Article: Meet The Audiophile Style Community | Volume 11

[The Computer Audiophile]

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[The Computer Audiophile]

Thanks for participating Andy.

 

I have a similar issue with "background" music :~)

[JoeWhip]

Hi Andy. Nice read. Hopefully one day I will get down and listen to the new speakers.

[Account Closed]

I thought I recognized the name but it wasn't until the mention of TAS that I connected the dots. I read your reviews for the very many years that I subscribed to TAS. I haven't been a subscriber to TAS for a few years now so that is why I did not make the connection quicker. 

 

Thanks for your enjoyable reviews over those years. And, it is nice to see you here as well.

[calloway]

Andy..dave smith here..my profile was the first in this great site. Have you had the chance to meet Doug White of 'thevoicethatis' who lives just outside of Philly..?.If not i would suggest going to his website and getting together with doug, who is a great guy and has a fabulous audio boutique at his house. He lives close to the 'White Manor' golf club...He and his wife Celeste are wonderful people..just a thought..dave..I have been a PA for >45 years..A good friend of mine in the Va/NC area is a Magico dealer....very nice speakers..

[JoeWhip]

Doug White is a friend and is a member of our local audio group as is AQ. Doug is a pretty good golfer. I hope to be as good as him when I grow up. 👽

[ARQuint]

1 hour ago, calloway said:

Andy..dave smith here..my profile was the first in this great site. Have you had the chance to meet Doug White of 'thevoicethatis' who lives just outside of Philly..?.If not i would suggest going to his website and getting together with doug, who is a great guy and has a fabulous audio boutique at his house. He lives close to the 'White Manor' golf club...He and his wife Celeste are wonderful people..just a thought..dave..I have been a PA for >45 years..A good friend of mine in the Va/NC area is a Magico dealer....very nice speakers..

 

Happy to say that I do know Doug and visited his place for the first time just a couple of weeks ago. I was bringing him  a DAC to try out as a potential product that I'd just finished with. I ended up staying much longer than planned: that room of his is certainly "dialed in!"

[AnotherSpin]

Bayreuther Festspiele... wow!!! Many years dreamed about getting there, but being aware of all the difficulties of the task never dared to make serious efforts. 

[ARQuint]

3 hours ago, AnotherSpin said:

Bayreuther Festspiele... wow!!! Many years dreamed about getting there, but being aware of all the difficulties of the task never dared to make serious efforts. 

I was a  Fanfare reviewer for 19 years and was their Wagner video guy for around ten. So being both a Wagnerian and an audiophile, I felt I had to get to Bayreuth. It was so remarkable I went twice. The first time resulted in an article that's among the things I've written I'm proudest of: "Wagner, the Festspielhaus, and the Audiophile Lexicon" in TAS issue 145 (Dec 2003/Jan 2004.) Immediately after each performance—I went to seven that year over about a week-and-a-half—I wrote down my impressions of the aural experience, trying to use the language all of us use to describe how good equipment and recordings sound. There are now some multichannel Blu-Rays that reproduce the sound of the theater pretty well and having those sonic characterizations was really helpful in helping to remember the experience. As I'm sure you know, there's a vast Wagner literature and many outstanding writers, real Wagner "authorities" unlike me, have tried to explain/describe the Bayreuth acoustic and I don't feel they were totally successful. I was pleased not just of how the feature worked out but also of our hobby for providing the language to do the subject justice.

 

By the way, there's a new 700-page book by my favorite music writer, Alex Ross, Wagnerism. I'm only around 90 pages into it but it's really interesting, for people of all levels of experience with the composer's music. Its focus is the context and influence of Wagner's music, good and bad, from when Wagner was the most famous composer on earth until now. I'm reading it slowly and savoring it. But my wife will tell you that I read everything slowly, whether it's Alex Ross or Dave Barry. And I do tend to report to her more than necessary about what I'm learning. She's counting the days until I finish, which may not be until the end of the year…

 

 

[AnotherSpin]

2 hours ago, ARQuint said:

I was a  Fanfare reviewer for 19 years and was their Wagner video guy for around ten. So being both a Wagnerian and an audiophile, I felt I had to get to Bayreuth. It was so remarkable I went twice. The first time resulted in an article that's among the things I've written I'm proudest of: "Wagner, the Festspielhaus, and the Audiophile Lexicon" in TAS issue 145 (Dec 2003/Jan 2004.) Immediately after each performance—I went to seven that year over about a week-and-a-half—I wrote down my impressions of the aural experience, trying to use the language all of us use to describe how good equipment and recordings sound. There are now some multichannel Blu-Rays that reproduce the sound of the theater pretty well and having those sonic characterizations was really helpful in helping to remember the experience. As I'm sure you know, there's a vast Wagner literature and many outstanding writers, real Wagner "authorities" unlike me, have tried to explain/describe the Bayreuth acoustic and I don't feel they were totally successful. I was pleased not just of how the feature worked out but also of our hobby for providing the language to do the subject justice.

 

By the way, there's a new 700-page book by my favorite music writer, Alex Ross, Wagnerism. I'm only around 90 pages into it but it's really interesting, for people of all levels of experience with the composer's music. Its focus is the context and influence of Wagner's music, good and bad, from when Wagner was the most famous composer on earth until now. I'm reading it slowly and savoring it. But my wife will tell you that I read everything slowly, whether it's Alex Ross or Dave Barry. And I do tend to report to her more than necessary about what I'm learning. She's counting the days until I finish, which may not be until the end of the year…

 

 

Thank you very much for your detailed answer. Wagner has a very special place in my musical universe, and being more a music lover than an audiophile, I like most of all archive quality live recordings of full cycle from Bayreuth, made in the 50s (those with Knappertsbusch, Keilbert, Krauss, etc.), or even fragments of earlier, pre-WWII recordings. One of the reasons why I didn't preserve an interest in attending this festival is that in my subjective belief, the current choice of conductors such as Kirill Petrenko for performing Der Ring in Wagner's Bayreuth is very controversial for more than one reason. It may be a sensitive topic, so I will not go deeper.

[Jud]

I have some impression of the role that diabetes plays in people's health in the US, and I also have some notion of the role played by FQHCs in taking care of underserved populations, so good on you.

 

Audio question: In general terms (or as detailed as you like), what does the Pass XA sound like in comparison to the Berning?

[ARQuint]

59 minutes ago, Jud said:

 

Audio question: In general terms (or as detailed as you like), what does the Pass XA sound like in comparison to the Berning?

When I was organizing my capital (that is, scrounging up the money) to buy the M2s earlier this year, I started to feel guilty about owning two such wonderful amplifiers as the XA 60.8s and the Quadrature Zs. Both are designed by musically sensitive but no-nonsense engineers, with neutrality as a key goal. The Pass amps and the Bernings are both uncolored and accomplished at controlling medium-sensitivity speakers that I didn't feel anything was lacking as I used the 60.8s with speaker after speaker. I was barely listening to the Bernings, and decided to list them on AudioGon. 

 

Then the Acora  SRC-1s—the 246 lb granite floorstanders—came and really impressed, in terms of their ability to uncover musically meaningful detail. I switched from the 60.8s to the Bernings and heard a substantial improvement: the presentation was more refined, meaning the amps were providing a richer representation of specific instruments and voices (not meaning sounding at all dull or homogenized.) There was just less sense of an electromechanical process being responsible for what I was hearing.

 

So I took the Bernings off the market—fortunately, there had been no interest at anywhere near the asking price— and found a way to finance the M2s without selling them. Glad I did, as the new Magicos sound fantastic with the Quad Zs.

[JoeWhip]

I was very impressed with what I heard from the Acora speakers at CAF 2019. Not enough to change my speakers but still very impressed, especially the stand mounted ones.