Welcome to The Abso!ute Sound online! We explore music and the reproduction of music in the home. We believe that the sound of music, unamplified, occurring in a real space is a philosophic absolute against which we may judge the performance of devices designed to reproduce music. Our goal is to provide the resources consumers need to judge how a component's sound either honors or departs from the music's truth, and to make sound purchasing decisions that maximize their experience of reproduced sound. Below is our Issue 173, August 2007 contents and editorial.

 

Read this edition's editorial by clicking here.

 

Articles & Reviews In This Issue
6 Letters

14 From The Editor

16 Industry News

20 Future TAS

24 Start Me Up
Robert Harley listens to the $595 Focal 706V loudspeaker and $900 B&W CM1.

32 iTAS
The Fatman brings tube amplification to the iPod. Chris Martens reports.

 

Equipment Reports
45 2007 Golden Ear Award
Our editors and senior writers honor their favorite audio components.

34 Absolute Analog
Graham B-44 Phantom tonearm
Wayne Garcia looks at a contender for the state-of-the-art in tonearms.

40 Air Tight PC-1 phono cartridge
Jonathan Valin on what may be the best moving coil yet.

67 Belles Soloist 3 preamplifier and Soloist 5 power amplifier
Good things come in these small packages from Belles, says Neil Gader.

70 Vincent Audio SA-31 preamplifier and SP-3312 power amplifier 
This marriage of German engineering and Chinese manufacturing deivers high value, says Chris Martens.

77 conrad-johnson CA-200 control amplifier
Don’t call the CA200 an "integrated amplifier." Neil Gader tells you why you’ve been warned.

102 Italian Masterpiece: Sonus Faber Elipisa loudspeaker
Wayne Garcia on the latest creation from the famed Italian speaker-maker Franco Serbin

81 Linn Majik System
Chris Martens reports on a complete music system from Scotland's venerable Linn Hi-Fi.

86 Nagra Pyramid power amplifier
What looks like the Luxor hotel and sounds as luxurious as it looks? Jacob Heilbrunn has your answer.

90 Furutech Pure Transmission system
Chris Martens on a variety of intriguing interconnects, speaker cables, and AC-conditioning products.

 

The Cutting Edge
94 Audio Space Reference 2 preamp
A balanced, full-function preamplifier with 300B tubes? That would be your basic Audio Space Ref 2, says JV.

111 HP's Workshop
Harry Pearson's 2007 Golden Ear Awards.

 

Music
125 Music Golden Ear Awards

141 Rock Etc

155 Classical

158 Jazz

160 Why the lower case "c" and "j" in conrad-johnson? Neil Gader interviews c-j founder Lew Johnson and gets the answer.

 

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