For me, the end of a year is always a time for reflection upon the events of the past year, as well as doing a bit of daydreaming about what the coming year might hold!
2022 Highlights!
2022 actually felt like life was almost starting to get back to normal, with a waning coronavirus pandemic, supply chain issues receding somewhat, travel opening up a little again, and the return of hi-fi shows like the Pacific Audio Fest.
The Pacific Audio Fest was a lot of fun, and if you missed my coverage of it, you can catch up on it HERE.
I was impressed by the audio systems / components I heard at the Pacific Audio Fest this year, as it seemed like a lot more audio companies were striving for a more musically natural sound quality than was evident in the past hi-fi shows I've gone to.
When it comes to advancements in high-fidelity sound quality, I've found that it doesn't always appear in the ways you think it might.
I suppose I've always been a bit of an audio anachronist, with a love of vintage hi-fi kit like that from Altec, McIntosh, Garrard, Thorens, Ortofon, and Western Electric, for example.
The best of vintage hi-fi kit captured a type of high-fidelity presentation of the music that I found to be very appealing, with its musically natural playback of a wide variety of musical styles with varying recorded fidelity, that just made listening to music a lot of fun for me.
However, the big story for me this year was digital audio. I know, that's blasphemy for an audio anachronist! Or maybe not ...
The Genesis Advanced Technologies room R2R demonstration.
If you are wondering what the sources with the highest sound quality are, it's quality reel-to-reel machines playing back master tapes, as seen in the photo above from the Pacific Audio Fest. Compared to fine vinyl playback, R2Rs playing master tapes were clearly at another level, as one would expect.
However, one of the things that I found surprising and interesting at the Pacific Audio Fest, was industry authorities on master tapes and R2R saying that high-quality digital transfers from master tapes have essentially become sonically indistinguishable from the master tapes themselves, when played back on studio quality digital kit.
Not only were those sorts of comments from industry experts surprising for me hear, I have to say I find the claim that digital transfers are reaching parity with their analog master tape sources makes me very hopeful about our musical future, but perhaps not entirely in the way you might think.
I found all that analog-digital talk to be very interesting, but for most hi-fi enthusiasts that ranking is almost meaningless, given that very few of us have access to music libraries full of all the master tapes in existence, or even 'perfect' digital transfers of them, and the expensive and esoteric dedicated audio equipment necessary to play them back at their best.
The reality is that for most of us, LPs - and gasp, actually CDs - are still on top for readily available high-fidelity source media.
Martin Taylor's Spirit of Django, Last Train to Hauteville CD.
I know, to include CDs in that sentence seems crazy, but what I'm finding is that the playback kit for CDs has advanced so much since I emerged from my vintage analog cave of years past, that the gap in performance has really narrowed between playing back LPs and CDs over the last few years.
I think LPs still have the lead in outright performance, but it's not by as much as you might think.
From a music lovers perspective I give CDs my top vote over LPs in 2022, simply for the reason that there is a very limited amount of good music available on LPs compared to CDs. The same can be said for high-resolution digital transfers from master tapes, which are mostly limited to a relatively small number of audiophile favorites from the magnetic era of recording.
The best recorded LPs from the magic magnetic era of recording are pretty special indeed, but if one narrows their listening to just those albums, then you end up missing most of the great recorded musical performances that this hobby can deliver.
As I have found out, on CD there are vast offerings of great musical performances that span the acoustic (1877 to 1925), electric (1925 to 1945), magnetic monaural (1945 to 1957), magnetic stereo (1957 to 1975), and digital (1975 to today) eras of the recordings arts.
The abundance of riches available on CD from all the eras of recording is staggering, and exploring the great recorded musical performances from all those eras of our recorded music canon has rekindled my passion for my hi-fi hobby significantly in 2022.
Audio Note (UK) CD 4.1x 'Level 3' CD player. Photo courtesy of Audio Note (UK).
I still love the great LPs, but my future is looking increasingly digital due to the incredible riches of recorded musical performances available on CD.
While digital audio hasn't really figured into my life to any extent in the past, that has changed in a big way over the last few years due to the arrival of the Audio Note (UK) CD 4.1x CD player (HERE), which I nominated as one of my three 2022 picks for the 19th Annual Positive Feedback Writers' Choice Awards (HERE).
Audio Note (UK) CD 4.1x Red Book CD player in action with my Westminster loudspeakers.
Along with my newly realized appreciation for CD, another trend that has emerged in parallel in 2022 was that of hi-fi kit that is capable of playing back almost any recording from any era, of any recorded fidelity, in truly impressive high-fidelity fashion.
When I think back to the mid 1970s, in hi-fi we had become obsessed with the thrill of hearing the best current recordings of that time at loud volumes, like the Mannheim Steamroller Fresh Aire albums available from American Gramophone Records, for example. We'd put on those albums, crank up the volume, and be amazed at the sound quality and visceral impact we heard from the best hi-fi kit of that time. It was fun!
Then as the 'high-end' audio era was ushered in, audio writers became preoccupied with all the new information they were hearing in recordings, but mostly in terms of visuospatial recording artifacts like soundstage and imaging, etc., that the stereo period of the magic magnetic era of recording brought to us.
One issue that arose during that audio era was that audio companies efforts to maximize visuospatial recording artifacts from stereo magnetic recordings skewed the performance of those systems / components so that they sounded miserable on anything but the finest magnetic era recordings. That era of hi-fi was not so fun.
As I mentioned in my 2022 Pacific Audio Fest show coverage, it seems as if audio companies are moving away from that limiting hi-fi paradigm, and there's lots more audio kit that sounds musically natural, and can play audiophile favorites in the extreme fidelity they are capable of delivering, while at the same time are also capable of turning even low-fi or mid-fi recordings into amazing musical experiences.
So it appears that the current trend is that the best audio systems are moving in a direction where they can provide amazing listening experiences from pretty much any album of any fidelity, from the very beginning of the recording arts in 1877, until now.
Audio kit continues to evolve in performance as we move into 2023, and I really like the direction things are going in these days.
About 2023 ...
First of all, let me say I have really appreciated the survey approach that Peter Qvortrup has allowed me to take with his Audio Note (UK) kit, which has really been illuminating on a number of levels.
I'll be sad to see the Audio Note (UK) kit that I have been writing about over the last few years depart, but the good news is that there will be more to come for 2023!
Audio Note (UK) CD 5.1x CD player.
In keeping with the digital vein I've been mining, Peter is going to send me one of his Audio Note (UK) 5.1x CD players to hear.
Here's what the Audio Note (UK) website says about their top one-box CD player:
"The CD5.1x is a completely new machine which elevates the one-box CD player to hitherto unknown levels of performance. Never before has it been possible to achieve such quite astonishingly superior levels of digital replay from a single chassis, integrated design."
"The CD5.1x features the top-loading Philips CD Pro 2LF CD mechanism, which we custom modify and improve in-house, bringing the performance of this already excellent mechanism up to a standard that is truly in a class of its own."
"The power supply is a valve rectified and regulated design, using a 6X5 and ECL82. The analogue output stage uses a combination of 1 x 5814a and 1 x 5687WB valves, feeding a pair of our world-renowned output transformers, using SHiB cores with copper primaries and secondaries."
"A mix of our own 0.5 Watt and 1 Watt non- magnetic Tantalum resistors are used in all critical areas, as are our own custom Audio Note (UK) foil / Mylar and electrolytic capacitors. The CD5.1x uses our own in-house designed and manufactured digital transformers; silver wound for the Transport side and copper wound for the DAC side."
It'll be a lot of fun to hear the CD 5.1x, and I can't help but wonder how close the CD 5.1x will come to the analogue front end combo of the Audio Note (UK) Io I MC phono cartridge, AN-S4 SUT, and AN-V silver interconnects that I've been listening to on my turntable, which is the most musically satisfying cartridge & SUT combo I've heard to date (more HERE).
If you remember from the pre-pandemic period, Peter and I were going to get together and hash out an updated audio reviewing vocabulary, as the 'audiophile era' of reviewing vocabulary is getting tired and dated, and is not all that useful for the latest performance trends in audio.
Due to the onset of the pandemic, we never were able to do that, but Peter and I are talking about making it happen in 2023!
Audio Note (UK) AN-E loudspeaker.
Also in 2023 I may be writing about the larger full-range Audio Note (UK) AN-E loudspeaker (above), so that should be fun.
Also in the works for the first quarter of 2023 are Mactone components from Japan. Mactone is an established and revered brand in Japan, but you don't hear as much about them in the USA.
I'm really looking forward to telling you more about Mactone in the not too distant future, as the review samples arrive in the next few weeks. More to come!
Not everything coming up is audio exotica, as there will be more about affordable high-performance DIY kit as told to us by Nelson Pass. I'm really looking forward to hearing what Nelson has to say!
I'm already thinking about the Pacific Audio Fest for 2023, and be sure to mark it on your calendar. I hope to see you there!
Like much of the USA, here in Washington State where I live, we have been hit hard by winter storms, and the snow has been piling up. Go outside? Forget it, unless you are talking ice skating or skiing!
Not being an ice skater or skier any more, I now call the snow covered landscapes from winter storms 'hi-fi weather', as it's a great opportunity to catch up on indoor hi-fi fun and games.
Mother Nature can be such a tease!
As always, thanks for stopping by, and may the tone be with you!
