BIAS FEEDING: Ever notice how the more you become convinced of something the more you feed that belief?

PS AUDIO: If we believe analog is superior to digital or vice versa, we tend to gravitate toward other groups that believe the same thing. It seems true in politics, stereos, cars, and perhaps even stamp collecting. We’re looking for affirmational support that we made the right choice. Newbies to our hobby don’t suffer the […]

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AUDIO INSIDER

UNDERSTANDING: Image height

PS AUDIO: It is not difficult to imagine left, right, and center imaging on a stereo system. It’s also likely not too much of a stretch to understand depth. After all, a proper stereo recording reproduces depth as a measure of how far away from the recording microphones the instruments or performers are. Harder for […]

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KILLER SOUNDS ON A BUDGET:

Caleb Denison (Digital Trends) writes: We were excited enough to be among the first to receive Pioneer’s new Atmos-enabled Elite speaker system for review, but when the company sent along legendary audio engineer Andrew Jones to install them, that was something else entirely. The man behind the speaker’s design and engineering — whose name is stamped right on the […]

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The validity of Hi-fi tuning fuses

“Does anyone here have any impressions on the Hifi tuning fuses and how they possitively or negatively affected components in their system? According to some audio enthusiasts, installing premium grade fuses in preampss, amps, phono etc make a significant improvement in the overall sound. Any comments are most welcome since I’m considering this relatively inexpensive […]

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STAX: 5 and 6-pin interface issues via the SRA-14S preamp

Dear Howard. Grateful for your views as to whether the captioned extension cable (6-pin in/female & 5-pin out/male) will work with a pair of SR-3 earspeaker into the normal socket of a SRA-14s.Many thanks in advance. I am finding this a very difficult question to answer with any confidence. First, despite many years of intimate […]

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GRADO: A visit to Grado’s Brooklyn headphone factory

The Audiophiliac visits Grado’s Brooklyn factory to document the fabrication and assembly of the most affordable “e” Series headphone, the SR60e. Steve Guttenberg:Grado manufactures all of its new “e” Series headphones (and phono) cartridges in a funky looking four story building in Brooklyn, NY. There’s no “Grado” logo or signage of any kind, just a […]

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BENCHMARK: Audio application notes – Relay-Controlled Volume – The Ultimate Solution for Analog Audio

John Siau writes: Benchmark has introduced the new HPA4 headphone/line amplifier with four 256-step relay-controlled attenuators and four 16-step relay-controlled boost amplifiers. Together these form two fully-independent, fully-balanced stereo volume controls. One volume control is dedicated to the line output and one is dedicated to the headphone output. Each has a +15 dB to -122 […]

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ADDING CAPACITORS

For the last post in this impromptu series let’s look at my goal of somehow increasing the size of power supply capacitors within a unit connected to a Power Plant. On the surface, this seems like a crazy goal. How can we affect something internally? First, let’s think about what happens when we increase the […]

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ARCAM: FMJ A19 integrated amplifier test review

Stereophile Magazine ….. It was fall 2000. I’d just begun working at Stereophile, and I clearly remember sheepishly, innocently putting this question to former senior editor Jonathan Scull. I think the question confused him—not because he didn’t know the answer, but because the answer seemed so obvious, the question itself should have been unnecessary. How […]

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CONVERSATIONS WITH COLIN: The value of mains regeneration?

Hello Colin and may I congratulate you on your resurrection. My question is this. As it is generally agreed that as a consequence of the variation of the mains waveform systems sound different at different times of any twenty four hours, do you do your fine-tuning at a similar time each day for continuity? Or […]

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NAKAMICHI: 680 dual-speed deck – user comments

Howard Popeck writes: Launched in 1980, the maker’s claims were, on the face of it, outrageous; “True high-fidelity performance at half-speed”. Although cassette recording and play-back technology were, through outstanding engineering, approaching the theoretical limits of what could be achieved, and enthusiasm for the medium was probably at its peak, true audiophiles rarely accepted that […]

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