Audio Critic the 26 r schematic

Also in this issue:

Loudspeakers, including a $229 system that sounds like $15,000

(but don't buy it for your listening room).
Power amplifiers, D/A converters, AV electronics, a TV, and more.
Plus our regular features, columns, letters to the

Editor, CD and DVD reviews—and our new look!

Biggest
Lies in

Audio

The

ISSUE NO. 26

Display until arrival

of Issue No. 27.

Retail price: U.S. $7.50, Can. $8.50

pdf 1

The 10 Biggest Lies in Audio

By Peter Aczel

Four Speaker Systems, Ranging from
the Most Ambitious to the Most Ingenious

By Peter Aczel

AVMS AV-1 TruSonic 10
EgglestonWorks "Isabel" 12
Monsoon MM-1000 13
Revel "Salon" 14

Power Amplifiers and Outboard D/A Converters

By Peter Aczel, David A. Rich, Ph.D., and Glenn O. Strauss
5-Channel Power Amplifier: Bryston 9B ST 19

Mono Power Amplifier: Bryston PowerPac 60 20

Outboard D/A Converters: Entech NC205.2/NC203.2 20
Outboard D/A Converter: MSB Technology "Link" 21

5-Channel Power Amplifier: Sherbourn 5/1500 23

Outboard D/A Converter: Van Alstine Omega IV DAC 27

Can a Car Radio Outperform a

High-End FM Tuner?

Blaupunkt Alaska RDM 168 22

Do You Need a Spectrum Analyzer?

By Glenn O. Strauss
AudioControl Industrial SA-3052 26

Direct Stream Digital and the "Super Audio CD"

By Peter Aczel
Sony SCD-1 33

High-Tech Gear for Your TV Room
(a.k.a. Home Theater)

By Peter Aczel and David A. Rich, Ph.D.
DVD Video Player: Denon DVD-5000 35

Personal TV System: ReplayTV 2020 36
DVD Video Player: Toshiba SD-5109 38
Rear Projection TV: Toshiba TW40X81 38

It Never Gets Better By Tom Nousaine 40
Capsule CD Reviews By Peter Aczel 41
DVD Reviews By Glenn O. Strauss 45

Box 978: Letters to the Editor 3

ISSUE NO. 26 • FALL 2000 1

contents

pdf 2

From the

2 THE AUDIO CRITIC

Publisher

Greg Keilty

Editor

Peter Aczel

Technical Editor David A. Rich

Contributing Editor Glenn O. Strauss

Technical Consultant (RF) Richard T. Modafferi

Columnist Tom Nousaine
Art Director Michele Raes

Design and Prepress Tom Aczel

Business Manager Bodil Aczel

Advertising Manager David Webster

The Audio Critic® (ISSN 0146-4701) is published quar­terly for $24 per year by Critic Publications, Inc., 1380
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Audio Critic, P.O. Box 978, Quakertown, PA 18951-0978.

Any conclusion, rating, recommendation, criticism, or
caveat published by The Audio Critic represents the
personal findings and judgments of the Editor and the
Staff, based only on the equipment available to their
scrutiny and on their knowledge of the subject, and is
therefore not offered to the reader as an infallible truth nor
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What Did I Tell You?

Issue after inevitably delayed issue, I have been talking
about our need to form a partnership with a publisher. Not just
any publisher but one that could help us publish regularly and
profitably without interfering with our editorial policy. Well, I
have found such a publisher, and you are holding the earliest
fruit of our partnership in your hand. Looks a lot more major­league, doesn't it? More importantly, it will be followed by the
next issue, and the one after that, and all the others after that,
at quarterly intervals, as originally intended. We are even
talking about a bimonthly schedule in a year or two.

Our new partner is The CM Group, based in Toronto

(haven't I always professed Canadophilia?) and headed by Greg
Keilty, a widely recognized circulation expert. I have retained
complete editorial autonomy. This publication will remain a
consumer advocate and not one of the compliant handmaidens
of the audio industry. You will notice that in this issue we are,
to some extent, still playing catch-up because we had to clear
our pipeline of accumulated products that had been submitted
for review. That will no longer be the case in our next issue.

My only worry is that some of our readers have become ac­customed to our former double issues for the price of one—
overstuffed out of guilt by your forever tardy Editor—and will
now want the same bargain every 90 days. Sorry, guys, that
may have been a bonanza for you, but it was a hell of a way to
run a magazine. Greg won't stand for it.

pdf 3

to the Editor

Our fresh start with our new publisher, after the long interruption of our pub­lishing schedule, leaves us with very few letters that are still of current relevance.
The two below, from two of the most distinguished names in audio, remain re­quired reading. Write us letters like that and there will be more pages again in
this column. Address all editorial correspondence to the Editor, The Audio Critic,
P.O. Box 978, Quakertown, PA 18951-0978.

The Audio Critic:

Thank you kindly for sending the
most recent issue of The Audio Critic. I al-
ways enjoy reading your nice little maga­zine. It is a pleasure to see that you have
managed after all these years to continue
to speak the truth and keep your sense of
proportion and humor.

I noticed your quest for a solution to
"One Last Mystery." Though I trust there
are more mysteries to come, I have won­dered about the same matter over the
years and thought I would make a few
comments about it.

I have many time said that there are so
many more fakes and frauds in the audio
area than in many others, each of which
should raise the same amount of passion.
I am not familiar with the automotive
field but I am very familiar with photog­raphy. There are two aspects to the relative
sanity in the area of photography as com­pared to audio. One of the issues has to do
with the ability of persons to make equip­ment and the other with the ability of per­sons to compare the performance of the
equipment.

On the first issue, I would suggest
that it is all but impossible for the pho­tographic equipment field to be flooded
with equipment designed by incompe­tents, fakes, and frauds, as is the case for
audio equipment, because it is so diffi­cult to do so. Anyone, qualified or not,
can purchase the components necessary
to make some sort of amplifier or pre­amplifier that will work, more or less.
Anyone can put this stuff together with
even minimal competence. There are
magazines that describe construction and
supply houses that provide the parts and
instructions to make loudspeakers and
electronics and so forth. There is in

electronics and audio a long tradition,
starting with the amateur radio groups,
to build stuff. As a result, stuff is indeed
built, and some go so far as to polish and
glitz up their stuff, market it with tech­nical drivel, and take in the suckers.

This is not so in the field of photog­raphy. There are no cameras being built
by amateurs. There are no camera parts
supply houses. There are no lens grinding
kits and shutter parts vendors. There is no
tradition of building a camera from parts.
So, as we might expect, there are no pur­veyors of odd or silly cameras. Every pho­tographer knows better than to be taken
in by an advertisement for some sort of
special super camera that would have
magical properties. They know that such
things are indeed silly.

As a result, photography is relatively
free of fakes and frauds who push equip­ment with special properties, compared to
the audio field. Photographers work at
taking pictures, just as audio professionals
work at making recordings.

There is another issue that I think is
just as important, possibly more impor­tant. Photographic results are much
more definitive and easier to compare
than are audio results. This effect is
caused by basic human perceptions that
are used to compare and evaluate the
final results of audio reproduction and
photographic presentation.

In the first case, the ear is the perceiver
and the mind the interpreter of the audio
result. In the latter the eye is the perceiver
and the mind the interpreter of the pho­tographic result. There is a basic difference
between these two processes. In the first
case a time-sequential comparison is
made, and in the second the comparison
can be and usually is simultaneous. Be-

cause of the time-sequential comparison
in the case of audio presentations, judg­ment is less precise and more easily biased
by opinion. One has to jump back and
forth between comparisons in the audio
case, and this fuzzes up the ability to

judge. One cannot hear both presenta-

tions at the same time. It is true that A/B
or ABX comparisons have been quite suc­cessful in ferreting out differences and
pinning down differences. But there are
still those who choose to believe what they
want to, regardless of the truth. One can
only hope to show that these persons re­ally can't tell the difference, if any, and
show them up for what they are, frauds.

In the case of photographic perfor­mance, the comparisons of photographic
results are done simultaneously. That is,
side by side but at the same time. When
simultaneous comparisons are made, the
differences, if any, are observed and can be
discussed by the viewers while doing the
examination. The language of comparison
then becomes very precise and the viewers
can interact quickly, in real time, to move
toward a resolution of differences of opin­ions. This sort of interaction cannot take
place in audio comparisons. Thus differ­ences of opinion often remain unresolved.

I believe that for at least the two rea­sons stated above, and possibly others,

there is a significant difference between the
audio and photographic fields, which will
continue. Photography will remain rela­tively free of fakes and frauds, while audio

will continue to be replete with them.

Sincerely,

R. A. Greiner

Emeritus Professor of Electrical and

Computer Engineering

Madison, WI

(continued on page 34)

ISSUE NO. 26 • FALL 2000 3

pdf 4

4 THE AUDIO CRITIC

The punch line of Lincoln's famous bon mot,

that you cannot fool all the people all of the
time, appears to be just barely applicable to
high-end audio. What follows here is an
attempt to make it stick.

I strongly suspect that people are
more gullible today than they were in
my younger years. Back then we didn't

put magnets in our shoes, the police

didn't use psychics to search for
missing persons, and no head of state
since Hitler had consulted astrologers.
Most of us believed in science without
any reservations. When the hi-fi era
dawned, engineers like Paul Klipsch,
Lincoln Walsh, Stew Hegeman, Dave
Hafler, Ed Villchur, and C. G.

McProud were our fountainhead of
audio information. The untutored
tweako/weirdo pundits who don't
know the integral of ex were still in the
benighted future.

Don't misunderstand me. In terms

of the existing spectrum of knowledge,
the audio scene today is clearly ahead of
the early years; at one end of the spec­trum there are brilliant practitioners
who far outshine the founding fathers.

At the dark end of that spectrum, how-

ever, a new age of ignorance, supersti­tion, and dishonesty holds sway. Why
and how that came about has been
amply covered in past issues of this
publication; here I shall focus on the
rogues' gallery of currently proffered
mendacities to snare the credulous.

Logically this is not the lie to start with
because cables are accessories, not pri­mary audio components. But it is the

hugest, dirtiest, most cynical, most in-

telligence-insulting and, above all, most

fraudulently profitable lie in audio, and

therefore must go to the head of the list.

The lie is that high-priced speaker
cables and interconnects sound better
than the standard, run-of-the-mill (say,
Radio Shack) ones. It is a lie that has

been exposed, shamed, and refuted
over and over again by every genuine
authority under the sun, but the
tweako audio cultists hate authority
and the innocents can't distinguish it
from self-serving charlatanry.

The simple truth is that resistance,
inductance, and capacitance (R, L, and
C) are the only cable parameters that
affect performance in the range below
radio frequencies. The signal has no
idea whether it is being transmitted

through cheap or expensive RLC. Yes,
you have to pay a little more than rock
bottom for decent plugs, shielding, in­sulation, etc., to avoid reliability prob­lems, and you have to pay attention to

resistance in longer connections. In

basic electrical performance, however,

a nice pair of straightened-out wire

coat hangers with the ends scraped is
not a whit inferior to a $2000 gee-whiz
miracle cable. Nor is 16-gauge lamp
cord at 18¢ a foot. Ultrahigh-priced
cables are the biggest scam in con­sumer electronics, and the cowardly
surrender of nearly all audio publica­tions to the pressures of the cable mar­keters is truly depressing to behold.

(For an in-depth examination of

fact and fiction in speaker cables and
audio interconnects, see Issues No. 16

and No. 17.)

pdf 5

This lie is also, in a sense, about a pe-

ripheral matter, since vacuum tubes are
hardly mainstream in the age of sil­icon. It's an all-pervasive lie, however,
in the high-end audio market; just
count the tube-equipment ads as a per­centage of total ad pages in the typical
high-end magazine. Unbelievable! And
so is, of course, the claim that vacuum
tubes are inherently superior to tran­sistors in audio applications—don't

you believe it.

Tubes are great for high-powered
RF transmitters and microwave ovens
but not, at the turn of the century, for
amplifiers, preamps, or (good grief!)
digital components like CD and DVD
players. What's wrong with tubes?
Nothing, really. There's nothing wrong

with gold teeth, either, even for upper

incisors (that Mideastern grin); it's just
that modern dentistry offers more at­tractive options. Whatever vacuum
tubes can do in a piece of audio equip­ment, solid-state devices can do better,
at lower cost, with greater reliability.
Even the world's best-designed tube
amplifier will have higher distortion

than an equally well-designed transistor
amplifier and will almost certainly need
more servicing (tube replacements,
rebiasing, etc.) during its lifetime. (Idi­otic designs such as 8-watt single-ended

triode amplifiers are of course exempt,
by default, from such comparisons since
they have no solid-state counterpart.)

As for the "tube sound," there are
two possibilities: (1) It's a figment of
the deluded audiophile's imagination,
or (2) it's a deliberate coloration intro­duced by the manufacturer to appeal
to corrupted tastes, in which case a

solid-state design could easily mimic
the sound if the designer were perverse
enough to want it that way.

Yes, there exist very special situations

where a sophisticated designer of hi-fi

electronics might consider using a tube
(e.g., the RF stage of an FM tuner), but
those rare and narrowly qualified excep­tions cannot redeem the common,
garden-variety lies of the tube mar­keters, who want you to buy into an ob­solete technology.

You have heard this one often, in one
form or another. To wit: Digital sound
is vastly inferior to analog. Digitized
audio is a like a crude newspaper pho­tograph made up of dots. The
Nyquist-Shannon sampling theorem is
all wet. The 44.1 kHz sampling rate of
the compact disc cannot resolve the
highest audio frequencies where there
are only two or three sampling points.
Digital sound, even in the best cases, is
hard and edgy. And so on and so
forth—all of it, without exception, ig­norant drivel or deliberate misrepre­sentation. Once again, the lie has little
bearing on the mainstream, where the
digital technology has gained complete
acceptance; but in the byways and trib­utaries of the audio world, in unregen­erate high-end audio salons and the
listening rooms of various tweako
mandarins, it remains the party line.

The most ludicrous manifestation of
the antidigital fallacy is the preference
for the obsolete LP over the CD. Not
the analog master tape over the digital
master tape, which remains a semi­respectable controversy, but the clicks,
crackles and pops of the vinyl over the
digital data pits' background silence,
which is a perverse rejection of reality.

Here are the scientific facts any
second-year E.E. student can verify for
you: Digital audio is bulletproof in a
way analog audio never was and never
can be. The 0's and l's are inherently
incapable of being distorted in the
signal path, unlike an analog wave­form. Even a sampling rate of 44.1
kHz, the lowest used in today's high-fi-

delity applications, more than ade­quately resolves all audio frequencies.
It will not cause any loss of informa­tion in the audio range—not an iota,
not a scintilla. The "how can two sam­pling points resolve 20 kHz?" argu­ment is an untutored misinterpretation
of the Nyquist-Shannon sampling the­orem. (Doubters are advised to take an
elementary course in digital systems.)

The reason why certain analog
recordings sound better than certain
digital recordings is that the engineers
did a better job with microphone
placement, levels, balance, and equal­ization, or that the recording venue
was acoustically superior. Some early
digital recordings were indeed hard
and edgy, not because they were digital
but because the engineers were still
thinking analog, compensating for an­ticipated losses that did not exist.
Today's best digital recordings are the
best recordings ever made. To be fair, it
must be admitted that a state-of the-art
analog recording and a state-of-the-art
digital recording, at this stage of their
respective technologies, will probably
be of comparable quality. Even so, the
number of Tree-Worshiping Analog
Druids is rapidly dwindling in the pro­fessional recording world. The digital
way is simply the better way.

Regular readers of this publication
know how to refute the various lies in­voked by the high-end cultists in op­position to double-blind listening tests
at matched levels (ABX testing), but a
brief overview is in order here.

The ABX methodology requires
device A and device B to be level­matched within +0.1 dB, after which
you can listen to fully identified A and
fully identified B for as long as you
like. If you then think they sound dif­ferent, you are asked to identify X,

ISSUE NO. 26 • FALL 2000

5

pdf 6

6 THE AUDIO CRITIC

which may be either A or B (as deter-

mined by a double-blind randomiza­tion process). You are allowed to make
an A/X or B/X comparison at any
time, as many times as you like, to de­cide whether X=A or X=B. Since sheer
guessing will yield the correct answer
50% of the time, a minimum of 12

trials is needed for statistical validity

(16 is better, 20 better yet). There is no
better way to determine scientifically
whether you are just claiming to hear a
difference or can actually hear one.

The tweako cultists will tell you
that ABX tests are completely invalid.
Everybody knows that a Krell sounds
better than a Pioneer, so if they are in­distinguishable from each other in an

ABX test, then the ABX method is all
wet—that's their logic. Everybody

knows that Joe is taller than Mike, so if
they both measure exactly 5 feet 11¼
inches, then there is something wrong

with the Stanley tape measure, right?

The standard tweako objections to

ABX tests are too much pressure (as in

"let's see how well you really hear"),
too little time (as in "get on with it, we
need to do 16 trials"), too many de-

vices inserted in the signal path (viz.,

relays, switches, attenuators, etc.), and
of course assorted psychobabble on the
subject of aural perception. None of
that amounts to anything more than a
red herring, of one flavor or another, to
divert attention from the basics of con­trolled testing. The truth is that you
can perform an ABX test all by your­self without any pressure from other

participants, that you can take as much

time as wish (how about 16 trials over

16 weeks?), and that you can verify the

transparency of the inserted control

devices with a straight-wire bypass.

The objections are totally bogus and
hypocritical.

Here's how you smoke out a lying,

weaseling, obfuscating anti-ABX hyp­ocrite. Ask him if he believes in any
kind of A/B testing at all. He will
probably say yes. Then ask him what

This widely reiterated piece of B.S.

would have you believe that audio
electronics, and even cables, will
"sound better" after a burn-in period
of days or weeks or months (yes,
months). Pure garbage. Capacitors will
"form" in a matter of seconds after
power-on. Bias will stabilize in a
matter of minutes (and shouldn't be all
that critical in well-designed equip­ment, to begin with). There is ab­solutely no difference in performance
between a correctly designed ampli­fier's (or preamp's or CD player's) first-

Even fairly sophisticated audiophiles
fall for this hocus-pocus. What's more,
loudspeaker manufacturers participate
in the sham when they tell you that
those two pairs of terminals on the
back of the speaker are for biwiring as

well as biamping. Some of the most

highly respected names in loudspeakers
are guilty of this hypocritical genu­flection to the tweako sacraments—
they are in effect surrendering to the
"realities" of the market.

The truth is that biamping makes
sense in certain cases, even with a passive
crossover, but biwiring is pure voodoo.
If you move one pair of speaker wires to
the same terminals where the other pair
is connected, absolutely nothing changes
electrically. The law of physics that says

so is called the superposition principle.

In terms of electronics, the superposition
theorem states that any number of volt­ages applied simultaneously to a linear
network will result in a current which is
the exact sum of the currents that would
result if the voltages were applied indi-

vidually. The audio salesman or 'phile
who can prove the contrary will be an

instant candidate for some truly major
scientific prizes and academic honors. At

hour and l000th-hour performance.

As for cables, yecch... We're dealing

with audiophile voodoo here rather
than science. (See also the Duo-Tech
review in Issue No. 19, page 36.)

Loudspeakers, however, may re­quire a break-in period of a few hours,
perhaps even a day or two, before
reaching optimum performance. That's
because they are mechanical devices
with moving parts under stress that
need to settle in. (The same is true of
reciprocating engines and firearms.)
That doesn't mean a good loudspeaker

won't "sound good" right out of the

box, any more than a new car with 10
miles on it won't be good to drive.

special insights he gains by (1) not

matching levels and (2) peeking at
the nameplates. Watch him squirm
and fume.

Negative feedback, in an amplifier or
preamplifier, is baaaad. No feedback at
all is gooood. So goes this widely in­voked untruth.

The fact is that negative feedback is
one of the most useful tools available to
the circuit designer. It reduces
distortion and increases stability. Only
in the Bronze Age of solid-state am­plifier design, back in the late '60s and
early '70s, was feedback applied so
recklessly and indiscriminately by cer­tain practitioners that the circuit could
get into various kinds of trouble. That
was the origin of the no-feedback
fetish. In the early '80s a number of
seminal papers by Edward Cherry

(Australia) and Robert Cordell (USA)
made it clear, beyond the shadow of a
doubt, that negative feedback is totally
benign as long as certain basic guide­lines are strictly observed. Enough time
has elapsed since then for that truth to
sink in. Today's no-feedback dogmatists
are either dishonest or ignorant.

pdf 7

the same time it is only fair to point out
that biwiring does no harm. It just
doesn't do anything. Like magnets in
your shoes.

Just about all that needs to be said on
this subject has been said by Bryston in
their owner's manuals:

"All Bryston amplifiers contain
high-quality, dedicated circuitry in the
power supplies to reject RF, line spikes
and other power-line problems. Bryston
power amplifiers do not require special­ized power line conditioners. Plug the
amplifier directly into its own wall
socket."

What they don't say is that the same
is true, more or less, of all well-designed
amplifiers. They may not all be the Brys­tons' equal in regulation and PSRR, but
if they are any good they can be plugged
directly into a wall socket. If you can af­ford a fancy power conditioner you can
also afford a well-designed amplifier, in
which case you don't need the fancy
power conditioner. It will do absolutely
nothing for you. (Please note that we
aren't talking about surge-protected
power strips for computer equipment.
They cost a lot less than a Tice Audio
magic box, and computers with their pe­ripherals are electrically more vulnerable
than decent audio equipment.)

The biggest and stupidest lie of
them all on the subject of "clean" power
is that you need a specially designed
high-priced line cord to obtain the best
possible sound. Any line cord rated to
handle domestic ac voltages and cur­rents will perform like any other. Ultra­high-end line cords are a fraud. Your
audio circuits don't know, and don't
care, what's on the ac side of the power
transformer. All they're interested in is
the dc voltages they need. Think about
it. Does your car care about the hose
you filled the tank with?

This goes back to the vinyl days, when
treating the LP surface with various
magic liquids and sprays sometimes

(but far from always) resulted in im­proved playback, especially when the
pressing process left some residue in the
grooves. Commercial logic then
brought forth, in the 1980s and '90s,
similarly magical products for the treat­ment of CDs. The trouble is that the
only thing a CD has in common with
an LP is that it has a surface you can
put gunk on. The CD surface, how­ever, is very different. Its tiny indenta­tions do not correspond to analog
waveforms but merely carry a numer­ical code made up of 0's and l's. Those
0's and l's cannot be made "better" (or

"worse," for that matter) the way the

undulations of an LP groove can some­times be made more smoothly track­able. They are read as either 0's or l's,
and that's that. You might as well polish
a quarter to a high shine so the cashier
won't mistake it for a dime.

Just say no to CD treatments,

from green markers to spray-ons and

rub-ons. The idiophiles who claim to
hear the improvement can never,

never identify the treated CD blind.

(Needless to say, all of the above also
goes for DVDs.)

This is the catchall lie that should per­haps go to the head of the list as No.

1 but will also do nicely as a wrap-up.

The Golden Ears want you to believe

that their hearing is so keen, so ex-

quisite, that they can hear tiny nu-

ances of reproduced sound too elusive

for the rest of us. Absolutely not true.
Anyone without actual hearing im-

pairment can hear what they hear, but

only those with training and experi­ence know what to make of it, how to
interpret it.

Thus, if a loudspeaker has a huge
dip at 3 kHz, it will not sound like
one with flat response to any ear,
golden or tin, but only the experi-

enced ear will quickly identify the
problem. It's like an automobile me­chanic listening to engine sounds and

knowing almost instantly what's
wrong. His hearing is no keener than
yours; he just knows what to listen for.
You could do it too if you had dealt
with as many engines as he has.

Now here comes the really bad
part. The self-appointed Golden
Ears—tweako subjective reviewers,
high-end audio-salon salesmen, audio­club ringleaders, etc.—often use their
falsely assumed superior hearing to in­timidate you. "Can't you hear that?"
they say when comparing two ampli­fiers. You are supposed to hear huge
differences between the two when in
reality there are none—the GE's can't
hear it either; they just say they do, re­lying on your acceptance of their GE
status. Bad scene.

The best defense against the Golden
Ear lie is of course the double-blind

ABX test (see No. 4 above). That sepa-

rates those who claim to hear something
from those who really do. It is amazing
how few, if any, GE's are left in the
room once the ABX results are tallied.

There are of course more Big Lies in
audio than these ten, but let's save a few
for another time. Besides, it's not really
the audio industry that should be
blamed but our crazy consumer culture
coupled with the widespread acceptance
of voodoo science. The audio industry,
specifically the high-end sector, is merely
responding to the prevailing climate. In

the end, every culture gets exactly what

it deserves.

ISSUE NO. 26 • FALL 2000

7

pdf 8

Four Speaker Systems, Ranging
from the Most Ambitious to
the Most Ingenious

L

et me digress briefly before ad­dressing my intended main

themes in the individual reviews.
I am always worried that new readers of
this publication might not be aware of
the dominant role of the loudspeaker in
any audio system. Upgrading your
speakers has the potential to change
your audio life, to take you into a new
world of sound; upgrading your elec­tronics will not have anywhere near the
same effect—if any.

I dwelled on this subject at some
length in Issue No. 25 (see pp. 15-16);
here I only want to remind you that

your money is more wisely spent on

new speakers than on any other audio
component. That does not mean I en­dorse loudspeaker systems in the $20K­and-up category (which extends to
$100K and more). The vast majority of
those insanely high-priced speakers
aren't worth 25 cents on the dollar;
many of them are just plain rip-offs.
On the other hand, you shouldn't ex­pect the $5000 kind of sound out of
$500-a-pair loudspeakers. Truly good
speakers are never cheap. That becomes
even more of an issue with multi­channel home-theater systems. (Again,
see Issue No. 25, pp. 16-17.)

My highest recommendation to
those who are willing to spend serious
bucks on a speaker system remains the
Canadian Waveform Mach 17, now
$8495 the pair direct from the factory.
So far I have not found its equal in
transparency and lack of coloration.
Yes, you need a 6-channel power am­plifier to use a pair of Mach 17's with
their dedicated 3-way electronic
crossover, and that raises the cost con­siderably, but then you have some­thing you can live with for years
without the urge to upgrade. Of
course, something in the $1500 to
$2000 range will also get you excellent
speaker performance if you shop
wisely (as our regular readers presum­ably do); just don't expect the highest
degree of refinement.

While I am digressing I should also
mention that some time ago I audi­tioned a preproduction version of the
new Infinity "Interlude" IL40 floor­standing 3-way system at only $998
the pair and was amazed by the unde­niably "high-end" sound. It was not on
my own turf and far from a complete
laboratory test, so this does not consti­tute a recommendation until they send
me review samples. Even so, you

should be aware of a whole new family
of Infinity and JBL speakers (both are
Harman International brands) repre­senting the long-awaited fruition of
Floyd Toole's guidelines. (See Issue No.
24, p. 13.) The speakers range from
quite inexpensive to very-but-not-il­logically expensive and show some
promise of taking the performance­per-dollar index to a new level, mainly
as a result of a proprietary diaphragm
technology (aluminum sandwiched be­tween two layers of ceramic). Most of
the models are just beginning to show
up in the stores as I write this, so it's
still a waiting game.

In general, new chemistry (i.e., ma­terials science) appears to result in
more immediate improvements in
loudspeaker design than new physics

(i.e., exotic transducer principles). The
good old moving-coil driver with a
better diaphragm looks like the way to
go for a while longer. Having said that,

I still want to call your attention to a
very interesting transducer develop-

ment, the distributed-mode loud­speaker (DML) pioneered by NXT, a

U.K.-based outfit with serious techno-

logical and financial resources (i.e., not

a basement operation run by tweaks).

ISSUE NO. 26 • FALL 2000

9

pdf 9

The DML is simply a flat panel, of

almost any desired size but very stiff,

with a complex bending behavior in

response to electroacoustic excitation.

It produces sound by breaking up into

a large number of seemingly random-

ized vibrational modes over its entire

surface. In other words, it is just the

opposite of the perfect piston, res-

onating in many segments and totally

lacking coherence. The amazing thing

is that it measures flat and sounds

quite accurate. It would appear that a

few resonances are bad but lots of

random resonances are good. That co

Audio Video Multimedia Solutions, 17

Saddleback Court, O'Fallon, MO 63366.

Voice and Fax: (636) 9788173. Email:

[e-mail]. AV1

TruSonic minimonitor/satellite, $900.00

the pair. Tested samples on loan from

manufacturer.

What we have here is the main

building block of a complete surround

system, used for the front left/right as

well as the rear left/right channels. The

centerchannel speaker (AVC Tru-

Sonic, $750.00) is not reviewed here

because it is essentially the same

speaker with dual woofers. (Besides, we

are planning a comprehensive center

channel survey in an upcoming issue.)

Nor is the powered subwoofer AVMS

sent me reviewed here because it is not

the final version that will be sold with

the system. The AV1 is of course the

unit on which the overall quality of the

5.1 (or 5.2) system depends.

For the money, and then some, this

is a very nicely built little speaker. My

review samples came in black oak ve-

neer and appear very professionally fin-

ished. All edges and corners are

rounded, albeit with a small radius.

The back and the bottom are also ve-

neered. The driver complement con-

sists of a 5½inch woofer and a 1inch

herence is under most circumstances a

nonissue has been explained to our

readers a number of times. The DML

is a genuinely different approach to

transducer design which would need

too many pages here to be explained

completely; furthermore, its current

implementations are all nonhifi and

thus not really grist for our mill. There

exists the promise, however, of future

hifi applications, and I find the

promise credible; an experimental car

stereo system with flush DML panels

in the upper dashboard sounded just

great to me in a recent demonstration,

dome tweeter. The woofer, with com-

posite paper cone (arguably still the

best material for large diaphragms),

phase plug, and polymer chassis, is

mounted above the tweeter. The en-

closure is vented to the rear. The silk

dome of the tweeter is slightly recessed

in a shallow hornlike cavity. The

crossover network is secondorder.

My quasianechoic (MLS) mea-

surements yielded very nice frequency

response curves over a large solid angle.

The small separation between the two

drivers and the fairly seamless crossover

made it quite uncritical whether the

calibrated microphone was aimed at

the woofer or the tweeter, or halfway

between the two—the results were al-

most identical. On the axis of the

speaker the tweeter response appeared

fully competitive with highend instal-

lations of conventional design. The

DML is definitely something to be

aware of as the art progresses.

As for the individual reviews that

follow, you know the old boxing adage

that a good big one will always beat a

good little one—but the true aficionado

judges each contender in the context of

the competition. We have a varied as-

sortment of good/big and good/little

here, but is there a weightdivision

champion in the bunch? I think there is

at least one, but you will have to decide

after having digested the facts.

to be slightly elevated in the top oc-

tave, especially since the two octaves

from 2 to 8 kHz are extremely flat:

±1.25 dB. The 8 to 16 kHz octave av-

erages 3 to 4 dB above that reference

level, with a welldamped peak at

13 kHz. Now here's the most inter-

esting part: at 45° off axis (horizon-

tally) the elevated top octave falls into

line, more or less, with the two octaves

below, so that the overall response is

actually flatter than on axis, with the

exception that the curve plummets

above 13 kHz. This behavior indicates

good power response into the room

and relative flexibility in the choice of

listening positions and leftright sepa-

ration. The phase response is wellbe-

haved at all measurement angles

The bass response does not go very

low, as the speaker is designed to work

in conjunction with a subwoofer. The

vented box is tuned to approximately

56 Hz; the maximum output from the

vent is at about 64 Hz. The summed

response of woofer and vent is essen-

tially flat down to an f3 (3 dB point)

of 60 Hz, exactly as given in the specs.

Below the f3 the response rolls off at

the rate of 18 dB per octave (QB3

alignment, most likely). Everything ap-

pears to be very simple and straight-

forward. The impedance of the system

varies from 6.2Ω. to 23Ω in magnitude

10

THE AUDIO CRITIC

pdf 10

and between ±35° in phase, not a dif­ficult load for the amplifier.

Tweeter distortion is negligible, as
it nearly always is, but the woofer is
unhappy with high-level inputs below
the f3, not surprisingly. For example, a
50 Hz tone at a 1-meter SPL of 90 dB
bristles with both even and odd har-

monics. The second harmonic (100
Hz) is at the -26 dB (5%) level, the
third and fourth at -31 dB (2.8%)

EgglestonWorks Loudspeaker Company,
435 South Front Street, Memphis, TN

38103. Voice: [phone] or (877)
344-5378. Fax: [phone]. E-mail:
[e-mail]. com. Web:
www.eggworks.com. Isabel 2-way com­pact loudspeaker system, $2900.00 the
pair. Matching stand, $500.00 the pair.
Tested samples on loan from manufacturer.

As soon as I started unpacking the
Isabels I became aware that I wasn't in
Kansas anymore but in high-end
tweako country.

Inside the shipping carton, this
obelisk-shaped little speaker is spirally
wrapped like a mummy—yards and
yards and yards of clingy wrapping to
protect the high-gloss black finish. Un­like the usual protective bag or sock,
the mummy wrapping is destroyed in
the unpacking process. But that's not
all. I said "little speaker," but this 2­way compact monitor weighs 55
pounds. Yes, with granite side panels, I
kid you not. And that's not all. The
boxy base the speaker needs to be
mounted on is the ultimate embodi­ment of the high-end audiophile creed
of redemption through suffering. The
prescribed mounting procedure re­quires eleven—count them!—steps.
The four bolts that are supposed to
fasten the speaker to the base must be
tightened with various washers from
inside the base cavity. To do that suc­cessfully one must be either a midget

each, and it doesn't stop there. At the
same SPL, however, any fundamental
above 125 Hz is quite clean, with a
THD in the neighborhood of-46 dB
(0.5%). I call that very acceptable in a
5½-inch woofer of nonexotic design.

The sound quality of the AV-1 ex­ceeded my expectations. Subjectively, I
found the speaker to make a better
sonic impression when inserted into my
home theater system than any number

who can crawl all the way into the
hollow base or an orangutan with arms
twice the length of mine.

Get the picture? No you don't. You

are then supposed to fill the base with
sand or lead shot through a special fill
hole (no water or "any other liquid," we
are warned) and screw spikes into the
bottom. I could go on but I don't want
to create the impression that I devel­oped a cultural antagonism to Bill
Eggleston's product before I even tested
it. No, I gave it every chance; it's just
that I come from another world and
my jaw tends to drop when I find my­self in the high-end fantasists' Land of
Oz. I must hasten to add, for the
record, that I callously disregarded the
instructions and simply placed the
speaker without bolts on top of the un­filled and unspiked base, where it re­mained anchored by its own weight,
solid as a rock. I am sure the rhythm­and-pace suffered hugely as a result, but
that was of no consequence to an igno­rant and insensitive tin ear like me.

The basic engineering design of the
Isabel is, on the other hand, extremely
simple. (Let's face it, highly sophisti­cated electroacoustical engineering
seldom goes hand in hand with lead­shot filling.) The granite-reinforced
MDF enclosure—hernia city, as I
said—is vented to the rear because the
front panel is barely large enough for
the 1-inch tweeter and 6-inch
midrange/bass driver. The tweeter is
Dynaudio's Esotar cloth-dome model;

of more expensive units that had resided
there before. Definition, balance, and
ease of dynamics appeared to improve.
On music, in my reference stereo
system, the AV-1 did not quite have the
airy transparency and exquisite detail of
the finest speakers but certainly held its
own against anything costing $450 per
side and then some. There is nothing re­ally faulty or unnatural about its sound.
Definitely recommended.

the 6-incher is from Israel (Morel), fea­turing a big motor with double magnet
and 3-inch voice coil. Expensive dri­vers, that's for sure. The internal wiring
is supplied by Transparent Audio—
most probably high-end fantasy cable
of no special electrical advantage.

The dead giveaway of the high-end
tweako culture is the crossover. The
mid/bass driver is driven naked, di­rectly connected to the amplifier. The
tweeter is driven through a single series
capacitor, in conjunction with a two-re­sistor L-pad. The theory is that the sim­plest possible network will yield the
best possible sound—the purest solu­tion and all that jazz. Unfortunately, it
doesn't quite work that way. Conceptu­ally, a perfectly controlled, smooth
midrange rolloff without a network
could be modeled as a lowpass filter
that sums to unity with a correctly cal­culated highpass filter for the tweeter.

That involves a lot of fancy math not in

evidence in the Isabel. The Morel driver

doesn't conveniently roll off at 6 dB per
octave as claimed by Eggleston—no
mass-controlled diaphragm does—and

thus cannot form a perfect first-order

crossover with the series capacitor on
the tweeter. (Not that a first-order
crossover is ideal in any event, but we
don't need an argument about religion
here.) Bottom line: the 6-inch driver
runs out of steam around 4 kHz and
the tweeter just sort of backs into the
dip there without a really good fit.

My quasi-anechoic (MLS) mea-

12

THE AUDIO CRITIC

pdf 11

surements yielded basically good re­sults in the top two octaves of the
audio spectrum and not so good fur­ther down. In other words, the Esotar
tweeter delivers but the Morel
mid/bass and the crossover show their
shortcomings. The response from 6 to

17 kHz is flat within ± 1 dB and holds
up very nicely even 45° off axis, both
horizontally and vertically. The reso­nant peak of the dome is around

16 kHz. The 6inch driver has a roller
coaster response varying at least ±3 dB
and in some cases, depending on how
the microphone is aimed, as much as

±4 dB. Not very impressive—and con­ducive to doubts about a 3inch voice
coil for a 6inch transducer. Bass re­sponse is naturally not very deep with
the vented box tuned to 100 Hz and
maximum output from the vent at
around 130 Hz. Eggleston claims —3
dB at 60 Hz; I don't know how they
figured that but I'll let it be. In any

Sonigistix Incorporated, 101 South Spring

Street, Suite 230, Little Rock, AR 72201.

Voice: (877) PC AUDIO (toll free). Web:

www.monsoonpower.com. MM1000 multi-

media speaker system, $229.00. Tested

samples on loan from manufacturer.

Some time ago I received a phone
call from David Clark, the designer of
this speaker system for computers. (His
company is DLC Design; Sonigistix is
one of his ancillary enterprises.) He told
me he would send me the $229 Mon­soon MM1000 for testing and asked
me to judge its nearfield sound, when
properly deployed in a desktop com­puter setup, as if I were evaluating a
costnoobject homeaudio model from
my normal listening position.

The man has cojones, I said to my­self. But wait! It turned out he was
basically right. I am not saying that
my Waveform Mach 17 reference
speakers have been equaled or bested.
I am saying that the sound of the

case, a subwoofer is indicated for full
range response.

Tweeter distortion is very low, as it
nearly always is; at a 1meter SPL of 90
dB, normalized to 7 kHz, it remains
between 0.05% and 0.18% over more
than two octaves. The mid/bass distor­tion at the same SPL, normalized to
500 Hz, is in the 0.16% to 0.56%
range down to about 110 Hz, rising
rapidly to 10% at 32 Hz. All in all,
these are very respectable figures. Im­pedance, above the tuned box range,
varies from 6.5Ω to 12Ω in magnitude
and from 24° to +18° in phase, a very
easy load for the amplifier.

Despite my essentially negative reac­tion to the basic gestalt of the Isabel, I
am not about to characterize its sound as
bad—far from it. If you are used to
mediocre speakers, the Isabel will sound
absolutely gorgeous to you. Its excellent

tweeter makes the allimportant upper

midrange and lower treble sound sweet,

Monsoon, as experi­enced with my ears
about 18 inches from
the satellites, is of the
highest fidelity and not
an obvious comedown

after listening to any
highend speaker in a
conventional setup.
More about that below.

The MM1000 system consists of
three pieces: two slim panels, each
only slightly larger than a businesssize
envelope, and a small cube, less than a
foot in each dimension. The panels are
planar magnetic transducers—mini
Magneplanars so to speak—and the
cube houses a 5¼-inch woofer plus all

the electronics and controls. The box

is tuned to 53 Hz (manufacturer's
spec). There's also a tiny hard-wired
remote volume/mute control. The
electronics include two 12.5-watt am­plifiers for the panel speakers, a 25­watt amplifier for the woofer, and a

smooth, musical, and nonfatiguing at all
levels. If, on the other hand, you are
used to the finest speakers, as I am and
my associates are, the Isabel won't quite
make the grade. There is something
lacking in transparency, definition of de­tail, and rendition of space when judged
against the best. For example, the

JosephAudio RM7si "Signature" (see

Issue No. 25) is superior in all those re­spects at a little more than half the price

(exactly half if you count the Isabel's
stands). It's a classic case of creative en­gineering versus high-end chic. The
money at Eggleston went into image­oriented attributes, at JosephAudio into
performance essentials.

I must admit, however, that when
the Isabels are sitting there on their
stands, gleaming in high-gloss black
from obelisk peak to floor, they do
have that "Hey, what's that cool setup

you have there?" quality—if that's

what you're looking for.

200 Hz third-order active crossover.
The controls on the woofer enclosure

adjust overall bass level, volume, and
on/off 6 dB bass boost at 55 Hz.

That's a lot of stuff for $229 at retail,

even if none of it qualifies as "audio­phile" grade. Sonigistix's parts buyer
must be quite resourceful. (Inciden­tally, the Monsoon MM-1000 is in­cluded in some Micron Millennia

computer packages.)

My standard methods of loud-

speaker measurement are not relevant
to this type of system, which is in­tended to operate in a confined desktop

ISSUE NO. 26 • FALL 2000

13

pdf 12

environment with hardly any distance
between the transducers and the lis­tener. The 1-meter quasi-anechoic

(MLS) response of an individual MM-

1000 planar magnetic satellite shows a
steady decline of approximately 6 dB
per octave throughout its range, and
that's certainly not what the ear per­ceives at the intended listening distance
with a reflective desktop interposed.
David Clark is one of the grand masters
of car-sound engineering, and it ap­pears that the same sort of perceptual
response massaging took place here as
is required for the special acoustics of
an automobile interior. The woofer, on
the other hand, is a straightforward
vented-box design with essentially flat
response down to an f3 (-3 dB point) of
52 Hz, according to my nearfield mea­surement of the summed driver and
vent. Maybe that's what the specs mean
by "tuned to 53 Hz" because the null in
the output of the driver—what I call
the "tuned to" frequency—is 47 Hz in
my sample. Small quibble—52, 53, 47,
whatever—it isn't 27 and it can't be. It's
just a very nice small woofer. Distortion
is quite low; at any frequency above f

3

Revel "Salon"

Revel Corporation, a Harman International
Company, 8500 Balboa Boulevard, North­ridge, CA 91329. Voice: [phone].
Fax: [phone].
E-mail: [e-mail]. Web:
www.revelspeakers.com. "Salon" floor­standing 4-way loudspeaker system,
$14,400.00 or $15,500.00 the pair,
depending on finish. Tested samples on
loan from manufacturer.

This is a tough one. Kevin Voecks,
Snell's former ace and now chief de­signer of Harman International's ultra­high-end Revel division, had told me
before the Revel "Salon" made its debut
that it would be "the world's best
speaker." I always had, and still have,
the highest respect for Kevin's work but
I can't quite go that far in my ranking

and any SPL even momentarily toler­able at the normal listening position,
THD remains below 1.5%, in most
cases well below. The planar satellites
stay below 0.5% THD at any fre­quency within their range and any SPL
that the 12.5-watt amplifiers can sus­tain (at some point buzzing ensues, but
only on steady-state signals, not on
music). Tone bursts of any frequency
are reproduced without ringing. Thus,
the system can be declared to have
some pretty decent measurable perfor­mance characteristics, even if one disre­gards the price—but is that what makes
it sound good? I'm sure that's part of it,
but the careful tailoring of the satellite
panels' response to the specific listening
environment is probably the most im­portant factor. I can't be certain.

I'm on much firmer ground when I
tell you what I hear when I insert a well­recorded music CD into my computer's
CD/DVD tray and set the volume to
the subjectively most convincing level.
Are there any obvious colorations? No.
Are all the instruments and voices nat­ural and clear? Yes. Are the three-di­mensional characteristics of the

of the Salon. Indeed, I am still inclined
to regard the aging Snell Acoustics Type

A as Kevin's masterpiece. Not that the

Salon is anything less than a very fine

loudspeaker system, exemplifying some

of today's most sophisticated design ap­proaches. There are a few things about
it, however, that I like a lot less than I

expected to.

To begin with, the Salon is unnec-

essarily awkward physically. Each

speaker system in its shipping carton
weighs 240 pounds. I am pretty inge­nious when it comes to moving huge
packages around without lifting them

(pushing on a dolly, sliding on a

carpet, tumbling the monsters end
over end, etc.), but this one gave me a
terrible time. The speaker incorporates
a separate main enclosure, a separate

recording space and the deployment of
the performers audible? Definitely. Are
the dynamics restricted? Not at all. If
the recorded sound is especially beau­tiful—shimmering strings, aerated
woodwinds, golden brasses—does that
special thrilling quality come through?
It does. Quite an amazing product.

Even so, don't misunderstand me.
The Monsoon MM-1000 is not the
$229 solution to the problem of finding
a reasonably priced reference-quality
speaker system for your listening room.
You will not like it if you insert it into
your regular stereo system and listen to
it from your favorite armchair. It is de­signed for a highly specialized applica­tion, just like a pair of headphones. In
that application, I believe it will satisfy
the most demanding users. What I ad­mire about it especially is that it is such
an elegant piece of engineering, in the
true sense of the word. Engineering, to
me, means the straightest line to the
simplest correct solution. You think a
$156,000 Wilson Audio speaker system
is engineering? No, it's an undisciplined
exercise in excess, a Caligula's feast. The
Monsoon MM-1000 is engineering.

tweeter/midrange enclosure, and two
huge detachable side panels, so there is
really no reason other than economy
(or support of hernia surgeons) to ship
it all screwed together; it could be
neatly broken down into manageable
modules. It's a no-brainer. That the
dealer or the end user (you or I)
couldn't assemble the modules as
solidly as the factory is a tweako high­end bugaboo—and not the only one I
discerned in the Salon. Another is wire
fastener/connector phobia (i.e., solder
fetishism), which I discovered when I
had to replace both tweeters, front and
rear, in my left channel. A momen­tarily interrupted ground connection
somewhere in my A/B lash-up had
blown both units, raising the question
of excessive fragility (but that's not my

14

THE AUDIO CRITIC

pdf 13