THE REVIEWS
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FRANCO SERBLIN ACCORDO ESSENCE - REVIEW
They played beautifully with the single-ended Lyric Ti 100 MkII (20 watts), with an expanded soundstage, beautiful midrange, and soaring highs in my medium-sized room at medium volume. The Air Tight ATC-1 preamplifier/ATM-1 amplifier (36 watts) combo extended low-end weight and gravitas while providing exceptional midrange tone and texture, and nicely extended highs.
FERN & ROBY RAVEN III - REVIEW
The Raven IIIs are amplification-flexible—they play with 8 watts all the way up to, I’m told, 400 watts. This, given its other traits listed below, makes it a reviewer’s dream. And especially for a reviewer/audiophile/music lover who does not listen to loud, bombastic music, or who has attached his reference stereo system to his television or movie projector…just saying.
BORDER-PATROL SE-i DAC - REVIEW
The BorderPatrol SE-i DAC is a true gem that hides its wondrous capabilities beneath a simple, clean, unadorned facade. To look past it though is to look past the tattered, dirt-crusted Van Gogh at a garage sale, posing as nothing more than an amateur's well-intentioned, paint-by-numbers, work. Don’t do that. [Really!]
AIR-TIGHT ATC-5S & ATM -1E - REVIEW
The Air Tight ATC-5s preamplifier and the ATM-1s amplifier provide an “old school meets new school” approach to rendering one’s music, which, as earlier mentioned, results in lush and beautifully textured music that is spatially astute, with superb transparency, resolution, detail, and brilliant musicality.
PASS LABS HPA-1 HEADPHONE AMP - REVIEW
I did not expect to be as impressed as I am with the PASS LABS HPA-1, given its 2016-17 introduction and the various technical improvements that have come to other headphone amplifiers made in the interim, but time has not touched the viability, technical prowess, or wonderful musicality of the PASS LABS HPA-1. In truth, it has few rivals among those I’ve reviewed in recent years, regardless of price.
BAETIS AUDIO REVOLUTION X4 STREAMER - REVIEW
The Baetis Audio Revolution X4 brings a naturalness, an ease, and a sweetness to recordings that will have analog-lovers fully engaged while also providing the high-fidelity technicalities—soundstaging, resolution, transparency, detail retrieval, etc.—for those long wedded to the evolving digital audio world. The Revolution X4 is an outstanding digital streamer that I am certain believes itself to be a synthesis of both digital and analog.
TORUS POWER AVR ELITE POWER CONDITIONER - REVIEW
When a component brilliantly does what it was designed to do and gets out of the way to let all the other performers—components—shine, well, it deserves an award. We happily award the TORUS POWER AVR Elite power conditioner our DIAMOND AWARD, well deserved for its exceptional work.