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Sunday, October 13, 2024

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: Written by: Michael Wright; Created: 15 September 2012

Select Component Last fall, I was talking to Gilbert Yeung, Blue Circle Audio’s founder and chief designer, about an amplifier he was working on. He felt it was something special. He told me he’d soon be in my area, and asked if I’d like to hear it.

Blue Circle Audio NSL Yeung came by with an unnamed prototype. When he told me that it generated only 18-20Wpc, I told him I didn’t believe it, and that even if it were true, I didn’t want to damage the amp by overdriving it. He invited me to give it my best shot. I smirked and thought, So be it.

: Written by: Peter Roth; Created: 01 September 2012

Select Component It’s said that a boy does not truly become a man until his father dies. I can’t confirm the truth of that adage -- my own father is alive and well -- but I’ve found that certain life-altering experiences have triggered new levels of responsibility, capability, and growth. I felt more a man after marrying my wife 15 years ago, and even more when my children were born. I suspect that when my parents shuffle off this mortal coil, another era of manhood will begin for me.

ARC Reference 250 Having been imbued with a set of core characteristics by founder William Zane Johnson, Audio Research Corporation was raised well, and was ready to live on its own when its progenitor approached his end. Many hi-fi manufacturers -- even some industry stalwarts -- begin, thrive, and ultimately die while still riding on the shoulders of their founders. Not so ARC. Few companies in high-performance audio have a longer history or a greater pedigree. Johnson retired in 2008, handed over the reins, and set ARC free. He died in late 2011.

: Written by: Uday Reddy; Created: 15 August 2012

Select Component VSA VR-35 I’m the envy of all my audiophile/home-theater buddies because I have my own dedicated sound room. It may not reach the heights of Jeff Fritz’s Music Vault, but it’s a great-sounding room and I don’t have to share it with anyone. Most audiophiles have to deal with the Wife Acceptance Factor (sorry, ladies, but almost all of us are guys), or settle for a system that does both audio and home-theater duties. Unless you have built-in, wall-mounted speakers, there’s going to have to be some compromise with speaker placement in the name of marital harmony. While Albert Von Schweikert may not have had the WAF primarily in mind, he did bring all his technical expertise to bear on the issue of a less obtrusive, against-the-wall type of speaker that would satisfy audiophile and spouse.

: Written by: Daniel Barnum; Created: 01 August 2012

Vitus SM-010 Vitus Audio electronics have impressed me at every trade-show exhibit at which I’ve heard them. VA always shows its strengths and sonic character while allowing the associated loudspeakers, cables, and ancillaries to shine. Typically, I would saunter into the room, get a first impression of the sound, then anchor myself and thoroughly enjoy the music as I worked out fantastic schemes to get the Vitus gear into my system. Cost or logistics didn’t matter -- I had to have them. Luckily, I didn’t have to follow through on my plots; I got my wish, at least for as long as it takes me to prepare this review: I’m listening to Vitus Audio’s SM-010 monoblock amplifiers ($45,000 USD per pair) in my home system.

: Written by: Howard Kneller; Created: 15 July 2012

YG Acoustics Kipod II Signature Select Component If you fancy the audiophile rags (and if you're reading this, you likely do), chances are you've heard of high-end speaker maker YG Acoustics. A while back, YGA caused a stir with an ad campaign that proclaimed its speakers "The best . . . on Earth. Period."

That's a brash statement from any manufacturer, let alone one that's extremely small (YGA currently employs only about ten people) and is barely ten years old. Not surprisingly, lots of people, including many reviewers, were taken aback. However, after listening to the company's wares, more than a few people have concluded that the statement isn't entirely hype.

: Written by: Doug Blackburn; Created: 01 July 2012

Select Component Vandersteen Audio Treo Vandersteen Audio is one of the survivors: a now-classic audio brand whose first product was the Model 2 loudspeaker, in 1977. In all those years, many flavor-of-the-month loudspeaker brands have come and gone, and most that have gone have deserved that fate.

A company doesn’t stick around for 35 years by accident -- it lasts because it makes products that people want, and has stood behind its products all that time. For many years, with his Models 1, 2, and 3, founder-owner Richard Vandersteen focused on maximum performance for the dollar. Updates for these models were issued regularly over the years, and for a long time they were Vandersteen’s core business. All featured essentially the same look: top and bottom caps of wood, and four side panels covered with an acoustically transparent cloth sock. Vandersteen’s thinking was that good-looking wood cabinets are expensive and add nothing to a speaker’s performance. Avoiding expensive wood finishes let him engineer better sound into his speakers than other companies could put into speakers at similar prices with real-wood finishes.

: Written by: Peter Roth; Created: 15 June 2012

Select Component Magico Q1 When any audio component comes in for review, it’s usually several weeks before its true nature begins to fully reveal itself. Familiar recordings of different musical styles, placing different demands on a playback system, are selected to tease out the character and capabilities of the device under test. But every once in a while, the initial impact made by a component is so clear that it stands out in stark relief from the rest. In those rare circumstances, the hundreds of tracks played in the following weeks serve only to confirm that initial impression, rather than blaze a circuitous trail to its real character, hitherto unrevealed.

: Written by: Michael Wright; Created: 01 June 2012

Hemingway I enjoy doing cable reviews . . . but nothing seems to get audiophiles more stirred up than criticisms of their speakers or cables. Critiques of anything else seem permissible, but cables and speakers . . . say the wrong thing and you’ll get e-mails for weeks. I know this because I visit audio forums and message boards, and I read what the cliques have to say about what reviewers have written about their favorite cables. A lot of the time, what these folks seem to forget is that reviewers need to use a unique set of standards in choosing cables.

: Written by: Howard Kneller; Created: 15 May 2012

Select Component In April 2009, when I reviewed Synergistic Research’s Tesla Apex interconnects and speaker cables, I concluded that they were among the best cables I’d heard regardless of price -- and I had heard more than a few. However, as a result of nothing more than my own carelessness and the need to begin my next review, I failed to give the Teslas the Reviewers’ Choice award they deserved. I remedied that failing two months later in a follow-up review, and wondered what Synergistic could come up with next.

I got my answer at the 2011 Rocky Mountain Audio Fest, when the company’s chief designer, Ted Denney III, released their new Element models. At that show, Denney told me that the Element cables represent an "enormous" jump in performance over the Teslas, which are to be discontinued. Knowing firsthand just how good the Teslas are, I was skeptical of this claim. Clearly, a review was in order.

: Written by: Peter Roth; Created: 01 May 2012

Arabesque Mini Thinking outside the box. Some designers do it, others don’t. Gabi and Edwin van der Kley, the husband-and-wife duo behind the Dutch sister companies Crystal Cable and Siltech, have coupled a solidly engineering-based design approach with a questioning spirit that leads them beyond the status quo. Whether it’s a novel amalgam of silver and gold conductors, or a cable-design philosophy based on the principle of thinner is better, the van der Kleys favor elegant solutions. Known principally for the cable offerings of their two companies, Edwin has also explored what’s possible in electronic design in a limited series of Siltech preamplifiers and amplifiers.

In 2008, with its glass-cabineted Arabesque, Crystal Cable introduced to the world Gabi’s ideal full-range loudspeaker: elegant in appearance, exceptional in sound. Besides its transparent enclosure, the most obvious characteristic of the floorstanding, mirror-imaged Arabesques is their unorthodox shape in cross-section, which gave them their name. (From Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary, 11th Edition: "arabesque: an ornament or style that employs flower, foliage, or fruit and sometimes animal and figural outlines to produce an intricate pattern of interlaced lines.") The original Arabesque ($65,000 USD per pair) was reviewed in Ultra Audio in 2009, was designated a Select Component, and then received the SoundStage! Network’s top honor: Product of the Year.