Front-end in the Lamm room, with a system featuring Lamm tubed electronics driving Wilson Sophia 2 speakers, was this gorgeous turntable from French company Metronome, the Gaia, fitted with a Graham Phantom tonearm and a Lyra Titan cartridge.
Yes, it's the same Canon—the Japanese photography, photocopier, and laser-printer giant whose logo for so many years adorned the rear wings of Williams Formula 1 racing cars. Canon's venture into the unknown waters of audio was instigated by the head of the UK-based research center, Hiro Negishi. I have been seeing Negishi-san, one of the world's leading minds in optical technology, at Audio Engineering Society conventions since the early '80s, so I was only half-surprised to see Canon launch first one loudspeaker, then a full range (footnote 1).
Back in the day, one of the first reviews to be posted in our free online archives at www.stereophile.com was Michael Fremer's June 1999 report on the <A HREF="http://www.stereophile.com/floorloudspeakers/139">Sonus Faber Amati Homage</A> loudspeaker. The Amati was the second in the Italian manufacturer's top range, the Homage line, which is dedicated to the master makers of stringed instruments of 17th-century Cremona. The first was the Guarneri Homage (<A HREF="http://www.stereophile.com/standloudspeakers/487">reviewed by Martin Colloms</A> in July 1994), while the third was the Stradivari Homage (<A HREF="http://www.stereophile.com/floorloudspeakers/105sonus">reviewed by MF</A> in January 2005). Mikey was so impressed by the Amati that he purchased the review samples and used them as his reference for almost three years.
We were saddened to learn of the passing of Richard "Dick" Powers on April 5, 2006, in Fremont, CA after a short battle with cancer. Dick was just 53.
There are components that stick in a reviewer's memory long after they have been crated up and entrusted to the tender mercies of UPS. When I reviewed the <A HREF="http://www.stereophile.com/digitalprocessors/305dcs">Verona Master Clock</A> from English company dCS in March 2005, the sound it allowed the combination of a <A HREF="http://www.stereophile.com/hirezplayers/814">dCS Verdi</A> transport, <A HREF="http://www.stereophile.com/digitalprocessors/454">Purcell</A> upsampler, and <A HREF="http://www.stereophile.com/digitalprocessors/259">Elgar Plus</A> D/A processor to achieve from SACD was the best I had heard from my system—better, even, than I remember getting from the EMM Labs SACD transport and processor I had borrowed for a weekend a few months earlier. But at what price? The stack of four dCS components adds up to a cool $45k—"Yes, the complete dCS system is hip," I wrote in the conclusion to my review. "But $45k's worth of hip? That's a question <I>I</I> can't answer, I'm afraid, what with school fees and mortgages and taxes." The megabux dCS stack thus had to go back to the distributor at the end of the review period.
Getting a name check from the mainstream press can be a good thing. But as Wes Phillips wrote in his <A HREF="http://blog.stereophile.com/wesphillips">blog</A> on February 5, "to paraphrase Mason Williams on winning an Emmy Award, 'It's like being kissed by a girl with bad breath—you appreciate the honor, but...'"
Michael Fremer has a problem.
How to integrate a computer into a high-end audio system is a hot topic these days. I'm getting more and more e-mails from readers asking for advice, Wes Phillips wrote about transferring his LPs to audio files in his <A HREF="http://www.stereophile.com/images/newsletter/1005Astph.html">October</A…; and <A HREF="http://www.stereophile.com/images/newsletter/1105Astph.html">November</…; newsletters, and a lively thread on this topic ran on the <A HREF="http://forum.stereophile.com/forum/showflat.php?Cat=&Number=2067&page=0… at www.stereophile.com</A>.
As much as I'm tempted by the impressive sweep and scale with which some of the large, full-range loudspeakers endow music, for some reason I find myself more at home with more compact examples of the breed. This is not through lack of familiarity with large speakers, a pair of <A HREF="http://www.stereophile.com/floorloudspeakers/506">B&W 801</A>s occupying pride of place in our living room (which also serves as my wife's listening room). Yet I find myself hankering after that ultimate soundstage precision that only minimonitors seem capable of producing: the loudspeakers totally disappearing, vocal and instrumental images hanging in space, truly solid—the prefix "stereo-" is derived from the Greek word <I>stereos</I>, which means solid—so that a rectangular, totally transparent window into the concert hall opens at the rear of your room. In addition, the necessarily limited low-frequency extension offered by small speakers makes it much easier to get the optimum integration with the room acoustics below 100Hz.