Equipment Reviews

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Saturday, December 10, 2022

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Most-Read Equipment Reviews

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 Hans Wetzel; Created: 15 February 2020

The year was 1997. I was in seventh grade, and had recently begun asking my older brother for his copies of Stereophile. He’d always talked about buying a pair of Wilson Audio Specialties’ famed WATT/Puppys, and having heard his system, I was eager to see what hi-fi audio was all about. Reviewed in the October 1997 issue, however, was a loudspeaker that would shift the spotlight -- if only for moment -- away from the super-high-end’s perennial heavyweight champ.

: Written by Jeff Fritz; Created: 01 February 2020

Reviewers' Choice What this world needs is a great loudspeaker costing under $15,000 USD per pair.

Many audiophiles don’t consider a speaker costing 15 grand per pair expensive. My non-audiophile friends consider this amazingly misguided. It wouldn’t take an exhaustive Internet search to find a reviewer somewhere saying something like this: “You can expect only so much for $15,000.”

: Written by Jason Thorpe; Created: 15 January 2020

It’s Christmas 2018, and I’m at my in-laws’ for the holidays. Doug Schneider pings me via text and asks if I’m interested in reviewing Audience’s Au24 SX interconnects and speaker cables. They’re in his car, see, and he’ll be driving right past Campbellford, Ontario, the rural town in which Marcia’s ’rents live. How ’bout he just drops ’em off?

: Written by Aron Garrecht; Created: 01 January 2020

For the past few years, McIntosh Laboratory has been refreshing and expanding its product line at an unprecedented pace. The subject of this review, the MC1.25KW mono amplifier ($12,500 USD each), made its debut in late 2017, and I haven’t been able to take my eyes off it since. Imagine my elation when Mark Christensen, McIntosh’s marketing coordinator, offered to send me for review a pair of MC1.25KWs and their flagship preamplifier, the C1100 (review in the works). In discussions with Christensen, I learned that the MC1.25KW is both a replacement for and an evolution of McIntosh’s beloved MC1.2KW amplifier, and offers more dynamic headroom, upgraded parts and connection points, and refreshed industrial design and lighting.

: Written by Hans Wetzel; Created: 15 December 2019

Reviewers' Choice I’ve reviewed many loudspeakers over the years, and while many were quite good, only a few stand out in my memory. There seems to be a limit to how much pleasure I get from looking at rectilinear boxes made of MDF over the 12 weeks of the average listening period for a review. Some manufacturers, in an effort to stand out from the crowd, might throw in a curve here, a flourish there, maybe a super-high-gloss finish to add flair to yet another box whose primary -- and, for most listeners, sole -- purpose is to move air.

: Written by Jeff Fritz; Created: 01 December 2019

Reviewers' Choice High-end audio gear can get expensive, but the meaning of expensive depends on the context. For the sake of SoundStage! Ultra, I put most equipment in one of two mental categories: house money and car money.

In the US, the median price of a home is $236,100 (all prices USD); the average transaction price of a light vehicle is $37,577. I used to review house-money gear, and these days many manufacturers make loudspeakers priced in that category. But most folks can’t afford a second home; it’s fair to say that you must be pretty wealthy to afford that much for a pair of speakers.

: Written by Howard Kneller; Created: 15 November 2019

Reviewers' Choice Theoretica Applied Physics, based in Princeton, New Jersey, has the most revolutionary digital signal processing (DSP) technology you’ve never heard about. The company’s website states that this technology, the Band-Assisted Crosstalk Cancellation Hierarchy-Stereo Purifier (BACCH-SP), uses digital interaural crosstalk cancellation (IXTC) to create “unprecedented spatial realism . . . [thus] allowing the listener to hear . . . a truly 3D . . . sound field that is simply unapproachable by . . . existing high-end audio systems.”

: Written by Aron Garrecht; Created: 01 November 2019

Reviewers' Choice Chances are that anyone reading this review is passionate about music and sound quality, and that most will agree that the audio component that plays the biggest role in determining the sound of recorded music reproduced at home is the loudspeaker. In recent years, many have argued that the second-biggest role is played by the room itself. Having reviewed speakers and electronic components for almost a decade now, I wholeheartedly agree with both assertions -- I’ve experienced their truth first-hand in my listening for reviews of speaker after speaker, and heard how each speaker has interacted with and performed differently in my well-damped listening room. Most of these speakers have been well engineered and built of high-quality materials, with cutting-edge drivers and electrical components installed in dense cabinets designed to optimize driver performance and minimize resonances.

: Written by Jeff Fritz; Created: 15 October 2019

GigaWatt is not widely known in North America, but Mark Sossa, of distributor Well Pleased Audio Vida, hopes that will soon change. Founded in Poland in 2007, GigaWatt’s history stretches back further, to 1998, and the founding of Power Audio Laboratories by Adam Schubert, a young electronics engineer with a passion for high-quality audio. P.A. Labs remained obscure until the Audio Video Show of 2002, where Schubert and his products gained wider recognition from attending audiophiles and the press. After that, P.A. Labs created GigaWatt as a separate brand, with Schubert at the helm.

: Written by Garrett Hongo; Created: 01 October 2019

In Eugene, Oregon, where I live, there used to be a mom-and-pop electronics store downtown, near the bus station and public library. It was the kind of place you went to pick up a pair of old Advent or Infinity speakers, a new stylus for your vintage record changer, a used CD or DVD player, or basic lamp cord to wire up your living-room stereo -- everything you needed for a cheap but good system was there. It was called Thompson Electronics, and I guess it had been there since the 1960s, occupying a storefront kitty-corner to the St. Vincent de Paul, where I’d sometimes scrounge for used LPs. Making only one downtown stop, I could get mounting screws for a phono cartridge and a new old record.