Some costly 'jitter-busters' are less than successful at cleaning up the digits, so can this one justify its high price tag? Paul Miller crunches the numbers...
Jan 1998
If the market for two-box CD transport/outboard DAC combinations has waned in recent years, then the same cannot be said for those little black boxes conceived to nestle in between. I refer, of course, to the add-on accessories often rather optimistically promoted as 'Jitter Busters'. Typically, these rely on a Crystal interface chip and one or two PLLs to suppress jitter while recovering the data clock.
Autobiography, revolution, angst and transcendence: music was never the same after the scandalous premiere of the Second Quartet. Peter Quantrill explores its history
There are pieces where you can hear the world - of music, of art, of human history - turning on its axis. Arnold Schoenberg's Second Quartet is one of those pieces. At the premiere in December 1908, one newspaper critic sensed and feared this (r)evolution in sound, saying it was 'like a convocation of all the neighbourhood cats'.
With recent data suggesting the vinyl revival is beng solely spearheaded by Taylor Swift, plus environmental concerns about LP production, Steve Harris wonders where it goes next
How much longer can it last? In America, as here, vinyl sales have been growing year on year for nearly two decades. But a 2022 slowdown in growth set some commentators suggesting that the vinyl boom could soon be over.
A century-old legend of suspicion and exceptionalism continues to haunt attitudes towards English music, says Peter Quantrill - and it appears that it's the English who won't let it go
The spring cleaning of schedules at BBC Radio 3 took its listeners by surprise, to judge from comments both within and outside the media. The 'shop window' of Record Review on a Saturday morning moved to the first floor, in the afternoon. The spoken-word programmes were shunted off to Radio 4, while Friday Night Is Music Night has resurrected an antique Radio 2 title. The channel's once-serious coverage of new and contemporary music is almost entirely effaced under the controllership of Sam Jackson, who formerly headed up Classic FM.
Silicon chips have been so successful there's a valley named after them, but new materials that are better suited to high-power applications are ready to replace them, says Jim Lesurf
Reading the review of HiFi Rose's RA280 amplifier had me thinking about the ways in which technology has developed over the decades. Modern audio enthusiasts are fairly familiar with the choice between 'solid-state' electronics and 'valve' (or 'tube' for our American colleagues). However, the full story of the choice of devices used for audio and radio kit has shown far more evolution over the decades - and is probably now evolving again.
There's no one-size-fits-all approach to high-quality music playback, says Barry Willis - and it's emotional engagement that's important, not the technology which is used to create it
This past winter I visited a new audio dealer, a fellow I'll call 'Colin'. He's a high-end hobbyist working from his home - a time-honoured practice and an increasingly prevalent one in the Internet age. His large demo room was festooned with recent examples of quality gear from multiple brands, but most conspicuous were the many brightly coloured cables connecting them - the work, he said, of a friend who had spent years researching the behaviours of such cables.
Supporters of Evovinyl, a sugar cane-based alternative to PVC, claim it can be used to make records that sound as good as 'the real thing'. For Barry Fox, the proof will be in the pudding
It's hard to be green and analogue. Manufacturing vinyl LPs consumes a lot of fossil fuel and heat energy - one estimate puts the production of PVC (polyvinyl chloride) at 30,000 tonnes per year for use by the global vinyl industry. So, it was big news when British speaker company PMC recently announced investment in UK company Evolution Music Ltd and Evovinyl, an alternative to PVC made from natural sugar cane.
The Milwaukee trio's 1983 self-titled debut album 'reinvented rock 'n' roll', according to one critic, and has since sold over one million copies despite never troubling the charts. Its secret? Brilliantly simple songs and the evergreen theme of teenage angst
If you wanted to fill a compilation album with songs of adolescent angst, you wouldn't have too much trouble, particularly if you're a fan of guitar-based rock music. Call it 'Teenage Kicks', start with the title track, and off you go. But what would you pick for its album equivalent? Is there a long-playing record that sums up the experience of being a disaffected, angry and unloved teenager in the modern world, particularly the male of that particular species?
Chord's first new integrated amplifier in some seven years combines no fewer than four switchmode PSUs and 125W of stereo power into a very stylish Ultima 3 preamp chassis
First seen in 2023 at Munich's High-End show, Chord Electronics' Ultima Integrated is steadily finding its way into selected hi-fi emporia. Based around John Franks' tried-and-tested amplifier architecture [see PM's boxout, p65], it's the entry point to the Ultima family, whose rollout began with the flagship Ultima monoblocks .
Chord's first new integrated amplifier in some seven years combines no fewer than four switchmode PSUs and 125W of stereo power into a very stylish Ultima 3 preamp chassis
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