The Price

$495

The Verdict

His new speakers are at least as visually striking as his Sorapot tea kettle. The shiny cones are handmade from pure white ceramic, cork and light birch, with an included amplifier (with toaster-style volume control) made of sheet metal and cast iron. In case its $500 price didn't tip you off, this set is in no way a mass-market product, instead designed for that small minority of intense audiophiles who need great sound even at their computers.

Both the ceramic and cork are "dead" in terms of vibration, unlike the more typical (and significantly cheaper) metal construction of other speakers, so the speakers themselves add no sound to your music. The stands, a Baltic birch plywood, hold the horns relatively firmly in place (they're sturdier than they seem in pictures) and look quite nice.

Within Roth's creation lie high-end components. There are custom-made Tangbanb 4-inch drivers, the only of their type in this tiny size, rated at 15W per channel. The amplifier, based on the well-regarded Tripath 2024 T-Amp, features gold-plated binding posts and one 1/8" input (though he includes an interconnect for RCA cables). Also included in the package is 16-gauge oxygen-free copper speaker cables (the kind with banana plugs). There's no subwoofer—the set is trying to emphasize the mids, and to an audiophile like Joey, thumping bass of the sort you see in 2.1 sets throws off the balance of the music.

If your eyes just glazed over reading that last paragraph, you're among the 99% of people for whom this speaker set is over the top. Don't worry about it—I'm in that group too. My high-quality MP3s played through a Zune HD sounded lifeless and dull, and the lack of a dedicated subwoofer was all too noticeable with the less-than-perfect encoding.

But when I got into the sweet spot, and listened to Joey's high-resolution audio files, connected via his computer, the experience changed completely. The sound was far more subtle and nuanced than what I'm used to—I could even hear some vinyl impurity on the files he'd encoded from old records. It was almost off-putting at first, but it came with a warmth I didn't know was there. Mids were clearer than I've ever heard them, giving more emphasis to vocal harmonies, guitar and piano, and the overpowering highs and lows in lower-end speakers were noticeably downplayed.

The hardware isn't perfect; it's handmade—apparently the ceramic cones are difficult to mass-produce—and sometimes it feels like it. The amplifier in particular looks a little messy with all the cables sitting out in the open (though Joey made it clear that that was a design choice) and the volume toggle feels a bit flimsy. It's not a plug-it-in-and-forget-it system, either: The EQ sometimes needs tweaking, and the gear is a bit delicate, so you want to take care with how you set it up. Still, the speakers themselves are heavy enough to stay put in their wooden cradles, and the 15 watts per channel were enough to fill the room with sweet music.

The question is, will crazy audiophiles go for a low-power, lower-end (for them, at least) 2.0 system? They're certainly not made for household music listening, and they cost five times more than a typical 2.1 computer set. I can't think of a better option for audio nerds who spend a lot of time at their computers, but I still think this will remain quite a niche product. If you're in that niche (and have $500 to spare), they're are available for pre-order now from Joey's site, in a limited first run of 200 that will arrive in early November.

Smaller than expected and gorgeous in person

Delivers audiophile-quality sound

Cheap for audiophiles, very expensive for the rest of us

Hardware feels a bit delicate (especially the plywood stand) and amplifier is a little finicky

Limited power

Audio nerds had suspected (or at least hoped) the PS3 Slim would offer such support. We've not yet confirmed it ourselves, but Japanese Tech News site, AV Watch, makes it sound like a done deal.

The HDMI chip used by existing fatty PS3 models doesn't support the relatively recent Dolby TrueHD and DTS-HD MA codecs. This forces them to decode internally, and send the audio to your receiver via LPCM.

Bottom line: Great news if you use the PS3 for watching Blu-ray movies with a high-end surround sound system. If not, just nod and know that this is a good thing.

Wanna know more? Check out Giz Explains: Dolby, DTS and Home Theater Audio Codec Confusion. [AV Watch (translated) via Engadget]

"I just want our product to sound better," Iovine said. "The record business committed many, many mistakes in the last 10 years, and I'm right in there. One of them was letting its product get degraded. It's one thing to let it get stolen, it's another to allow it to be degraded because then you really don't have a chance...video games and TV quality are getting better and the quality of our work is getting lower. If that happens, then music will become disposable. That's something we can fix."

Their goal, it seems, is to educate the iPod-owning masses about what music should sound like so that we may rise up and demand this sort of quality in the future. Details on the product line have not been released, but we do know that they will feature a premium price tag—a major barrier for adoption beyond the hardcore audiophile. While I agree that the public puts up with sub-standard sound quality in many cases, the best way to make a technology mainstream is to make it affordable. [CNET via BusinessWeek]

My objective in experiencing a full-bore audiophile's listening room was not to try to call him on whether or not he or I could hear the difference in speaker cables composed of wire hangers or braided unicorn mane—no, it was to listen to music on a $350,000 stereo. But while I was there, how could I not try to experience a few before-and-after tests to see if I could spot the harmonic differences that are the audiophile's raison d'etre?

The differences we are talking about here are, of course, of the most incredible subtlety. But to many critics of audiophiles, a subtle change is quickly reduced to and equated with zero change, whereupon the screams of hysterics and rage against the immense stupidity and utter inanity of the audiophile life begins.

I didn't think I had to say this, but I guess I do: Anyone who spends $20,000 on speaker cables is fucking crazy. In fact, anyone who spends $200 on cable is crazy, in my opinion. But that's just not the point.

If I was drinking wine with a sommelier or wine critic, I wouldn't find it irrational to taste subtleties that I might have glossed over when drinking in the presence of normals. In these cases, it's not about the power of suggestion, it's about the power of context, and like it or not, there's context at the heart of all the world's manias, anything to which we attach the suffix "phile."

With audiophiles, I am an agnostic rather than an atheist. I believe that these differences, however miniscule, are, to those who have spent their life studying them, based on something real, not invented. Can I hear them? Maybe not, but that doesn't mean I write them off completely. My belief here is based not on decades of listening on high-end gear, but on a day I spent listening to a $350,000 system with someone who's been doing this for forty-some years.

It's a fact: I was led into hearing things I might not have without guidance. While some look to this possibility as evidence that the whole thing is a sham, I don't. I would need a lot more time to build up the necessary context to even be near a place where I could pretend to listen critically for such minutiae, but I heard something different than I would hear listening to my own sound system, and that's also a fact.

With that out of the way, here are three wholly unscientific but incredibly interesting listening tests we did in Fremer's audiocave. They were a blast.

Power Cable Swap
Test Song: "Avalon" by Roxy Music
Surprisingly not the fishiest test we ran, at play here is the purity and frequency range of the raw AC power that gets fed to the speaker amps. Fremer had two cables laying around that he was reviewing—one from Power Snakes Shunyata Research at a cost of $4,000 and one from Wireworld, whose $1,200 cable's selling point is that it filters out all but the 60Hz frequency of pure, unadulterated US alternating current.

Here's Wireworld's filtering claim, from their website:

An ideal audio or video cable would pass the entire frequency range without alteration. However, an ideal power cord would pass only the 50Hz or 60Hz AC power, while blocking all other frequencies, to prevent power line noise and harmonics from degrading the sound and imaging quality of the system.

Not entirely sure how those two are related, but a claim is a claim.

The result: I heard a difference here, but whether or not it was a direct result of AC filtering, who knows. The filtering cables (the cheaper ones) seemed to sound a bit more reserved, but in some ways clearer. There might have been a little less harshness in the high frequencies of cymbals, or when Bryan Ferry sang an "S" sound. The more expensive AC cable was different, but it was hard to quantify how or why. Maybe a fuller sound, but not necessary a better one.

With this one, if there's any audible change at all from one to the other, one is still not better than the other. That's an important point to make here—spending more money in the audiophile realm often just means getting something different, not better.

Speaker Cable Swap
Test Song: "Whole Lotta Love" by Led Zeppelin
Let me say now that listening to "Whole Lotta Love" on this system at high volume was transcendent each and every time, no matter what gear was involved. You may want to put a knife in any audiophile you see, but if you heard that song like I did once, and realize that these guys get to listen to it that way every time, you'd be doing it out of jealousy, not contempt.

That said, speaker cable is the most sensitive area to prod on both audiophiles and audiophile reactionaries alike, because it is home to some of the most dramatic swings in price for things that, fundamentally, are doing the exact same thing: carrying an electrical current from amp to speakers. That said, as Wilson explained on Tuesday, it's the one thing in these tests that may have the most merit. Genuine differences in electrical properties (wire thickness, manufacturing process, and the materials of the wire and its coatings all contribute to differences in capacitance, inductance and resistance) mean that cables are liable to sound different, given speakers with enough resolution to show those differences.

At play in our test was a set of $200 cables from Monster (here, playing the unfamiliar role of bargain choice) and a pair from Tara Labs that costs a deeply stupid $22,000, which Fremer had for review purposes.

The result: I strained to hear a difference, but did. Like I said, I was pretty busy trying to keep from shitting myself during both playbacks, but I did identify a change. And again, it was detectable most for me in the high-frequency zone: With the high-end cables, cymbals, tambourines, the high frequency bits of that crazy swirling tape-effects breakdown, all sounded perfectly isolated in the 3D space of the song and came through with crazy clarity. On the Monsters, anything in the high-end tended to blend together into a single entity that was slightly less pleasing perhaps, but still amazing.

Was the difference worth $21,800 to me—or even Fremer? Of course not. But it's there.

De-Magnetizer
Test Song: "Oh! Darling" by The Beatles, and others
And if you thought the other stuff was ridiculous, maybe turn away your gaze now. This is a $1,600 platter that, once activated, neutralizes the magnetism that allegedly develops over time in the metallic impurities found in vinyl's black dye. Since the record cartridge operates with magnets, this allegedly translates to less unintended futzing with the cartridge and therefore purer sound. I say allegedly because there's nothing in the way of firm scientific evidence that such magnetic impurities are enough to tamper with the cartridge's signal in a meaningful way. (It should also be noted that the Furutech product in testing here is no longer to be found on Furutech's website.)

The result: I swear to Lucifer, when listening to "Oh! Darling," I thought I heard Paul's voice move back a good foot or two in the soundscape once that record was de-juju'd. "Back" in a way that added clarity. Beyond that, I can't say I heard much else.

We tried the trick on several other records, and I got nothing. Fremer claims he and his audio buddies can usually tell a difference, which is sometimes drastic, sometimes not.

You can even try for yourself if you want to. Here are two AIFF files of Tom Waits' "Step Right Up" (download: File 1, File 2)—both encoded directly from vinyl by Fremer on his system. (Yeah, that process alone seems enough to dispel this myth all by itself, but again, it's a shaky claim to begin with.) One is pre-demagnetizing, another is post. Can you hear a difference? I can't. But if you have crazy gear at home, give it a try.

So as you can see, there was no hosanna moment in any of these tests, whereupon I drank any snake oil or took receipt of any ear honey. Far from it. My particular experience did not convince me to go out and spend tens of thousands of dollars chasing the minute gains that can be made in an audio system with ridiculously expensive gear. But I did hear something. By experiencing those differences first hand, I acknowledge their existence, and thus, acknowledge that people who have been listening to music at the highest possible level of quality for decades may know more than I do about the comparative sonics involved.

And the point remains, as clear as ever: Those who are listening to music at the highest level of fidelity and can discern the tiny differences at play here are doing a service—in both music production and music reproduction—to everyone who loves music everywhere.

Listening Test: It's music tech week at Gizmodo.

For serious audiophiles out there, the details can be gleaned from the extensive photographic record Giahy compiled during the build process. The rest of us can stare at this crazy horn, wall speaker setup and only imagine what the sound and the experience of being in the room must be like. [Giahy]

We didn't give a single one of these speakers any kind of field test, and we're not going to pretend for a second that that matters. Thankfully, you and I are not the folks who have to view these speakers as anything more than absolutely beautiful monuments to silly rich audio fetishists. So let's ogle: take the Sonnance "Threewheeler" donught-y Bluetooth outdoor speaker shown above as only the beginning. It costs $21,000.

Plenty more where that came from in our captioned gallery:

We especially like the way the drivers are all connected with flattened internal cables, hidden among the angles, nooks, crannies and corners of this stunning design. We're not sure how the Pear Cable crowd will like that arrangement, what with all the difference they think fat, solid-gold/copper cables make and all.

The pricing is what really surprised us, where we thought these 40-inch Victoria EVO speakers would cost $50,000 or more, and here they are retailing for $5,400 a pair. Their little brother, the 34-inch Iguasçu EVO, omits one of those midrange drivers and costs $3,900 for a pair. Both models will be available in February or March of 2008. Just don't play any loud operatic soprano music through these babies, or you'll have a living room full of broken glass. [Waterfall Audio]

One of the most astonishing accomplishments of the Transparent Cable Company is how it gets "reviewers" to play along with its con game.

This is from the Transparent Cable website:

"We are also pleased that so many members of the audio press have chosen to write about Transparent Cable. While our upper-end products seem to garner the most attention in the sheer number of reviews written, audio experts write about our more affordable cables, too. Reviewers everywhere agree that Transparent products at all levels deliver superb performance and great value for the asking price."

So, without further ado, please enjoy the following gallery of Extra Big Ass Speakers (names and obscene prices are in the captions). – Wilson Rothman & Louis Ramirez

Home Entertainment Show 2007 [Gizmodo]

Slim Devices founder Sean Adams gave Gizmodo a video tour of his high-end streaming audio player that we first told you about in July. The overview is up top. Videos about the specific features after the jump...
—Noah Robischon

Sound Cameras [The Newspaper]

But how they sound? Get this: B sendorfer speakers were the subject of a unique demo in New York last year, where piano music was played through the speakers and then replayed instantaneously by Juilliard students playing B sendorfer pianos live. It was hard for even golden-eared attendees to tell the difference.

B sendorfer VC7 and AC7 Loudspeakers [CoolHunting]

Audiophile [ilikejam - Get ready to slam this poor guy's DSL line via BoingBoing via BackupBrain]