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Belle and Sebastian: "How to Solve Our Human Problems"

Details: Written by: Joseph Taylor; Created: 15 May 2018

Matador OLE-1123-2 LC 11552
Format: CD

Musical Performance

Sound Quality

Overall Enjoyment

The 15 tracks of Belle and Sebastian’s latest release were originally issued on three five-song EPs titled How to Solve Our Human Problems, Pts. 1-3. Does that make this latest edition a coherent album or a compilation? After the first listen, I found that the music made sense either way, though on repeated hearing I found myself pausing after each quintet of songs. At 70 minutes, How to Solve Our Human Problems is a lot to absorb; listening to these songs in three groups of five each gives this listener more space and time in which to digest them, and has let some tracks that at first sounded like filler come into their own.

Five Tracks I Listen to through Every Product I Review

Details: Written by: Hans Wetzel; Created: 01 May 2018

When some hi-fi publications cover industry trade shows such as High End, held each May in the beautiful Bavarian metropolis of Munich, they write up listening impressions and deliver subjective assessments of how a component or a complete system sounds. I’ve done it myself, often. I’ll listen to a new system in an unfamiliar room, playing music I’ve never heard before. How futile an exercise is that? Sure, it paints a picture for readers who want to sample fancy new gear from a distance -- when I miss a show, you can bet I pore over the SoundStage! team’s coverage and pictures like a hawk -- but I could care less about the old jazz recordings that reverberate through the Munich Order Center, where High End is held. It’s all about the music, isn’t it? The music is the frame of reference -- or it’s the lens through which we evaluate whether or not we love the sound pouring from a stereo system. Diana Krall may be a talented pianist and singer, but she’s more likely to drive me into a coma than have me on the edge of my seat.

SVS Prime Bookshelf / Elevation / Center / Satellite / SB-2000 Home-Theater Speaker System

Details: Written by: Vince Hanada; Created: 01 May 2018

SVS has firmly established itself as an online retailer of loudspeakers, first with its highly acclaimed subwoofers, and then through its Ultra and Prime speaker lines. The Ultra line comprises its higher-end speakers, the Prime line its more budget-friendly models. I first became acquainted with SVS through my review of the Prime Tower speaker, which I thought punched well above its price.

The Breeders: "All Nerve"

Details: Written by: Joseph Taylor; Created: 01 May 2018

4AD LTD 4AD0035CD
Format: CD

Musical Performance

Sound Quality

Overall Enjoyment

The Breeders reunited in 2013 to commemorate the 20th anniversary of their second and best-known album, Last Splash, and soon decided to record music for a new album, their fifth. All Nerve took a few more years to complete, but the same lineup that appeared on Last Splash has produced a record that embodies the qualities that made them unique. The strangely likeable, almost hummable melodies and hooks are slight reminders of Kim Deal’s other band, the Pixies, but the Breeders use dissonance and buzz-saw guitars in ways that set them apart from everyone else.

KEF Q150 Loudspeakers and Kube12b Subwoofer

Details: Written by: Kevin East; Created: 15 April 2018

One of the traditional problems in standard loudspeaker design has been the placement of a speaker’s different drivers at different points on the speaker’s baffle. A solution is to superimpose a tweeter on a midrange cone -- basically, the tweeter is nested within the cone -- to create a single point source for the wavefronts of the soundwaves produced by both drivers. This sort of arrangement is called coincident because the two drivers that comprise it share the same axis. Coincident drivers have been around for 60 years -- Cabasse made them for movie theaters in the 1950s -- and have mainly been used in recording-studio monitor and car speakers. In 1991, speaker maker KEF adapted the concept to create the first truly hi-fi coincident driver intended for use in home audio, calling it the Uni-Q. KEF’s Q150 bookshelf model is the eighth and latest evolution of the Uni-Q.

MGMT: "Little Dark Age"

Details: Written by: Joseph Taylor; Created: 15 April 2018

Columbia 88985476052
Format: CD

Musical Performance

Sound Quality

Overall Enjoyment

Ben Goldwasser and Andrew VanWyngarden formed a band in 2002, while attending Wesleyan University, in Connecticut. They called it the Management, but because another group was already using that name, they changed it to MGMT. Both men are multi-instrumentalists, but they’ve used additional musicians in the studio and on tour since their second album, Congratulations (2010).

Trust Your Ears, and Question Everything

Details: Written by: Hans Wetzel; Created: 01 April 2018

“Why did they do it? For the money . . . ”

This rhetorical question and its inevitable answer regularly sailed through the halls of my childhood home. My father had, and continues to have, a critical mind. Dubious of anyone or anything claiming to have all of life’s answers, he ingrained into the minds of his four children the motto “Question everything.” As a student of Western history, he was all too aware that self-interest drives the majority of people, and in the modern-day West, money is the literal currency that keeps the gears of capitalism and globalization turning. Altruism may yield serenity of the soul and a peaceful night’s sleep, but it won’t necessarily pay the rent or buy groceries.

MartinLogan Motion 20 Loudspeakers

Details: Written by: Al Griffin; Created: 01 April 2018

MartinLogan is best known for its electrostatic tower speakers, which range from the ElectroMotion ESL ($2500 USD/pair) up to their flagship model, the Neolith ($80,000/pair). While I’m a longtime fan of their electrostatic designs, the MartinLogan models I’m more likely to recommend to friends are found in its budget-leaning Motion Series, which includes a trio of floorstanders: the 60XT ($3000/pair), the 40 ($1999/pair), and the 20 ($1599/pair). Philip Beaudette reviewed the Motion 40 for SoundStage! Hi-Fi in October 2012. Here I listen to ML’s entry-level floorstander, the Motion 20.

Grant-Lee Phillips: "Widdershins"

Details: Written by: Joseph Taylor; Created: 01 April 2018

Yep Roc YEP-2556
Format: CD

Musical Performance

Sound Quality

Overall Enjoyment

Songwriter, singer, and multi-instrumentalist Grant-Lee Phillips’s ninth solo LP is a reaction to the current climate of American politics and culture, but it’s not shrill or hysterical. Even at its angriest, Widdershins is full of wit and a sense of shared responsibility, both for our current predicament and for what we might need to do about it. It’s also tuneful and skillfully played.

Hegel Music Systems H90 Integrated Amplifier-DAC

Details: Written by: Sathyan Sundaram; Created: 15 March 2018

Norway’s Hegel Music Systems makes CD players, DACs, and amplifiers -- integrated, pre-, and power -- and since its founding has focused on solving the problems that plague contemporary amplifiers, such as harmonic distortion. In fact, harmonic distortion so intrigued founder Bent Holter that, in the late 1980s, he wrote his thesis on the subject. Among the technologies to come from this research has been Hegel’s patented SoundEngine circuitry -- now reincarnated as SoundEngine2 -- which seeks to retain the original detail and dynamic range of the signal with error-correction technology. The various stages of an amplifier -- input, gain, output -- are usually connected in series. The trouble with this is that any distortion produced in one of these stages is then sent on to the next stage to be amplified, along with the signal. At the end of this series, this cumulative distortion is then, hopefully, minimized by a global feedback loop.

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