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Are we shrinking?
I've been involved in the high-end for more than 50 years. That's longer than a number of our HiFi Family members have been alive. And always, during that half century,...
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Stickiness
I'm right in the middle of auditioning a new set of software updates that will one day become a new mountaintop for the MK2 DirectStream. Aside from the obvious traits...
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A moment of reflection
Over the past weeks I have immersed myself in writing. I got this wild hair idea to expand The Audiophile's Guide to an entire series of 10 books covering everything from subwoofers,...
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Homegrown
On a recent trip to France, Terri and I had the opportunity to look around at what passes for stereo equipment in European homes and we were reminded of the...
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Emotional connections
Our musical systems are all about connecting our emotions with the music. If the system's working correctly, if all the tweaks and the work we put into it matters, then...
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Powering the source
In 1997 we introduced to the world the idea of regenerated power. Back then, the notion that the AC power's quality mattered was revolutionary. Scoffed at. We persisted and today few...
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Old habits
My electric car has no oil to leak onto the garage floor, yet each and every morning I take a peek under the car just to make sure. It's an old...
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Fast subwoofers
A subwoofer properly setup so it is augmenting the main speakers and filling in the few holes in the room shouldn't need to sound "fast". Why? Because at 30Hz or...
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Design choices
If you cut up a coat hanger and use it to connect your power amplifier to your speakers it'd work, though there are no doubt better choices we could make....
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Moving air
Our stereo systems won't work in the vacuum of space. That's because the task at hand is the moving of air. Our loudspeakers are like pistons, pushing and pulling the...
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My new book!
It's been a long time since I've announced a new book I just published, but now it's time.I am delighted to let you know that the final book in the Eemian...
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Microphones and speakers
I cannot think of a product more closely related to the challenges of choosing a loudspeaker than that of the microphone. Both microphones and loudspeakers are hardly flat transducers. In...
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Musical types
How many times have I heard someone explain to me that their system shines when playing jazz or classical but kind of sucks on rock music? Or the opposite? Too...
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When more is better
As a designer it's often difficult to know when to stop. Do I stop adding power supply capacitors to a design when there's enough to make it work the way...
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Validation
Isn't it wonderful when your spouse or friend walks into the listening room and asks what happened? "The system sounds so much more real, lifelike. What did you do?" And...
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Stuck?
Rarely do we consider downgrading our system. We've worked so hard to get our systems to sing that lowering their quality to better accommodate poor recordings is an obvious major step backwards....
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Getting inside
We had learned that despite the expert's opinions, and the measurements that supported those opinions, "identical" functional amplification blocks could sound dramatically different. The world had been flipped on its...
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Picking up the pieces
In yesterday's post I described how our world had just been turned upside down. Two identical measuring devices, IC Op Amps, were sounding remarkably different. The phono preamplifier we were...
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The regular kind
Further to yesterday's post about discretes vs. ICs, Stan and I had built the first phono stage prototype using the standard integrated circuit op amp of the day, the ubiquitous...
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Discrete vs. IC
When we first came out with our original phono stage for $59.95 (complete with a money back guarantee), we were building the phono using integrated circuit op amps. At that...
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