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This article by Gary Beard originally ran in Issue 5, February/March 2003, so while we call this section "New Old Stock - Articles from Our Days in Print" you are also going to see some articles from our early days of going online. A Lighthearted Look at the Lightweight ChAMP of the World: The Zero-Hysteresis... Read More »

This article by Dr. David Robinson originally ran in Issue 5, February/March 2003, so while we call this section "New Old Stock - Articles from Our Days in Print" you are also going to see some articles from our early days of going online. After All These Years... You know, it's strange. In PF's "Ghost of... Read More »

Black on Black Red October with Western Electric 300Bs and U52s ampsandsound continues to surprise and delight me. Last year it was with the Rockwell, which showed me what a DHT amplifier built around a less well known tube could do. ampsandsound also rolled out the new Agartha and converted their entire lineup (with the... Read More »

The Usher R-1.5 stereo amplifier is built like a tank. Its utilitarian industrial design bears a striking resemblance to the Threshold 300 Stasis designed by audio guru Nelson Pass, which should come as no surprise. In 1972 Usher Audio's owner and head engineer Lien-Shui Tsai built the first Usher R-1.5 amplifier as a copy of... Read More »

Prestigious power, glorious grace, and terrific transparency. Review By Dwayne Carter With this article, Positive Feedback continues its content-sharing relationship with Enjoy the Music where Dwayne Carter shares his thoughts on the Pass Labs X260.8 Monoblock Amplifier. Dr. David W. Robinson, Editor-in-Chief Pass Laboratories, Inc., is a name that most audiophiles utter, after describing a product that comes... Read More »

Each Zion weighs nearly 75 pounds As I sat in my listening room with the lights dimmed, I began to take a journey. My journey started with the Red Hot Chili Peppers' Unlimited Love, and I then found myself listening to Mark Knopfler's Down the Road Wherever. After awhile I ventured onto St Vincent's MasSeduction, with a short... Read More »

The brilliant late audiophile, J. Gordon Holt, once wrote that if the purchaser of a fine system was torn between buying a great pair of speakers or a great amp, one should choose a great amp and a good pair of speakers that fit your basic needs. He commented that he had heard numerous systems... Read More »

Octave Audio is a German company founded in 1968 by Karl Heinz Hofmann; initially it produced transformers. In 2000, his son, Andreas Hofmann took over the business, and from then on it has been called Octave Audio. We are testing the top Jubilee system. Although the first Octave amplifiers were made in 1975, and since... Read More »

A while back Triode Lab's Frank Ng asked me if I would like to listen to a pair of his very exclusive—only four pairs are scheduled to be made—cost-no-object, limited edition Triode Lab 2A3 parallel single-ended-triode (P-SET) RSR monaural amplifiers, that incorporated all of Frank's design insights for state-of-art high-performance SET amplifiers (HERE, scroll down... Read More »

Every once in a while, a piece of gear comes into the listening room that immediately makes its presence known as something special, something just a bit elevated from the other shiny boxes that make our hearts beat faster. Such was the case with arrival of the Parasound JC 5. However, in all fairness, I... Read More »

Greetings friends, I hope you are doing well. I know there's a lot of Leben HiFi Stereo Company fans out there, and today I want to tell the Leben fans in the audience about the rather rare and exotic Leben CS-300F vacuum tube integrated amplifier (photo below). Over the years, I've either owned or written... Read More »

Justin Weber, the owner of ampsandsound, has been on a roll lately. 2021 has been a big year for him. He introduced two new headphone amplifiers (The Rockwell, and the Agartha), had two of his products put on the 2021 Stereophile recommended component list, and introduced a new set of mono block speaker amplifiers known... Read More »

Prologue I've had the Magneplanar LRS loudspeakers in my daily-listening system for over two years now; every time I swap them out for something else, they invariably seem to find their way back in. And that's despite being devilishly difficult loudspeakers to drive; their 2.8 ohm impedance (almost constant across the entire audio spectrum) presents... Read More »

I was first introduced to Rotel products back in the mid 70s when I bought my first Rotel turntable from the Stereo Buff in Springfield, MO. I was a poor college student, and they had very affordable prices. I ran that table through a Yamaha integrated amp along with a Aiwa cassette player and Genesis... Read More »

I first came across Triangle Art around 7 years ago while scrolling through a familiar webzine. It was fortuitous as I was getting back into vinyl after abandoning it decades ago, leaving behind my thoroughly thrashed Garrard that carried me valiantly through my childhood and teens. What caught my eye in that webzine's ad was... Read More »

Whether musing about the greater understanding the Belle II particle physics experiment at KEK may bring to questions around Standard Model predictions, dark matter, and the asymmetry of matter and antimatter in the universe, or the exciting themes of parallel universes, the multiverse, and time travel that we see imaginatively explored in science fiction, physics... Read More »

All Creatures Great and Small As a mid-50s baby boomer, I face the daunting but simultaneously liberating task of deciding which of my possessions to keep and which to jettison. For most of my adult life, I have chosen smaller, carefully curated living spaces over "mcmansions," a preference more and more Americans have embraced, young and... Read More »

For the last five weeks, I have had the opportunity to sit back and enjoy one of the best amplifiers I have heard in a long time. It all started when I got a phone call from the owner of ampsandsound, he said he had something new and special in the works. I was intrigued,... Read More »

It's funny. As we move up through the echelons of the audio world, the pieces that produce our sonic magic become more and more singular in function. The jobs which devices perform move into larger and more separate boxes as if no component can do two things well at once. Stay in your lane. In... Read More »