John Atkinson

After I reviewed NAD's Masters Series M10 streaming integrated amplifier in January 2020, I bought the review sample to use as my daily driver . . . In 2022, NAD replaced it with a revised version, the M10 V2 . . . I never tried the V2, but when NAD introduced the M10 V3 ($2999) in late 2024, I felt a follow-up review was appropriate.

To be considered for our 2025 awards, only products subjected to a full review or considered in a column published from the November 2024 issue through the October 2025 issue would qualify. Each product was subjected by the reviewer to a thorough evaluation over a period of weeks or months—plus, for regular reviews (not columns), a session in my test lab.

Although I have very much appreciated how the best floorstanding loudspeakers have performed in my various listening rooms over the decades, I have always been most comfortable with relatively small two-way standmounts. Back in the early 1980s, I got musically moving sound from a pair of Rogers LS3/5a's, which I still own . . .

Stereophile has favorably reviewed three loudspeakers from Swiss manufacturer Stenheim. Art Dudley reviewed the Alumine standmount in April 2012 and the Alumine Five floorstander in March 2018. More recently, Herb Reichert reviewed Stenheim's three-and-a-half-way Alumine Three tower in October 2021. My assignment for this month's issue was to review the company's Alumine Two. Five floorstander, which, at $23,500/pair, fits neatly between the Alumine Two ($13,500/pair) and Three ($36,500/pair).

For the past decade or so, I haven't been using a preamplifier. The D/A processors I have been using all have volume controls, so I have been feeding their outputs directly to the power amplifiers. It would seem logical that having nothing in the signal path would have less of a degrading effect than a preamp's input and output sockets, switches, volume control, printed circuit-board traces, and active and passive parts, not to mention an additional pair of interconnects. However, with some of the preamplifiers I have auditioned in my system, there was no doubt that the sound quality improved compared with the direct connection from the digital processor.

The most recent of these preamps was the MBL N11 that Jason Victor Serinus reviewed in July 2021, which was preceded by the Pass Labs XP-32 I reviewed in March 2021, the Benchmark LA4 Kalman Rubinson reviewed in January 2020, and going back even further, the Ayre Acoustics KX-R Twenty I reviewed in December 2014, which was one of the products Ayre released to celebrate its 20th year of operation.

I am now reviewing the KX-8 line preamplifier, which costs $6500 in basic form.

In last month's As We See It, I offered some reminiscences of my almost half-century of being involved in audio magazine publishing, as well as some thoughts on the Law of Diminishing Returns as it applied to the prices of hi-fi products. As I was compiling this issue's Records 2 Live 4, it struck me that my interest not just in audio but in recording live music started 10 years earlier, when my parents bought me a mono Grundig tape recorder for my birthday. I first used the Grundig to record the high school rock group in which I played bass guitar, then replaced it with a stereo Sony tape recorder as my opportunities to make live recordings expanded.

Although I excelled in the sciences at school and university, music was my first love. I played in bands, first semiprofessionally, then professionally, and I ended up in the mid-1970s as the house bass guitarist at a recording studio in Cornwall, England. Working at that studio with producer Tony Cox and legendary engineer Jerry Boys, I became familiar with the studio environment and how recordings are created.

As Jim Austin wrote in this space in the December 2024 issue, following a medical procedure that he had in mid-October, he needed to take several weeks' leave to recuperate. He delegated the magazine's production to Managing Editor Mark Henninger, AVTech Editorial Director Paul Miller, and myself. The three of us worked with copy editor Linda Felaco and longtime art director Jeremy Moyler to produce the issue you hold in your hands.

As readers probably know, I was Stereophile's editor for 33 years until my retirement at the end of March 2019. However, they probably don't know that for the 10 years prior to my joining this magazine in 1986, I was first an editorial assistant, then Deputy Editor, then, in 1982, Editor of British magazine Hi-Fi News. (In a twist of fate, Paul Miller is now Hi-Fi News's Editor.)