When the recession hit high-end audio in 1978–80, Bongiorno designed cost-effective versions of his original Sumo amplifiers. These included the $750 class-A Model 9 and the $899 Sumo Andromeda. These second-generation Sumo amps present a common appearance—a tall, shallow chassis attached to a rackwidth, 5mm-thick front plate with massive handles. Fortunately they do not include the noisy fan found on earlier Sumo products—a major improvement. Fans effectively diminish an amp's signal/noise ratio (unless one runs the amp in another room).

Did I just say that headphones are a secondary means of listening for most audiophiles? Take one look at the Sennheiser Orpheus's price tag and you might wonder who would consider such a device a secondary system. Its import duty alone must be higher than the entire price of all but a handful of other 'phones. I can't imagine anyone who listens primarily through loudspeakers purchasing these 'phones—but then, I can't afford a Ferrari, either.

I've been with JBL, Superscope, Marantz, and Gauss Electrophysics, the high-speed tape duplicator. Gauss was great, because one of the bright, really bright guys in this industry, Keith Johnson of Reference Recordings, was over there. The duplicator's Keith's baby. Keith was also responsible for video disc. Keith and Paul Gregg were the original founders of Gauss, and had the idea of doing a video disk in 1969! In 1969 Gauss had a black-and-white video disk up and running.

If this is supposed to be the age of communication, why aren't people communicating? If we can bounce a TV show off a satellite into the Soviet Union, or send an architectural plan along with the designer's signature from New York to London in 30 seconds by facsimile, why the hell haven't we been able to explain to the Great Unwashed what high-end audio is all about?

Dejan Nikic has designed tube electronics for NAT Audio since 1993. Their current product line consists of three tubed preamplifiers, a tubed phono stage, five tubed monoblock power amplifiers, a hybrid integrated amp, and three power cords. The visually striking Magma, a single-ended, class-A monoblock, uses a single TH450 tube and costs $45,000/pair. NAT claims that this amplifier, at 160W, is currently the most powerful single-ended amplifier ever made to use a single tube in its output stage. At $8000, the Symmetrical line stage is not the most expensive preamp in NAT's product line; that honor belongs to the dual-chassis Utopia line stage ($9000).

The phrase the mystic chords of memory comes from Abraham Lincoln's First Inaugural Address. Of course, larger issues than those addressed in this column occupied most peoples' minds just then. But it is nonetheless worthwhile for us to spend a moment or two thinking about how differently people experienced music in 1861, compared to how things are today.

Victor Tiscareno and Byron Collett of AudioPrism are known in audiophile circles for their complete line of power-conditioning products. (See Barry Willis' omnibus review in the December 1998 Stereophile.) Their intimate knowledge of the ever-capricious electrical supply has resulted in a series of front-end components bearing the company's logo. The flagship Mana Reference monoblocks, under consideration here, represent AudioPrism's collected wisdom and engineering savvy taken to its logical extreme.

The real world is never that simple. Big companies have the expertise, production facilities, and economies of scale to produce exceptional products if they put their minds to it. And sometimes they do put their minds to it. Sony has been making solid, well-engineered, genuinely high-end CD players for many years. The CDP-XA7ES is the latest flagship model in the premium ES series.

Bo Christensen

As long as you're spinning an LP for your listening pleasure, and if digitizing it at a resolution of 24-bit/192kHz is transparent to the analog source, why not record and store the LP on your computer at that high sampling rate for future convenient playback via iTunes or for iPod use, or for burning to CD-R? And, while you're at it, why not record the LP unequalized and apply the RIAA curve in the digital domain, where you're not dependent on capacitors and resistors that are imprecise to begin with, and can drift over time? With no drift of phase or value, the virtual filter's results should be better than with any analog filter. And in the digital domain, you can program in any curve known, and select it at the click of a mouse. Aside from the sweat equity invested in programming it in the first place, it wouldn't add a penny to the program's cost.

I started my testing by making a series of recordings using the $1599 Seta Nano phono preamplifier. With the Nano's Flat balanced outputs fed to the A/D converter of the Lynx soundcard and its RIAA-equalized single-ended outputs into the preamp, I could A/B the all-analog, RIAA-corrected live playback of an LP with the digitally corrected version. The digital domain version sounded superior—not because digitizing the signal somehow improved it, but because the digital RIAA correction was obviously superior to the analog-domain filter in the less expensive Seta.

The significantly more expensive, beautifully built Seta Model L includes balanced and single-ended inputs, balanced unequalized outputs, variable gain, and a built-in rechargeable battery power supply (footnote 1). A $999 option adds RIAA correction for both balanced and single-ended outputs (a high-output moving-magnet version is also available for the same price).

Conventional audiophile thinking would have Mead Killion, PhD, who founded Etymotic Research in 1983, introducing a new flagship model to take advantage of the new price paradigm. But Killion isn't so much an audiophile as an audiologist, with multiple patents on hearing aids and hearing-aid amplifiers to his credit. Instead of going for a top-this product, he decided to top himself by getting the performance of his classic ER-4 model in a better form and at a cheaper price.

Over the years, Stereophile and its writers have been taken to task for doing, thinking, and saying any number of things. We've been raked over the coals for enjoying acoustic music, electric music, old music, new music, light music, serious music, and music God put here as a test, just to see if we're smart enough to hate it. We've been taken to the woodshed for comparing new products to known references; for failing to compare new products with known references; for borrowing known references for the purpose of such comparisons; for taking advantage of professional discounts so that we can buy and keep known references for the purpose of such comparisons; for being out-of-touch naÔfs who haven't owned enough gear in our lives to know anything about anything; and for being spoiled, materialistic pigs who have owned so many things that we've lost touch with The Common Man. We've been assaulted for loving analog, dissed for loving digital, tasered for loving tubes, sucker-slapped for loving solid-state, and mauled for loving mono. We've even been impeached, indicted, secretly reassigned to a new diocese, and flown back to Russia without an adult guardian for being overly concerned with current events.

Ultimately, of course, and provided that you a) have very deep pockets and b) are prepared to reach to the very bottom of those pockets, you can have everything. But each of us who lives in the real world of car payments, mortgages, and college-age children must decide what is most important to us. You can't, therefore, say that real-world speakers with more extended lows are inherently better than those that excel at soundstaging, or that both are inferior to those with zero midrange coloration. All that can be said is that one of those choices will fit your needs better than it fits others' needs. That's why so many companies offer so many different speaker models at so many prices.

For all that, Amar Bose's model 901 loudspeaker and Jorma Salmi's Helsinki 1.5 ($6500/pair) are as different as night and day. Whereas the Bose 901's acoustical output is mostly projected away from the listener and toward the boundaries of the listening room, the Helsinki 1.5, which is made in Finland by Gradient Ltd., aims to disperse as much sound toward the listener's ears as possible, thus minimizing the room's effect on playback. That, as Robert Frost might say, has made all the difference.

While the DVD-Audio and SACD formats were fighting their small war of attrition, MP3 downloads took over most of the world. With economies of scale reaching a tipping point (a negative one) for many independent producers of high-quality music, downloads have become increasingly attractive.