There was a time, long ago, when I was making a living dealing in old tubes and dusty old Altec and Western Electric gear. Okay folks, right now is when the whole day exploded in front of me. This was classic Golden Era audiophile sound, and everybody loved it. The source was a Garrard 301 turntable in a custom plinth with an SME 309 tonearm and Sumiko Songbird cartridge. The well-drawn soundstage occupied the entire space in front of me. The 4B put genuine slam in those illustrious Maggie bass panels. I had to ask, "Fernando, why the 8B?" Whereupon he switched in a Bryston 4B solid-state amplifier, also circa 1978which got everything perked up, fast-accelerating, slamming, and focusing. The sound was sweet and spatially hugebut! It was obvious the Marantz 8B's modest power supply was not pulling the Magnepan's current-hungry load. You can't imagine how surprised I was to see these historic Maggies driven by a classic Marantz Model 7 preamp and the best-looking tube amplifier ever, the Marantz 8B. He described it as "a system of genuine musical authority and accuracy, possibly the best now extant." (For a couple of years, until both the I-D and QRS were discontinued, affluent audiophiles went crazy for it.) The result was a hybrid speaker that Pearson dubbed the QRS-1D. Some background color: Back in the day, after reviewing the Magnepan I-D for The Absolute Sound, that magazine's founder, the late Harry Pearson, and Magnepan's Wendell Diller tried an experiment: pairing the two bass panels from the three-panel I-D with the mid- and high-frequency panels of the Infinity QRS loudspeaker using a Van Alstine-modified Dahlquist DQLP-1 electronic crossover. Next, we drifted back a decade to 1978 and auditioned a beautifully preserved pair of Magnepan Tympani I-D planar-magnetic loudspeakersa real high high-end design. I thought it sounded like the images were surrounded by dull, sluggish air. Skyfi's senior audio technician Ben Hase testing an amplifier. Everybody in the room praised this setup. Images became more distinct and more obviously three-dimensional. They did, and in short order the soundstage tripled in size. Then Sphere asked Ben Hase and Elliot WhiteSkyfi's senior audio technician and marketing director, respectivelyif they could position the loudspeakers farther apart and toe them in a little. The sound, from a Chesky CD (Wycliffe Gordon's Dreams of New Orleans), was initially all lumpy and round and monoistic. The era of wide- baffle speakers had ended. I remember that in 1990, speaker designers were all about minimizing diffraction and were creating speakers with aerodynamic headslike the KEF 107 Reference and its primary competitor, the B&W Matrix 801 Monitor with its fiber-crete head and "free-field" mounted tweeter. Driving home from the Leica barn, I wondered which digital cameras might someday be considered timeless and beautiful.Īfter lunch, Sphere and I began our carefully orchestrated listening sessions.įirst up was a system from the early 1990s: KEF 107 Reference speakers (with KUBE equalizer), powered by Sony's still-coveted TA-N77ES stereo amplifier, driven directly from the volume control of a Sony 707ESD CD player. All these cameras were supremely beautifuland timeless looking. While perusing the shelves, I stumbled on a dozen or so black-bodied Nikon rangefinders hidden in a remote corner. It too was super-clean and filled with 50 years' worth of vintage Leica film cameras. Just then I was struck by a memory from decades ago, of being in a corrugated-metal pole barn, in the middle of nowhere.
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