Archives for Newsletters

    Rogue Pharoah Integrated Amp, $3500, 185×2 Designed/Built in Pennsylvania Rogue’s new Pharoah integrated amp was not created JUST to be a steal of a deal. But it is! Integrated amps offer the best electronic value in high end audio. Pharoah gives you a one box solution for very serious audio performance. By pairing a marvelous preamp and amp on a single chassis, it just happens to land at a great price. But please, don’t think the Pharoah isn’t an upper echelon product just because it’s quite the bargain. It’s a combination of tube refinement and big solid state
Read More

    Bryston A Series Loudspeakers Are Here! After many years of research and planning, Bryston got into the speaker biz at Thanksgiving of 2012. Bryston introduced the Model T Series, based around massively constructed 8” woofers. The performance and value of the T Series, with a 20 year warranty (!!), has taken the high end speaker community by storm. The performance has been so impressive for the price points that we chose to replace B&W with Bryston! Times, they are a changing. All the T Series models need to be 10 ½” wide to accommodate its MONSTER 8. While
Read More

    Paradigm Sountrack 2 Sound Bar, $900 Sound bars made their mark in the mid 2000s. The big distribution manufacturers offered bars for $300-400 with a dozen drivers and amplifiers on board. People expected them to sound good. Really? Think about it. The magnets on these speakers are smaller than what is used in your door bell. The amplifiers are like what is built into a computer speaker. These bars are literally no better than what is in the TV itself. Their only advantage is that they face forward while speakers within TVs face away from the viewer. It
Read More

    New Anthem Surround Receivers: For the Audio Purist! Anthem has just introduced its new line of surround receivers. In “round one” Anthem earned a reputation for fine sounding audiophile receivers with the best room correction circuit on the market- ARC, Anthem Room Correction. The new line has a more advanced version of ARC. ARC 1M measures the response of the speakers in your room. It reads peaks and valleys. It chops off the peaks and boosts the valleys. Almost all competitors just lop off the peaks. The typical room has a dip in the midrange and a bass
Read More

    Grado GS-1000i, Balanced Headphones $1100 Grado’s headphone models with wooden cups have been my favorites. RS-2 $500, RS-1 $700 and GS-1000 $1000. The wooden cups provide a chamber to produce subterranean bass and a warm, rich timbre. As you can see from the photo, foam contacts your ears, not wood. We now have on display the top of the wood line, GS-1000i, in a special balanced configuration ($1100) because that’s how you get the best performance. To take advantage of this feature you need a great headphone amp. That would be the Bryston BHA-1 $1400. This combo runs
Read More

    Rega Aria Phono Preamp $1500, MM & MC: On Display! Rega has just introduced one of the finest phono preamps available at any price. In the past Rega offered Fono and MC Fono. Both were highly respected at under $500. Aria brings phono performance into the highest echelons.   A recent perusal of The Absolute Sound’s reference phono stages shows price points of $12k, $13k, $25k. The CHEAP ones are $1900-$11k! Aria is right there with the best of them, and at nowhere near those price tags. Aria features two (MM & MC) independent phono stages on one
Read More