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Audio

Good things with sound. My Etymotic ER4s died (after how many years of solid use?) — sent them off to the US for repair and the nice people at Etymotic simply replaced them with the current version. They sound excellent, and the new anti-microphonic cables are much better than the original ones. Much walking around London with downloads from Thinner‘s archive on scene.org as background. Also, managed to get a pair of ex-demo Vivid B1s. The equally nice people at Vivid even reconditioned them by replacing all the drivers before shipping them. And they sound amazing. Shame that they’re so …

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AV32R

Recently won a Tag McLaren AV32R on eBay. Admittedly there’s very little official technical support for these now, and given that mine is the single processor model, there aren’t really a whole lot of upgrade options, even should I find someone to install them for me. And the VFD display, being a VFD display, is a bit tired. But it’s all about the sound, and the sound is excellent. I’ve been most surprised to find that I’m actually using their proprietary DSP when listening to music, as most DSP programs for spatialising stereo just turn the music to mush. The …

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Vivid

Busy week. Have been in Amsterdam (lovely) and South of France (also lovely). On Sunday we went to a hifi show in the wasteland hotels near Heathrow airport. Many average or averagely good things, and we ended up short of time, so didn’t get to see everything. But the standouts, by far were the Avantgarde Duo and Vivid speakers. The Duos demonstrated (at least from vinyl, through decent valve amplification) the most transparent sound I’ve ever heard. The Vivids, on the other hand, seemed ready for absolutely anything — not as ætherial as the Duos, but as happy with every …

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9B

For a couple of years, my main CD source has been my Theta Data Universal Transport — a laserdisk/CD player from the early 90s. Fed through a Meridian 518 for dejittering and upsampling to 24-bit, it has always sounded good through my Yamaha DSP-AX1 amp. But recently, I’ve started to feel it’s been missing something at the top end. Conversely, CDs played on my Arcam FMJ DV27 have sounded mechanical, with a lack of warmth in the bass, and overbright, unrefined treble. Assuming that the Theta’s failings at the top were probably simply masking the limitations of the Yamaha’s power …

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