By Juan C. Ayllon
CHICAGO -- I searched the halls of Audio Expo North America (AXPONA) 2014 for a Digital to Analog Converter (DAC) to link to a dedicated computer server for music playback (you can read about it here) and, fast forward to last fall, I had a world class loudspeaker and component designer I’d met there, upgrading my converter in my living room.
At AXPONA 2017, Lampizator’s president, Lukasz Fikus, introduced me to his good buddy, Sam Wisniewski, maker of Destination Audio horn loudspeakers, preamps and amplifiers. I interviewed him, reviewed his tube preamplifier and had him over for dinner. We became fast friends, spending a lot of time when he was in Chicago, and that’s when Sam decided to do it: with Lukasz’ blessing, he would modify my Lampizator Lite 7 DAC -- and my warranty would remain intact. That was a major coup for me.
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By Juan C. Ayllon
SCHAUMBURG, IL -- I was soldering a pair of high end Mundorf capacitors into my digital to analog converter several months ago, when the scent of the molten silver alloy took me back to 1972. Then 11, I watched with wonder as my late father, solder iron in hand, fused components onto a circuit board of a HeathKit receiver. It was meticulous, but rewarding, producing wondrous music in our living room for years. He was an engineer, after all. That HeathKit, anchored by a Garrard turntable, introduced me to FM radio and instilled a love for music and its reproduction. The editor-in-chief of Stereophile Magazine, John Atkinson, set up his first stereo 50 years ago and, on the weekend of April 13th through the 15th, will serve as keynote at AXPONA (Audio Expo North America), where he will speak on the evolution of his system and tastes, as well as today’s high fidelity audio market. His presentation is one of many attractions bringing together dealers, distributors and manufacturers with thousands of audio engineers, musicians and audio lovers alike in this, the marquee U.S. high end audio show.
By Juan C. Ayllon
I read that Mark Levinson first introduced a preamp without tone controls in the 1970s, but suspect it was a paramour, tired of being ignored while he adjusted knobs, who was the prime mover. No doubt, this backfired. Like the twitching of a squirrel’s tail, since then audiophiles worldwide have obsessed over ways to tweak and improve their sound systems’ performance.
My latest tweak came about after I re-read the owner’s manual of my Lampizator Lite 7 Digital to Analog Converter (DAC). A passage eschewed the use of cones to isolate this sensitive device from vibration (which, it is argued, causes distortion and smearing of the audio signal) and suggested, instead, that anti-vibration feet with ceramic ball bearings were best.
By Juan C. Ayllon
For some, the idea of using a specialty electrical fuse to improve the performance of a stereo is preposterous and on the level of wearing a tin foil hat to protect one’s brain from mind reading, mind control and electromagnetic fields.
Recently, Bernd Ahne of the Berlin, Germany-based firm, Hifi Tuning, challenged my friend, Barry, an electrical engineer and one of my fellow administrators at The Audiophile Group on Facebook, to simply try some of his audiophile fuses and make his own conclusions. |
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