Daniel Kumin

Speaker Buying Tips
Sound Choices: How to Pick the Best Speakers for You
Daniel Kumin  |  Aug 13, 2012  |  0 comments

Virtually all music recordings and film soundtracks are intended by their creators to be heard over speakers. There’s good reason for that: Speakers yield the most natural tone and the most accurate spatial presentation — qualities that are difficult or impossible to match via any sort of headphone listening. But what kind of speakers should you buy?

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Tower Speaker Reviews
Test Report: Polk Audio LSiM Speaker System
Daniel Kumin  |  Jun 05, 2012  |  0 comments

History may one day judge “offshoring” to be the macroeconomic disaster that some pundits would have us believe. Still, you can’t argue that it’s been a microeconomics windfall for American consumers.

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Streaming Device Reviews
Review: Pro-Ject Box Design Stream Box DS and Media Box S
Daniel Kumin  |  May 22, 2012  |  0 comments

Who wouldn’t want to play their growing horde of audio files – the same ones that feed the iPod and iTunes — on the “big” system, with big-system volume, quality, and impact?

Nobody, that’s who.

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Power Amplifier Reviews
Review: Wyred4Sound Mini MC 5-Channel Power Amplifier
Daniel Kumin  |  Apr 10, 2012  |  0 comments

I am of the school that believes that more power is always better than less power. That school also professes that amplifiers, while operating within their linear abilities (a big “if”), are not generally distinct in their sonics.

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Headphone Amp/DAC Reviews
Something in the Air: Wireless HDMI from Gefen, IOGear, and Vizio
Daniel Kumin  |  Apr 03, 2012  |  0 comments

I have seen the future, and it is wireless. Wireless data, wireless music, wireless speakers, wireless keyboards, and now, wireless HDMI hi-def video. (Of course, all these things still need to be plugged into the wall, for AC power. Perhaps, somewhere on the Other Side, Nikola Tesla is still working on that.)

Wireless HDMI gets us that much closer to the Jetsonian ideal of the sheet-of-glass video screen floating unencumbered on a wall – without having to tear down that wall to run wires.

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Power Amplifier ReviewsSurround Processor Reviews
Test Report: Bryston SP-3 Preamplifier/Processor and 9BSST2 5-Channel Amplifier
Daniel Kumin  |  Mar 22, 2012  |  0 comments

It’s a fact of modern life. The higher you climb in the high end of anything, the less, at least in one sense, you will get. You will find, I believe, few gargoyles on buildings designed by I.M. Pei, and even fewer rear-seat DVD screens in Paganis.

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Desktop Speaker Reviews
Power to the Speakers: Three New Active Desktop Systems
Daniel Kumin  |  Mar 12, 2012  |  0 comments

Were we to travel to, say, Jupiter, and abduct its leading audio engineer (turnabout is fair play, after all), we might want to ask him (or it) this question: what’s the very best way to design a loudspeaker for the reproduction of high-fidelity music?

There’s no doubt in my mind as to how our Jovian guest would answer: “Active/powered!”

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Surround Processor Reviews
Review: Integra DHC-80.3 A/V Controller
Daniel Kumin  |  Jan 30, 2012  |  1 comments

How long have Integra’s A/V preamplifier/processors been around? Long enough to become a bit of an institution among home theater insiders. If you were assembling a serious system and demanded legitimately audio/videophile performance in every aspect but were unable or unwilling to pay the sometimes absurd prices asked for “seriously high-end” gear, an Integra pre/pro is what you bought.

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Desktop Speaker Reviews
Test Report: Focal Little Bird 2.1 Speaker System
Daniel Kumin  |  Jan 30, 2012  |  0 comments

Focal has flipped me the bird. The company is hardly the first to have done so (even just among audio manufacturers) and is unlikely to be the last. But none before has done so quite as elegantly or enjoyably.

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Surround Sound System ReviewsTower Speaker Reviews
Test Report: Paradigm Monitor Series 7 Speaker System
Daniel Kumin  |  Jan 30, 2012  |  0 comments

It seems like there have been Paradigm Monitor-series speakers roaming the earth since shortly after Rice and Kellog patented the dynamic loudspeaker as we know it in 1924. (The original practical design was by Peter Jensen, co-founder of Magnavox, some years earlier.) And as the arrival of its “Series 7” might suggest, the Canadian maker’s Monitor family does in fact date back a couple of decades. Like the speakers that preceded them, Paradigm’s new Monitor models are benchmarks of performance/value quotient in the best Canadian-speaker tradition: rationally priced, excellent-performing, technically advanced designs that compete very effectively with some far more costly “high-end” designs.

So what has changed for Series 7? According to Paradigm, the answer is smaller, deeper, broader: The new models are smaller in size (and so more décor-friendly), yet thanks to redesigned waveguides and the adoption of aluminum bass/mid cones and tweeter domes, they offer improved low-frequency extension and smoother, wider off-axis response. In other words, just like before — but more so.

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