In response to my recent love letter to integrated amplifiers, I received some interesting feedback that came in the form of a question: isn’t there some contradiction in the fact that I use integrated amps almost exclusively in my dedicated two-channel system while relying on separates in my main home-theater system? Why not use an A/V receiver in my media room instead of an A/V preamp and multichannel amp if I’m so enamored with one-box solutions?
If you haven’t noticed already, there’s a bit of a theme being established with my new and upcoming reviews for SoundStage! Access. To call it “all integrated amplifiers, all the time” would be a bit of a stretch, but not by much. I recently took a deep dive into Marantz’s PM-KI Ruby, and I’m following that up with reviews of Rotel’s A11 Tribute and Vincent Audio’s SV-500. And those will hardly be the last integrated amps to cross my threshold in the coming months.
Read more: (What's So Great About Peace, Love, and) Integrated Amplifiers?
These days, most of the better room-correction systems give you the ability to set an upper limit for the frequencies being “corrected.” And for my money, it’s not only the most useful feature of such systems but also the most misunderstood.
Read more: This One Room-Correction Trick Could Breathe New Life into Your A/V Receiver
To paraphrase the titular character of the film V for Vendetta, “who” is but the form following the function of “what,” and what I am is a great big AV geek.
If you regularly read my turntable reviews, you should already have a pretty good idea of the albums and cuts I use when I’m reviewing a table for SoundStage! Access. But you probably don’t know why I use them. Here’s the scoop on the five albums I use most frequently and a couple of outliers that occasionally see the platter.
Wikipedia defines the term ghosting thusly: “A colloquial term used to describe the practice of ceasing all communication and contact with a partner, friend, or similar individual without any apparent warning or justification.” As a matter of principle, ghosting is not something I’d do. As I explained in this feature on our sister site SoundStage! Ultra back in mid-2019, I just needed a change. It wasn’t you, it was me. But to be clear, I’m just making a cameo appearance here as the search continues for a permanent steward and champion for SoundStage! Access.
Putting together a quality audio system for $1500 (all prices USD) is easy. It’s also hard. For audiophiles on a budget -- people like me -- these days it’s easy to find high-quality audio components for not much money. But today there are so many high-quality components that it’s hard to narrow down the choices.
Read more: How to Assemble a Quality Hi-Fi System for About $1500
In November 2019, I wrote a feature for SoundStage! Access in which I discussed a few recordings I use to evaluate loudspeakers and subwoofers. This month I write about the reference tracks with which I evaluate how well a pair of speakers can reproduce aural images of singers, instruments, and other sound-producing objects, and to create a three-dimensional soundstage on which to accurately position those images.
Read more: The Music I Use to Evaluate Soundstaging and Imaging
For the last several years, turntables have been at the center of my audio life. It had something to do with the vinyl revival, and the fact that I was one of the few SoundStage! Network reviewers who never lost the faith -- mostly because I have somewhat esoteric (read: strange) tastes in music, and own a large library of recordings on vinyl that have never been digitized. So I kept ready for action my late-1980s Dual CS-5000 turntable and myriad cartridges -- one ADC, four Grados, two Shures, one Stanton, one Sumiko -- until what goes around came around again: the LP.
Read more: The Care and Feeding of the Modern Audio Turntable
Although I’ve been critically listening to speakers for almost 30 years, I’ve listened and measured for only the last two. I take my own measurements in my home listening room, and help out with measuring the speakers we review in the anechoic chamber of Canada’s National Research Council (NRC), here in Ottawa.