and Digit CD Player
57
SpeciAl RepoRT
Inside the Chinese Audio Industry
16 MainstreaM Multichannel
Robert Harley on high-res multichannel audio gear from Sony.
90 parasound halo Jc 2 linestage
preampliier
JV on a superb (and affordable) solid-state preamp from John Curl.
24 absolute analog
Neil Gader on Ortofon’s 2M Series moving-magnet cartridges.
the cutting edge
98 Balanced Audio Technology Rex
linestage preampliier
BAT’s two-chassis, all-tubed, 76-pound linestage sets a new
standard in midrange liquidity. RH reports.
equipMent reports
82 Bybee Technologies Golden Goddess
“Super effect” Speaker Bullets
Dick Olsher on a controversial new addition to any stereo system.
108 hp’s Workshop
Harry Pearson previews the Clearaudio Statement turntable,
and announces his 2008 Golden Ear Award winners.
86 spendor s3/5r loudspeaker
Paul Seydor on a classic design re-imagined for the 21
st
century.
June/July 2008
The Absolute Sound
eAR AwARdS!
iTAliAn
Contents
8
letters
www.theabsolutesound.com
reissues from Blind Pig, a must-have
Michael Jackson reissue, and a short
interview with the Black Keys’ Dan
Auerbach.
founder; chairman,
editorial advisory board
editor-in-chief
executive editor
acquisitions manager
and associate editor
music editor
proofreader
art director
Harry Pearson
Robert Harley
Jonathan Valin
Neil Gader
Bob Gendron
Mark Lehman
Torquil Dewar
14
From the editor
148
Jazz
The lowdown on new records from
Marian McPartland, Avery Sharpe, and
Jacob Fred Jazz Odyssey.
96
Manufacturer comments
senior writers
John W. Cooledge, Anthony H. Cordesman, Wayne
Garcia, Robert E. Greene, Chris Martens,
Tom Martin, Dick Olsher, Andrew Quint,
Paul Seydor, Alan Taffel
MUSIC
reviewers and
contributing writers
150
classical
We weigh in on
La Ruta de Oriente
(a
spectacular book/CD package from
Alia Vox), a new offering of Italian
arias from Natalie Dessay, and Speakers
Corner’s 180-gram nine-LP box set of
Beethoven’s Nine Symphonies with
Herbert von Karajan.
120
2008 MuSic Golden eAR
AwARdS
For this year’s awards, each music writer
chose three favorite records released to
date in 2008.
Soren Baker, Greg Cahill, Guido Corona,
Dan Davis, Andy Downing, Jim Hannon,
Jacob Heilbrunn, Sue Kraft, Mark Lehman,
Ted Libbey, David McGee, Bill Milkowski,
Derk Richardson, Don Saltzman,
Steve Stone
140
Rock
Reviews of new albums from R.E.M.,
Destroyer, the Raconteurs, Justin
Townes Earle, Van Morrison, and
Clinic. Plus, three new 180-gram LP
AVguide.com
Managing editor
web producer
152
TAS Back page
A chat with Ray Kimber of Kimber
Kable.
Monica Williams
Suzanne Mahadeo
nextScreen, llc, inc.
chairman and ceo
vice president/publisher
advertising reps
Thomas B. Martin, Jr.
Mark Fisher
Cheryl Smith
(51) 891-7775
Marvin Lewis
MTM Sales
(718) 5-8803
Jennifer Martin, Wrights Reprints
(877) 65-595,
:
(81) 19-575,
jmartin@wrightsreprints.com
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June/July 2008
The Absolute Sound
Letters
e-mail us:
rharley@nextscreen.com
or write us a letter:
The Absolute Sound
, PO Box 1768, Tijeras, New Mexico 87059
welcome Back
For once I actually took a few reviews in
The Absolute Sound
seriously (over the last
year or so), went out and heard some rec-
ommended products, and ended up buying
new gear. I am extremely happy with my
Cambridge Audio 840C CD player. I had
given up on your publication some years
ago (in the early 90s) because the reviewers
were making me laugh harder than I lis-
tened. Although
Stereophile
’s Lewis Lipnick
period rivaled your “more-money-than-
brains” period of hilarity, I truly believe
you now have the more comprehensive
and useful coverage of high-end audio.
You’ve come a long way and that’s cool.
Dean Singh
Get a life
After reading the three e-mails sent by
Ivan Charvat (Letters, Issue 178), I am
truly amazed that there is someone out
there whose sole hobby is to do exten-
sive research just to bash up a particular
product. Get a life. If you do not like the
Cambridge Azur 840C CD player, then
don’t buy it. Get something that you like.
It’s called freedom of choice, mate.
Paramalingam
making 96/24 DVDs because for readers like
you this is an obvious application for the Korg
DSD iles. The beauty of DSD recordings
is that they can be easily translated to 96/24
and used for playback. Just because there are no
SACD home-burners doesn’t mean that DSD
iles can’t be enjoyed in their native format, since
you can play back these iles through the Korg or,
if you are so blessed, through the Meitner D/A
converter.
As to whether 96/24 iles will sound “close
enough” to the original LP to satisfy every
listener is a question that I can’t answer. I heard
subtle differences between the DSD iles and the
original discs. I would not be surprised to ind
that 96/24 iles may have more pronounced
differences. These differences may or may not
be acceptable depending on your own listening
criteria.
clock Jitter and
picoseconds
Thanks for the thought-provoking ar-
ticle on jitter in the March issue. Keith
Johnson said he could “hear the differ-
ence between 8 and 15 picoseconds of
clock jitter.” How can this be possible?
Seven picoseconds introduce a mere
0.0000308% distortion [
according to Mr.
Sanford—
RH]. I would expect this distor-
tion to be orders of magnitude smaller
than any human can detect.
The sample rate for a CD is 44.1 x 10
3
samples per second (sec). A picosecond
(ps) is only 1 x 10
-12
seconds. Therefore
the number of picoseconds between each
sample is 1x10
-12
ps/sec)/ (44.1x10
3
sam-
ples/sec) = 22.7 x 10
6
ps/sample. The
distortion is (7 ps/(22.7 x 10
6
ps)) x 100
= 30.8 x 10
-6
percent.
The article states: “It’s an amazingly
small timing variation, but one that
our aural decoding system can easily
detect.” Can this be true? Time delays
on surround-sound systems are set
in milliseconds and if you change the
lp to High-
Resolution digital
conversion
I believe Steven Stone has missed the point
of the Korg MR-1000 (Issue 180). LP-to-
CD is not the goal (at least it shouldn’t
be). LP-to-DSD may sound wonderful,
but since there are no consumer SACD
burners, it’s rather pointless.
No, the goal in archiving LPs should
be hi-res digital playback. So why
didn’t Mr. Stone explore the hi-res PCM
capabilities of the Korg? Its 24-bit/96kHz
iles can be burned to a video DVD and
played on any DVD player. Also, there are
networked music players that can handle
24/96, such as the excellent Slim Devices
Transporter.
Mr. Stone should revisit the Korg MR-
1000, this time recording his LPs straight
to 24/96. Or he might try converting
his existing DSD recordings to 24/96
with the Korg Audiogate software. Ei-
ther way, I’m betting the resulting iles
would sound close enough to the origi-
nal LP that his analog rig would increas-
ingly be used more as a source in the
recording chain and less as a playback
device.
Time warp
I am now a subscriber to TAS because you
converted my subscription to
The Perfect
Vision
to a TAS subscription. Wow, have you
guys changed—for the better! The last time
I looked at TAS it was a small magazine that
hurt my eyes to read, only reviewed com-
ponents that Trump could afford, and had
absolutely
no
interest in multichannel sound
(which is the only way I listen), turning up
its nose at Quadraphonics in the 70s.
Thank you for your SACD reviews, the
new multichannel column, and the guest
editorial (Andrew Quint’s “A Grand Mul-
tichannel Experiment” in Issue 180).
Don’t forget to do multichannel equip-
ment reviews, along with reviews of mul-
tichannel SACD and DVD-As. Vinyl ai-
cionados might want to know that there
will soon be a vinyl quadraphonic rebirth.
One of the original promoters of the
CD-4 (Quadradisc), Lou Dorren, is work-
ing on a new, up-to-date, modern CD-4
demodulator that he himself will be sell-
ing that won’t have any of the problems
that the units of the 70s had.
Thanks for the changes! I will be renewing.
John Thomas
Ken Gilmore
Steven Stone replies:
I didn’t delve into
8 June/July 2008
The Absolute Sound
delay between any two speakers by one
millisecond you can barely hear the
localization of the sound move. (You can
test this with the
Chesky Ultimate DVD
Surround and 5.1 Set-up Disc
.) Perhaps if
the time delay could be changed by 0.1
millisecond it
might
still be possible to
hear the change, but what Keith Johnson
is saying is that he can hear differences
by changing the clock speed by seven
billionths of a millisecond! [
Not the clock
speed; jitter is timing variations
between
clock
cycles.
—RH.]
You put the minuteness of a picosec-
ond in perspective by stating that light
travels only one inch in 100 picoseconds,
but for a visual image of how small a pico-
second is, imagine standing enough issues
of TAS on their edge to fully encircle the
earth, a distance of 24,902 miles. An inch
of paper is approximately 250 sheets, so
the total number of pages to circle the
earth would be approximately 0.394 x
10
12
. If that row of paper circling earth
represents one second then the 7 picosec-
onds Keith Johnson claims to hear would
be represented by only 3 sheets of paper.
What am I missing? If there are any
test reports published that can support
Mr. Johnson’s claim I would be extremely
interested in reading them.
the time shift (jitter) is inaudible. The history
of audio is illed with examples of phenomena
that affect the sound but would appear from
an unsophisticated theoretical analysis to be
inaudible. A quote by the great audio thinker
Dr. Richard Heyser comes to mind: “One of the
most belittling experiences is to deride the ‘black
art’ of a craftsman who gets consistent results
by a ritual that he cannot explain and then to
discover that his actions in fact held a deeper
technical signiicance than we understood from
our simpliied model.”
I didn’t mean to drag Keith Johnson into a
controversy (or to suggest he employs Heyser’s
“black art”—far from it). I was simply repeating
something he casually mentioned to me once. You
can, however, hear the effects of ultra-low-jitter
A/D and D/A conversion by listening to
Johnson’s recordings on the Reference Recordings
label through the Spectral SDR-4000 Pro CD
player (which he designed) and form your own
opinion.
describes as opening the sound window.
The Esoteric combination (which I own)
will shock some listeners in its recovery
of information such as the sonic character
of the recording venue and, particularly,
the decay and fading of individual instru-
ments (which is what happens when they
are actually played). These effects may be
retrieved from standard Red Book CDs as
well as the “higher” resolution SACDs with
upsampling when played on this system.
It was somewhat ironic to me that this
review falls in the middle of the annual
“analog” issue. The combination of an
excellent transport, DAC, and highly pre-
cise clock will challenge if not equal any
of the high-end analog playback systems,
albeit at the price of a small Lexus or
Mercedes-Benz, but then again there are
already record-playback systems at that
price or higher.
Well done, Mr. Harley.
Lawrence
Devoe
The proof of the
pudding is in the
eating
I thoroughly enjoyed Robert Harley’s re-
review of the Esoteric P-03/D-03 digital
playback system, now aided and abetted
by the G-0Rb Rubidium Master Clock (Is-
sue 180). The discussion of timing errors
and jitter should be required reading for
anyone interested in the hows and whys
of digital recreation of audio recordings.
I was introduced to the beneits of out-
board clocks some years ago and my reac-
tion was very similar to what Mr. Harley
To SAcd or not
to SAcd?
If Christopher Mankiewicz has said his
piece [Letters, Issues 176 and 178], then
I must say mine. What I found amus-
ing initially was his diatribe about Robert
Harley’s review of the Cambridge Azur
840C CD player and its inability to play
SACDs, hence my comments about it not
playing any other formats, either. It was re-
viewed and found to be a very good CD
player at a bargain price. Nowhere were
comments about SACD, either positive or
negative, mentioned in the review. Wheth-
er any comments should or should not
have been made is not my call. I believe
a product that performs well with one for-
mat does not denigrate any other format.
I fully agree with Mr. Mankiewicz that
pure
SACD (native DSD encoding, not re-
cooked PCM) is a superior format to CD.
(I don’t agree with his implication that
only delusional audiophiles still listen to
LPs/CDs, but it appears I am one.) I have
heard and enjoyed some great music on
SACD. I was given a good quality (Pioneer
Elite) universal player that plays SACD.
Unfortunately, it doesn’t sound too good
with SACD. Nor with anything else (its
strengths are in the video arena).
David Sanford
Robert Harley replies:
There’s a signiicant
difference between a delay of one sound source
relative to another source and a time shift of
samples in a PCM-represented audio waveform.
Although as you point out the amount of that
time shift is extremely small, it’s a mistake to
extrapolate based on arm-chair calculations that
UPCOMING IN
ISSUE 183
• Special digital Focus issue
• Hard-disk recording primer
• downloading high-res music
• Reviews of Benchmark, Bryston,
classé, oppo, and primaluna
digital
• Munich show report
• inside the Thorens turntable
factory
• nAd’s new entry-level integrated
amp and cd player
• naim’s new nait 5i-2 integrated amp
• Budget phono cartridges from
ortofon
• Sunire ribbon speakers and Bob
carver interview
• pass lab’s irst integrated
ampliier
• Jonathan Valin on the $60k dcS
Scarlatti digital stack
• Budget speakers from Focal and
dynaudio
10 June/July 2008
The Absolute Sound
Letters
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