Equipment Reviews

Network Hub Buying Guides Newsletter Signup Advertisers' Index

Saturday, December 21, 2024

Legacy link:

This new site was launched in July 2010. Visit the older site to access previous articles by clicking above.

Ultra Audio's site platform was changed in August 2010. For equipment reviews previous to that, use this link to transfer to the old site.

: 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.

: Written by: Tim Shea; Created: 15 April 2012

EgglestonWorks Fontaine Way back when, I was a teenager looking to buy my first set of "serious" speakers with the hard-earned money I made on my paper route, and went looking for the biggest suckers I could find per dollar spent. Sound quality was a consideration, but I’m embarrassed to say that looks and woofer size were at least as important as the quality of sound the speakers could produce. I ended up with a pair of Pioneer HPM100s. I still have them today . . . though I can’t remember the last time a signal passed through them.

Since those blissfully ignorant wonder years, more time has passed than I like to admit. Fortunately, I’ve actually learned some things since then. Of the few I can remember, one is that it’s often not the size of the package that counts, and that’s certainly true of speakers. It took me a while to accept this, but accept it I have, to the point where my next pair of speakers may be minimonitors. Never woulda seen that coming not so long ago.

So when the relatively smallish Fontaine Signatures arrived from EgglestonWorks, along with their not-small price tag of $8500 USD per pair, I wasn’t nearly as concerned as I’d have been back in the day. That said, knowing what else is out there at that price had me thinking that they’d better pack a bunch of sound per square inch.

: Written by: Doug Blackburn; Created: 15 March 2012

AudioQuest Carbon This review is completely and utterly insane. If you read it, then describe it using such words as preposterous, impossible, improbable, hogswallop, or the ever-popular bullship, I won’t disagree. I did all the work here, and I still think it’s the goofiest thing I’ve ever experienced in audio since I got seriously involved in the field 40 years ago. It should be impossible. I was trained as and worked as an engineer -- mechanical, electrical (including power-supply compliance), software, and computer systems -- for more than 35 years, but this goes against everything I know or thought I knew about electricity, electronics, and physics. Had these results been written by anyone else, I’d have described them as complete fantasy. Perhaps most interesting of all, what I talk about in this review might be only the iceberg tip of something I don’t recall having once read about in the last four decades.

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

Artos Sunrise As a reward for my efforts in 2011, editor Jeff Fritz made me an offer: Would I like to review my first loudspeaker for the SoundStage! Network, the Artos Audio Sunrise ($23,000 USD per pair)? Their construction is first-rate, and the speakers are not only beautiful to look at but sound good. I said yes, and Jeff put me in touch with Artos Audio’s US distributor, Alfred Kainz, who owns highend-electronics, Inc., in Apple Valley, California.

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

Esoteric I-03 When it comes to amps, my beat here at the SoundStage! Network involves integrated amplifiers, which for the most part have been solid-state. The one exception has been the Esoteric A-100, which I reviewed in 2008. Reviewing that $19,000 USD amp based on the KT88 output tube was a singular experience -- it remains one of the finest amps I’ve ever heard. So I was intrigued when Jeff Fritz offered me the opportunity to experience what Esoteric could do in a lower-priced but higher-powered solid-state integrated amp, the I-03 ($13,000). I leapt at the chance.

: Written by: Graham Abbott; Created: 15 January 2012

NuForce DAC-9 Select Component Call me a dinosaur, anachronistic, or snatch a bon mot from one of the uncharitable cranks who sound off on some online forums, but listening to vinyl records on a decent-quality, properly set-up turntable still provides the best approximation of real music that I have heard. There’s just something intrinsically right or more real about it: LPs sound more open, fluid, textured, detailed, dimensional, and -- this is where the magic is -- effortless than their digital counterparts.

Our number-centric brethren may point to measurements as proof of my stupidity, while others may point out that I’m just a self-deluded, middle-aged freak trying desperately to hold on to the brass pole of my youth. Be that as it may, I am not proclaiming some kind of neo-Kantian universal maxim of analog. I here state my personal bias not to start yet another donnybrook of analog vs. digital, but to provide some context for what I heard in my time with NuForce’s DAC-9 digital-to-analog converter.

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

Select Component Many people, perhaps most, think of power conditioners as providing some degree of protection for their audio systems -- protection they’re happy to have, so long as it doesn’t interfere with the sound quality. The adeptResponse (aR) power conditioners made by Audience, based in San Marcos, California, turn that thinking on its head: Their raison d’être is to improve a system’s sound.

aR6-TS In the mid-2000s, Audience added power conditioners to its line of accessories, tweaks, and cables. Since then they’ve added loudspeakers (including their own drivers), a planned preamplifier and power amp, and capacitors. The power conditioners currently comprising the aR series share parts and details of internal construction, differing only in their cosmetic details and number of outlets (two, six, or 12). These are serious power conditioners -- with them, Audience aspires to offer the best sound available for their various price points.

: Written by: Garrett Hongo; Created: 15 December 2011

EAR MC 4 As I write this, fall weather has come on just over a week ago here in Oregon. Two or three days of coolish, overcast days were followed by a day and a half of soft rain showers. Then, clean, crisp, coolish mornings gave way to a lovely slanting light of afternoon, warm and yellow, bathing the plum and Japanese maple trees, both on the verge of turning, subtle tonal colors of their varied green leaves shining in the rich luminescence of the new autumn. Things in the garden that had seemed blonded by the intense sun of summer now appeared somehow freshened -- hennaed tassels of corn fringed more deeply purple, yellow marigolds more golden, red and orange heirloom tomatoes shining as if lantern-lit from within. Even the colors of the earth seemed to gain gravity, their browns deepened with new umber. Time to put away gardening tools, fishing rod and reel, and get back into audio!

These past few years, fall has always meant moving away from summer life outdoors and back inside, to my study and listening room. Curiously, come fall, I seem to hear music better, the season’s intensification of floral colors echoed in the varied timbres and tonal lusters of the music I hear through my audio system. It’s especially the case with analog, where any change in the chain of amplification can intensify and transform listening, often revealing heightened details, the gorgeous splendors of playback having been suborned by memory and the summer’s distraction. Therefore, I think of the MC 4 step-up transformer ($2195 USD) from EAR as a kind of perfect autumnal instrument for my audio system. It does for music all that fall does to my garden’s living colors.