Monday, October 24 CHAMBER MUSIC SOCIETY OF LINCOLN CENTER— Frescobaldi's Canzoni for Organ and Brass; Spohr's Grand Nonetto for Winds and Strings, Op. 31; Beethoven's Sonata for Piano and Violin in A, Op. 1; Brahms's Piano Quartet No. Alice Tully Hall at 7.30. MUSICIANS AGAINST.

Powered 4-Way Dipole Loudspeaker System Linkwitz Lab LX521 Designer: Linkwitz Lab, 15 Prospect Lane, Corte Madera, CA 94925. E-mail: sl@linkwitzlab.com. Kits: Madisound, 8608 University Green, Suite 10, Middleton, WI 53562. Phone: (608) 831-3433. Also, Ear Food Speakers,Dr. Frank Brenner, Veilchenweg 5, D-70771 Leinfelden, Germany. E-mail:. Prices vary greatly according to the kits’ content and state of assembly—please check the websites.

Reviewed samples owned by The Audio Critic. For photos (lots of them), please go to the websites indicated above. There are basically two approaches to advancing the state of the loudspeaker art. One is to accept an established paradigm and then refine its various elements to a new level of excellence. A prime example of this approach is Wilson Audio’s.

Dave Wilson accepts the classic concept of the forward-firing driver in a closed box and then does fabulous over-the-top things with the boxes, the drivers, the passive crossover networks, etc. (not to mention the prices). What he offers is essentially a world-class version of the old “monkey coffin” (1970s audio-store slang denoting a rectangular box with conventional forward-firing drivers). The other approach is to examine all the established paradigms, identify their strengths and weaknesses, pick the most promising one, and then refine the latter to the point where it becomes, in effect, a new paradigm, and the tweaking of its constituent elements becomes a secondary project. That is Siegfried Linkwitz’s design philosophy. For about ten years, his flagship was the Orion, incorporating all of his insights regarding open-baffle, powered, and equalized dipoles with a spectrally neutral radiation pattern (which is his number one priority). The Orion, in its progressively improved versions, represented a refinement of a number of previous Linkwitz speaker systems, which already incorporated the basics of the boxless dipole paradigm, and for a long time it seemed just about unbeatable for domestic stereo playback.

Except to Siegfried Linkwitz. In his late seventies, he made an elder statesman’s climactic effort to go beyond his previous best.

The result was the LX521, which he says is his last loudspeaker. Now, when SL says he is done with loudspeakers, he doesn’t mean he has run out of steam (although I could very well understand that).

No, he means he has evaluated all the alternatives, such as horns, electrostatics, ribbons, line sources, distributed mode diaphragms, not to mention monkey coffins of all kinds, and determined that their disadvantages outweighed their advantages in comparison with his solution. I suggest you go to, undoubtedly the greatest loudspeaker website of them all, and dig deeper into his arguments.

He now feels that the LX521 has taken his design theory to its practical limits and that there is no need for an encore. The Design Early reports suggested that the LX521 was an improved Orion, but that’s not accurate. It is, in some respects, a simplification of the Orion, or purification is perhaps the better word. It produces purer results because, for one thing, its new architecture puts less of a burden on its drivers. The Orion’s expensive SEAS Excel “Millennium” tweeter pair was assigned all frequencies above 1.4 kHz, thus splitting the midrange in the middle and necessitating very careful massaging of the midrange equalization in the electronic crossover/processor because a tiny change in an R or a C could significantly affect midrange neutrality. The LX521 solves that problem by cutting the Gordian knot and putting a 4-inch upper-midrange driver between the 8-inch lower-midrange unit and the 1-inch tweeter, thereby making the speaker 4-way. Linkwitz resisted the 4-way solution for years before coming to the conclusion that it actually simplified the design, produced better results, and was more cost-effective.

The 8-inch and 4-inch units, both recent “Curv cone” designs by SEAS, together form a very broadband “single” source of frequencies from 120 Hz to 7 kHz, separated at 1 kHz by a first-order passive crossover that blends them imperceptibly. The 120 Hz and 7 kHz fourth-order Linkwitz-Riley crossovers are electronic, effected by an ASP (analog signal processor) very similar to the Orion’s, reusing the latest Orion PC boards. The 1-inch textile-dome front and rear tweeters by SEAS are much simpler and less costly than the Orion’s, since they only handle the 1½ octaves above 7 kHz, a piece of cake by comparison. On the other hand, the two 10-inch SEAS woofers in push-pull are the same expensive long-throw model with aluminum cone as used in the latest Orion versions, except that the mounting is very different. The baffle board is a V with 45-degree slopes turned on its side, the woofer in the bottom leg facing forward in the open frame, the one in the top leg facing backward. This mounting is both simple and strong, minimizing vibration. That’s not the master stroke of the physical design, however; the upper baffle is.

Experimentally arrived at by Linkwitz, it is surprisingly small, very tightly wrapped around the four upper drivers, and of a very unusual shape. Its purpose is to make the polar response of the speaker as frequency-independent (i.e., neutral) as possible, well beyond the capabilities of the Orion. This is Linkwitz’s number one priority and the secret of precise phantom images between the speakers (i.e., lifelike soundstaging) in a correct stereo setup, where the speakers are at least 1 meter away from all walls. I must digress at this point to emphasize that the LX521 is intended strictly for two-channel stereo (as are its predecessors).

Linkwitz has little use for surround sound, at least at its current stage of development. I tend to agree with him, although I must admit that initially I was rather enthusiastic about 5.1 surround. It certainly gives you a feeling of immersion, which is part of, but far from all of, the concert hall experience. The structural specificity of music, the specific location/direction of instruments and voices, disappears in 5.1 surround, most probably because the latter is not a mirror-image playback of what the microphones picked up but rather an “authored” mix, where an editor has decided what goes into each of the channels.

Two-channel stereo, on the other hand, when the original live music was a frontal presentation, can give you a very precise idea of the soundstage details, especially through a pair of loudspeakers like the LX521. (A movie soundtrack is, of course, another matter. If you want to follow that Black Hawk helicopter passing over your head, you need 5.1.) The other new feature of the physical designs is the so-called bridge, which is nothing more than an open box (no front, no back, no bottom) placed over the woofer frame with just a half-inch gap. Its purpose is to isolate the relatively light upper module from the unavoidable residual vibrations of the woofer module. Driving the LX521 requires three or four power amplifier channels per side, depending on whether you connect the woofers in parallel or drive them individually.

Parallel connection results in an impedance of 2 ohms, a difficult load for many amplifiers. I still use the 12-channel AT6012 (Amplifier Technologies) and find it totally adequate in my 22-by-20-by-9-foot listening room. Megawatt enthusiasts may disagree. Please note that all of the above is about a design, not a product. There is no company producing the LX521, even in small quantities. It is basically a DIY project, with Siegfried Linkwitz selling the construction plans plus the blank printed-circuit boards for the ASP, and outfits like Madisound in the USA and Dr. Frank Brenner in Germany selling full kits in various stages of completion.

Brenner will, on special order, sell you a turnkey LX521 system, but it’s not a production item.) There is also a digital alternative to the ASP, with which I have no experience whatsoever. Go to for details. (In fact, linkwitzlab.com should be your main source of information for all the theoretical and practical details missing from this review.

As I said, it is the loudspeaker website.) The Measurements The LX521 cannot really be properly characterized by the conventional two or three frequency response measurements. They would be meaningless. The main difference between the LX521 and lesser speakers is the total power response into a half-sphere space, and to measure that is beyond the capabilities of my home laboratory and MLS software. Even on linkwitzlab.com there is only one LX521 response figure, illustrating the first-order passive crossover (see, “From F3 to LX521”). There is no figure for the total response. If I showed here a single frequency-response curve on the 0° axis, it would not be flat because the response is deliberately shelved at both ends to compensate for various effects that are ignored by the flat-from-dc-to-light school (e.g., the head-related transfer function in stereo listening).

Barring the availability of Harman International’s anechoic chamber (70-odd frequency response measurements into a 4π space!), or very extensive outdoor measurements that are far too difficult for me, I cannot prove here with graphs that the LX521 is what it is. For what it’s worth, you could check out the response curves of the individual drivers on the SEAS website. They are honest measurements; no doctoring. Lower midrange.

Upper midrange. The Sound I am journalistically challenged here. God Of War 3 Psp Download Cso here. I have praised the sound of the Orion to the skies, more and more with each successive version, and now I am out of superlatives. How shall I characterize the sound of something better than what I have called the best?

Well, I can give it a try. Let me go back a decade, for the moment. When the original Orion made its debut, the sound of the open-baffle, powered, and equalized dipole was so different from any monkey coffin’s, even the most advanced and costliest ones, that it was truly night and day. It was a startlingly open, untrammeled sound, without the immediately recognizable boxy signature of enclosed speakers. What’s more, it got further refined with each new modified version. You could close your eyes, listen to that sound, and with a little bit of mental effort pretend that the speakers have disappeared, leaving only the living soundstage in front of you. The main difference between the Orion and the LX521 is that the latter requires no such mental effort.

The speakers naturally disappear as soon as you start the music; you don’t even have to close your eyes. I would go even further—you have to make a slight mental effort to be aware that the speakers are actually there! It’s uncanny. What it proves (at least to me) is that radiation pattern is the chief determinant of loudspeaker quality and that the unique shape of the LX521’s upper baffle is a significant breakthrough.

The precise phantom images produced by the LX521 create the most solidly three-dimensional soundstage of any stereo system in my listening experience. In the end, that is more important in producing a you-are-there effect than the superior definition of instruments and voices, the “texture” of the sound, where the LX521 may perhaps be equaled by other loudspeakers using advanced drivers. As for the midrange neutrality that has been Don Barringer’s obsession with his Orion mods, the LX521 makes an end run around the problem with the addition of the 4-inch upper-midrange driver.

It is no longer an issue. The midrange is totally relaxed and natural without any heroic effort. The tweeter is happy just tweeting instead of having to handle the upper midrange.

(Don used to wonder why a kitchen radio can have a neutral midrange while the Orion’s needed endless massaging.) I need to add that the bass quality of the LX521 is audibly superior to that of the Orion with the original Peerless drivers. (My Orions retained the Peerless woofers while going through all the successive mods, including Barringer’s.) The latest Orion versions were equipped with the same SEAS woofers as the LX521, but I had no opportunity for a comparison. In any case, don’t even think about subwoofers. The LX521 doesn’t need them. Even the lowest organ pipes are reproduced with authority. Summing Up I have not tested or even briefly listened to every high-end loudspeaker out there, but of all the speakers known to me none equals the Linkwitz Lab LX521 in my opinion.

I have been to a few audio shows fairly recently and auditioned the most highly touted speakers there, and after each listening session I just shook my head, wondering how they could charge so much money for such obviously canned, unlifelike sound. It’s as if the designers had never heard live acoustic music in a concert hall. Siegfried Linkwitz has not only established a new paradigm but has also proved that throwing money at each component of a speaker design, and then charging the consumer with a huge multiple of the cost, is not the way to go. Instead, the simple and cost-effective principle of the “spectrally neutral radiation pattern” rules! Benchmark DAC2 HGC 20 August, 2013. PCM and DSD D/A Converter with Line-Level Preamp and More Benchmark DAC2 HGC Benchmark Media Systems, Inc., 203 East Hampton Place, Suite 2, Syracuse, NY.

Voice: (800) 262-4675 and (315) 437-6300. Fax: (315) 437-8119. DAC2 HGC stereo preamplifier with PCM and DSD D/A converter, headphone amp, and asynchronous USB, $1995.00. Tested sample on loan from manufacturer. [For better pictures than I can reproduce here, please go to the website indicated above.] The super D-to-A converter with line-level preamp capabilities is a relatively recent format, although scattered examples of it have been around for a number of years, such as the Benchmark DAC1 HDR (reviewed here in July 2009).

Lately a number of high-end boutique companies have seen an opening and announced some insanely overdesigned models at astronomical prices. I haven’t had my hands on any of these (and never will), but it baffles me what they can do that the new Benchmark DAC2 HGC, at a fraction of their price, can’t. The latter has such a complete set of features and capabilities, and such amazing specifications, that I can’t see how any outrageously costly unit could trump it. The Design What is required to design a super DAC/preamp in the second decade of the 21st century is no mystery. You start with the best DAC chip that money can buy, the world champion ESS Sabre³² Reference 32-bit 8-channel audio DAC, and use all 8 channels for stereo, 4 per side. In that deployment, the digital noise reduction spec is 133 dB and the total harmonic distortion (THD) is –120 dB (0.0001%).

You can’t do any better; that’s what Benchmark has in the DAC2 HGC, and that’s what the megabuck high-enders have in their models, also. As for the analog section, you go with the Texas Instruments (formerly National Semiconductors) LME49860 operational amplifier, which has a specified voltage noise density of 2.7nV/√Hz and a THD of 0.00003% (–130.5 dB). Low enough for you? Once you build your device around electronic components with numbers like that and keep the construction quality high, as Benchmark does, there isn’t much headroom for improvement, nor much reason for a higher price than $1,995.00. And that’s just for starters; the DAC2 HGC goes well beyond the DAC1 HDR (which is still an “A-team” contender) with a large number of new features, such as native DSD conversion and a hybrid gain control (HGC). The latter is capable of active analog, 32-bit digital, and passive analog attenuation, thus ending all debates about tradeoffs.

I am not willing to list and explain all these new technicalities because you can go to and read all about them in full detail. (Have you noticed that about 50% of the usual equipment review consists of a restatement of the manufacturer’s information? In the age of the Web?) You can even download the 68-page instruction manual from and pretend you already own the DAC2 HGC. Since I have no doubt about the state-of-the-art status of the unit’s electronic signal paths, I’ll only discuss matters that Benchmark does not. For example: Despite 16 LED status indicators on the unit’s front panel, you can’t tell whether the DAC2 HGC is in standby mode or totally shut off. Yes, when you first put it in standby mode, the red Dim/Mute LED keeps flashing for a while, as does the blue LED of the muted input, but they stop after a short while, and the panel then looks the same as in power-off mode—no lights at all.

This is a bit annoying when you want to listen to something and don’t remember whether the unit should be unmuted or powered up. It’s best to leave it in standby mode at all times when not in use, especially since powering it off sends a 0.15-volt dc pulse through the audio chain, which can result in a serious pop from the loudspeakers if the power amplifier is still on. These minor annoyances don’t in any way constitute a deal breaker for the prospective purchaser but merely illustrate the learning curve necessitated by the unit’s control functions. The latter are not intuitive; the remote control’s buttons are not quite the same as those on the front panel, and there are quite a few press-twice and press-two-together protocols to activate certain functions. I am sure there are geeks who will relish these secret handshakes, but I would have preferred a brilliantly engineered state-of-the-art device to have beautifully simple controls.

In case that’s not doable, my total endorsement remains unchanged (actually, I am a little geeky myself). The Measurements If your interest has been stimulated to the point where you actually downloaded the instruction manual from the link indicated above, you will have found, in the back of the manual, sixteen Audio Precision graphs illustrating the incredible perfection of the DAC2 HGC’s electrical response. I have no reason to question, or try to verify, the accuracy of these graphs, especially since I no longer have on extended loan the same instrument they were produced with, the Audio Precision SYS-2722. If I still had it, I would have obtained the same results. Yes, some manufacturers “cook the books,” but Benchmark does not. The measurements are basically what you would expect in view of the specifications of the ESS Sabre³² Reference and the TI LME49860—state of the art.

(There are no mysteries in electronics, only in the minds of certain tweako audio reviewers.) There is, however, an issue that needs to be cleared up. The measurements of the DAC1 HDR are almost equally perfect, lagging only by a dB here and a couple of dB there—not enough to make a difference in real-world performance. I am not talking about the DAC2 HGC’s many additional features but actual differences in the basic audio signal path and the perceived sound. As I have repeatedly proclaimed in The Audio Critic, there is no such thing as an effect without a cause, and I see nothing in the two designs to cause them to sound different. The human ear is not as sensitive as the Audio Precision SYS-2722, which shows only tiny differences between the two, and my 87-year-old ears are certainly not as sensitive. Of course, some subjective reviewers have already heard huge differences, but anyone can assert that without objective proof, such as an ABX double-blind test. Fortunately, there is now a fairly new objective test, which is not only less laborious and time-consuming (not to mention controversial) than the ABX but also even more sensitive and more specifically targeted.

I’m talking about the Audio DiffMaker by Liberty Instruments. The Sound The Audio DiffMaker is definitely a sound comparison test, but not in the conventional sense.

Instead of listening to sounds A and B, and trying to determine if there is a difference, you listen only to B minus A, which is the objective and unquestionable difference between the two. If B–A is silence, there is obviously no difference between A and B, since silence can be objectively ascertained. This is of course an oversimplified explanation of a very sophisticated test, the brainchild of a clever technologist named Bill Waslo, but you can see why it is necessarily more sensitive than ABX; even if there is a small audible difference signal, you may not be able to hear it listening to full-blown A and B, but if the difference is silence, that’s ironclad proof that A and B are sonically identical. For more details, see.

Unfortunately, the DiffMaker program has a rather steep learning curve. There are many, many settings and adjustments to achieve optimum results, and the interface with various soundcards is quite problematic. As a novice user, I was able to extract a difference signal between the DAC1 HDR and the DAC2 HGC, but I don’t think that difference signal was at the lowest level obtainable with more sophisticated manipulation of the software.

The level I was able to get was –47 dB (0.45%) with respect to the reference level, and that’s faintly audible when the difference signal is listened to by itself. Interestingly enough, the faintly audible signal was music, not noise or distortion products, indicating that I was unable to null the two DAC signals accurately because of tiny amplitude or phase differences. Even so, assuming that –47 dB is actually an accurate reading, that’s low enough to be completely masked by normally loud music levels in an ABX comparison.

I don’t think I would have heard a difference even with my 20-year old ears (retrieved by time machine). As I said, the DiffMaker is the most sensitive and objective A/B test known to me—although I suspect it was primarily intended to debunk “differences” that don’t exist, such as coloring the edge of a CD with a green felt pen, in which case the difference signal would be silence. Conclusion The Benchmark DAC2 HGC represents a new reference standard in the category of “DAC with line-level preamp” (excluding mysterious megabuck products designed to meet voodoo criteria).

I refer you again to the links above if you wish to explore the unit’s awesome feature set, with any and all digital or analog signal sources, be they audio components or computer. Its sound is what any non-voodoo reviewer would expect on the basis of the Audio Precision measurements: the exact sound of the signal source, nothing more and nothing less. Yes, the user interface is not as intuitive as it perhaps could be, but even that I can’t say with certainty given the complexity of the design. And yes, in my own main system, I am switching from the DAC1 HDR (even though it sounds the same) to the DAC2 HGC! Latest DIY Orion Mod 08 January, 2013. Powered 3-Way Dipole Loudspeaker The Final Mod: Orion 3.3.1SN (All information regarding the standard Orion versions is obtainable at.) My Love Affair with the Orion It takes a special jolt these days to interrupt my geriatric hibernation and prompt me to post something new on this website.

Audible improvements of the Linkwitz Lab “Orion” loudspeaker are among the rare stimuli that can still do it. My obsession with the Orion over the years is due not so much to its specific characteristics but rather to the generic concept it represents.

I can best explain that with a thought experiment. Pretend that you are brought blindfolded into a room where you are going to listen to an unknown pair of loudspeakers fed by first-rate electronics.

You sit down and focus on the sound. It is obvious that the speakers are very large because the soundstage is very wide and very tall. It is an unprecedentedly open and transparent sound, leading you to believe that new and unusually sophisticated technologies are being used (floor-to-ceiling ribbons made of stainless kryptonite?). The localization of instruments is extremely precise—is there a center-channel speaker they sneaked in there? At last the blindfold comes off and all you see is a pair of Orions, not at all large and with utterly conventional drivers. Please explain the magic. And that’s my point—it’s the concept.

No box, just a frame. A dipole, almost totally symmetrical, front and back. Acoustically small (because, if the size of a driver approaches a large fraction of the wavelength it must reproduce, all bets are off). Electronic crossover/processor, with radical equalization of each driver for optimum linearity.

I could go on—add up all the details and it turns out that the design indeed represents a new generic class and is highly sophisticated, regardless of its innocent appearance. That’s what gets me. Now Siegfried Linkwitz has come up with the somewhat similar but still rather different LX521, of which he owns the so far only extant prototype and which he claims sounds better than the Orion. Well, I’m perfectly willing to believe it sounds better than his Orion, but what about my Orion?

That’s a different story and the reason for this review. The Don Barringer Connection Don Barringer has been Siegfried Linkwitz’s associate and “second pair of ears” since the late ’70s. He is a former trumpet player, a cutting-edge recording engineer, and a no-compromise audio fanatic. When SL finalizes one of his amazing designs and declares victory (which he doesn’t do lightly), Don says wait a minute, we aren’t done yet, it still needs such and such. SL believes that there inevitably comes a time “to shoot the designer,” at which point Don cries “don’t shoot!” Not long ago, their formal collaboration finally came to an end, although their relationship remains cordial and communicative. Don was never entirely happy with the circuit values in the incredibly complex analog filters SL came up with to linearize the Orion’s drivers and overall response. He did not think the Orion sounded sufficiently neutral, even in its latest version (3.3.1) and quite aside from its other startlingly superior qualities.

When SL revisited the equalization of the Orion a couple of years ago, he started out with new measurements of the response of each driver and attempted to flatten out each by adjusting the circuit values of their respective filters on the printed circuit board of the crossover/processor. He did not succeed in effecting a significant improvement. He then instructed his computer to ignore the separate filters and just come up with an overall circuit that would yield the correct response across the entire audio range, also including the required HF and LF shelving.

That attempt was successful, at least to the extent possible with standard resistor and capacitor values of ±2% tolerance. That’s where Don wasn’t quite happy yet. Don believed that further fine-tuning of those values could result in even greater neutrality, which was his only remaining concern regarding the Orion.

The problem was that SL’s incredibly convoluted catchall equalization characteristic proved to be extremely ticklish to fine-tune. You pushed it in just a tiny bit here, and it bulged a tiny bit over there. It overreacted all over the place to local stimulation.

It took Don over a year and a half to figure it out, during which he substituted resistors and capacitors with the minutest changes in value and listened, over and over again. The evaluation had to be strictly subjective because the changes he made were much too small to be measurable with a microphone but still marginally audible. (You can hear a change of, say, 0.2 dB in the electronic signal path but you can’t reliably chart it on an acoustical response curve.) It was a desperately laborious process, not unlike picking the fly shit out of the pepper (1940s GI metaphor). After 20 months (during which, he says, he considered committing himself), he finally declared victory.

He recently posted the results and DIY instructions on the Orion-Pluto Users Group (where you need to register before being able to access restricted information). The remarkable thing is that, with one exception, all the nonstandard and ±0% tolerance circuit values he came up with were within SL’s ±2% specifications. It is even imaginable, theoretically, that a random statistical freak would have Don’s final values in an unmodified Orion 3.3.1!

Of course, the bottom-line question is: does a Don-modified Orion 3.3.1 (he calls it 3.3.1SN, for “subjective neutrality”) sound different from a plain-vanilla SL-approved 3.3.1? There is only a very small circle of Don’s followers who had the new resistor and capacitor values installed; I am one of them; and our answer is a resounding yes!

The Sound of the 3.3.1SN I have always maintained that the big sonic breakthrough was the original Orion of a decade ago, because it “blew away,” to use the audiophiles’ favorite expression, all traditional loudspeakers in sealed or ported enclosures (monkey coffins, in 1970s trade parlance). Subsequent versions manifested incremental improvements, large and small, but no overall change in gestalt. The same is true of the 3.3.1SN; it sounds definitely better than the unmodified 3.3.1, but exactly how much better depends on the importance of sonic nuances to the listener. The best way to describe the change is to say that the realism is finally complete; the rare reminders that one is listening to a mere loudspeaker are gone; no more momentary aggression here or thickness there, just soaring music. I am sufficiently impressed to have started reassessing all of my favorite recordings. If you’ll allow me a somewhat farfetched classical analogy, Don Barringer has become the Plato to all of us faithful disciples of Siegfried Linkwitz’s Socrates. It must be added that all of the above takes on less importance if SL’s new LX521 (also strictly a DIY project) turns out to be as good as he says.

As a rule, he is not in the habit of just whistling Dixie. Computer Speaker 23 November, 2011. Powered 3-Way Dipole Loudspeaker Systems Linkwitz Lab 'Orion 3.3' and 'Orion 4' Designer: Linkwitz Lab, 15 Prospect Lane, Corte Madera, CA 94925.

E-mail: sl@linkwitzlab.com. Web: www.linkwitzlab.com. Constructor: Wood Artistry, L.L.C., 408 Moore Lane, Healdsburg, CA 95448. Voice: (707) 473-0593.

Fax: (707) 473-0653. E-mail: sales@woodartistry.com. Web: www.woodartistry.com. Orion 3.3 loudspeaker system, latest small revision, at this point available only as a DIY project. Orion 4 loudspeaker system, available soon, $14,750 custom-built, with electronic crossover/equalizer (necessary cables and power amplification extra).

Tested samples of Orion 3.3 owned by The Audio Critic. Orion 3.3 Advancements on the cutting edge of loudspeaker design are very small and very subtle at this stage of the game. The resolution of free-field acoustical measurements, whether outdoors or in anechoic chamber, is almost certainly no better than 0.2 dB. The changes in the last few iterations of the Orion crossover/equalizer are smaller than that (remember, electronic signal paths are measurable with nearly infinite resolution). I know from years of experience that we can hear differences not much larger than 0.1 dB in the electronic signal path. Sneeze Game Download. We seem to have reached the point where the audible benefits of tiny changes in equalization upstream from the loudspeaker can only be ascertained by listening.

(Before the voodoo audio subjectivists rejoice, let me remind them that this does not apply to larger, but still very small, changes that are measurable with a microphone.) Siegfried Linkwitz, a man of science if there ever was one, is understandably not very happy about the not-quite-perfect alignment of theoretical, measurable, and audible information. Still, unlike some other engineers, he refuses to let abstract desiderata trump the reality in front of his nose. That reality, once again, is that small crossover and equalization changes to version 3.2.1 (see my December 4, 2010 posting for a review of that version) result in small but audible improvements in the sound of version 3.3.

The entire presentation is a bit smoother, more solid, more relaxed, more real. Imprecise words, but without the availability of the older version after the changes were made, that’s the best I can do. Needless to say, I can’t guarantee that this is it, no more changes. The history of the Orion 3 revisions seems to indicate the contrary. In any case, the conversion of the crossover/equalizer from 3.2.1 to 3.3 is strictly a DIY project; the Linkwitz/Wood Artistry connection is not available for it. Go to and for the details. It should be pointed out that this kind of endless massaging of the crossover/equalizer would not be necessary with powered loudspeakers that are less sophisticated than the Orion.

Siegfried Linkwitz has repeatedly said that he would not have believed before he designed the Orion that tiny adjustments in the electronics could make such a significant sonic difference. It flies in the face of all previous experience. The original Orion, no suffix, was a bit more tolerant in this respect; the rearward-firing tweeter in the Orion+ and subsequent versions, resulting in completely symmetrical dipole radiation, made it more critical. Orion 4 The crossover and equalization changes that resulted in the Orion 3.3 were actually inspired by the new but not yet available Orion 4, at this writing still in advanced prototype form. The Orion 4 is basically an Orion 3 with a different woofer configuration. The tweeters are the same, the midrange driver is the same, but the old Peerless woofers have been replaced by a new long-throw SEAS model, which is not yet in full production.

The new woofers are mounted in an upward- and downward-firing position, instead of forward- and backward-firing. This allows the woofers to operate in force-canceling opposition, eliminating the slight rocking or vibrating tendency of the older model’s frame, which could resonate wooden floors (not the floor of my listening room, which is concrete covered by industrial carpeting). Since the Orion 4 is still a full-range dipole, open in front and back, the different woofer mounting requires a new and more complicated frame, called a “W frame.” (The older Orions have an “H frame.”) The crossover frequencies and equalization of the Orion 4 are also slightly different, and extensive listening to the prototype led Siegfried Linkwitz and Don Barringer to the realization that the electronics of the Orion 3.2.1 should also be changed accordingly. I have to repeat that these changes are very small and subtle. For pictures showing the redesigned woofer configuration of the Orion 4, go to. I had a chance to audition the Orion 4 at the AXPONA show in New York, in the slick preproduction format that Don Naples of Wood Artistry will manufacture and market for $14, 750 (with crossover/equalizer but no amplifier and no cables!).

To me it sounded very much like the Orion 3.3 (because it is very much like the Orion 3.3), and the theoretical superiority of the SEAS bass (excursion, power handling, distortion) was partly masked by the low-frequency characteristics of the smallish hotel room. That it is one of the world’s greatest loudspeakers was quite evident. That’s all I can say about it at this time. Siegfried Linkwitz says that his next project is the Orion 3.4, which will adapt the new SEAS woofers to the H frame. That will undoubtedly necessitate further small changes to the crossover/equalizer, after which the bass performance should be equal to that of the Orion 4, minus the vibration benefits. Early deliveries of the SEAS woofers will obviously go into the first production run of the Orion 4, so I am not holding my breath.

Eventually, I expect to go for the 3.4 revision myself, the Orion 4 being too rich for my blood. Ah, to think how happy I was with the original Orion, no suffix, back in 2005.

Latest Orion Revision 04 December, 2010. Powered 3-Way Dipole Loudspeaker System Linkwitz Lab “Orion 3.2.1” Designer: Linkwitz Lab, 15 Prospect Lane, Corte Madera, CA 94925. Constructor: Wood Artistry, L.L.C., 408 Moore Lane, Healdsburg, CA 95448. Voice: (707) 473-0593. Fax: (707) 473-0653.

Orion 3.2.1 loudspeaker system (latest revision), $9200 and up for two complete channels (custom-built, with electronic crossover/equalizer, all necessary cables, and ATI AT6012 twelve-channel power amplifier). Kit versions available in various stages of completion at lower prices. Tested samples owned by The Audio Critic.

Yes, another Orion revision, even though no one dislikes revisions more than Siegfried Linkwitz. (“There comes a time to shoot the designer” is one of his witticisms, originating from his Hewlett-Packard days.) The trouble is, the man is too honest. Equalized electrodynamic dipoles are still relatively virgin territory, and there are always new insights, generally small, which he could shrug off, but his conscience won’t let him.

He remains the only loudspeaker designer known to me with (1) the highest technological qualifications and (2) an ear that really knows the sound of live, unamplified music. That being the case, we must live with his urge to fine-tune his products and his penchant to think out loud on his website before the fine-tuning is complete, creating major waves of anxiety among owners of his designs. Between the Orion+ of three years ago and the present Orion 3.2.1, there were three agonizing temporary versions.

I know because I went through the agony. Such is the price of perfectionism. (For the moment, version 3.2.1 appears to be final, thank goodness.) I must quickly add that, even though the Orion+ was a definite advancement and now the Orion 3.2.1 is a further important improvement, nothing compares to the breakthrough represented by the original suffixless Orion. Switching to that speaker from even the best conventional box speaker (“monkey coffin”) was night and day.

The Orion+ merely provided more daylight and the Orion 3.2.1 still more. The Changes I have written a great deal about the Orion, so here I’ll discuss only what is new. The Orion 3.2.1 is physically no different from the Orion+; all the changes are in the electronics, but they are significant. The EQ in the crossover/equalizer has undergone serious readjustments in both the midrange and the treble. Linkwitz has long suspected that the acoustic output of the midrange driver wasn’t quite as flat as it could be, but his computer modeling of the complex interactions of the various EQ curves and notch filters didn’t quite jell until very recently.

The result was (temporary) version 3.0, an undeniable improvement in the midrange. Then came another eureka moment, after Linkwitz had read Acoustics and Hearing, a new book by Dr. Peter Damaske, a German scientist summarizing a whole lifetime of studies. Among other things, Damaske shows how “surround sound” can be obtained out of two channels (but Orion owners already know that!); what Linkwitz was looking for, and found, was scientific evidence of something else that he already knew by subjective experience—that a pair of anechoically flat loudspeakers must have their treble response attenuated when brought into a normal, reverberant listening room. (He is never satisfied knowing something intuitively without a scientific theory to back it up.) How much attenuation is needed, and starting at what frequency, required a bit of experimentation, hence those in-between versions that we could have been spared.

Mind you, all these changes are fairly subtle and very difficult to measure quasi-anechoically with my somewhat crude MLS technique. I’d just as soon not publish any curves and refer you to instead. Of course, if the changes weren’t subtle, the unchanged previous versions wouldn’t have sounded as great as they did. But they definitely didn’t sound as good as version 3.2.1. There are also some minor changes in the 3.2.1 that are unrelated to the audio upgrade.

The switchable subsonic filter is now 30-Hz highpass instead of 50-Hz highpass to let more bass content through when switched in, while still remaining effective as a rumble filter. The trim pots are much larger and easier to turn with a screwdriver. The tweeter trim pot has a narrower plus/minus range than before because of the critical contour of the new high-frequency shelving. And, by the way, you can without too much difficulty make all the 3.2.1 circuit changes on the motherboard yourself, provided you aren’t quite as ham-fisted with a soldering iron as I am.

The Sound So, what exactly is the sound of the 3.2.1? Even the original, suffixless Orion produced a uniquely three-dimensional soundstage, and the Orion+ with its additional rearward-firing tweeter added still more realism. Version 3.2.1 has now brought everything into perfect balance. The 3-D effect is considerably more precise, with left, right, middle, front, back, height, etc., more palpable than before. The trumpet is right there, the timpani are over here, the space between them is about this much, the clarinet is just left of center, the hall is not very big, and so on. Earlier versions of the Orion did not focus quite as sharply. Also (and this is important), the highs are more relaxed and natural, as well as richer and rounder.

Just greater realism all around. It is quite a bit easier with version 3.2.1 to close your eyes and imagine a living audio scene in front of you. All of this is, of course, quite subjective. The changes in the crossover/equalizer are easy to measure, the resulting acoustical changes not so easy, but the audible quality changes are entirely a matter of opinion.

All opinions known to me so far, however, are in favor of the changes. The Orion 3.2.1 lives in the overlapping regions between scientific audio engineering and psychoacoustics.

Among the domestic loudspeaker systems I am familiar with, it is the most highly refined and the easiest virtual transportation to the original live audio event. * * * One more thing. As far as the need for subwoofers is concerned, what I have written about the Orion+ remains unchanged. The Linkwitz “Thor” woofers can be added, or not, to the Orion 3.2.1 as before. As I indicated, in the majority of cases that will not be necessary. Lenny Revisited 18 November, 2009.

Blu-ray Disc Player & DLP High-Definition TV OPPO BDP-83 & Mitsubishi WD-73835 OPPO Digital, Inc., 2629 Terminal Boulevard, Suite B, Mountain View, CA 94043. Voice: (650) 961-1118. Fax: (650) 961-1119. BDP-83 Blu-ray Disc Player, $499.00 (direct from manufacturer). Review sample originally on loan from manufacturer, later acquired by The Audio Critic. Mitsubishi Digital Electronics America, Inc., 9351 Jeronimo Road, Irvine, CA.

Voice: (800) 332-2119. Diamond WD-73835 DLP high-definition 73-inch TV, $4699.00 (original list price—large retail discounts available). Review sample originally on loan from manufacturer, later acquired by The Audio Critic. High-definition video has become an inevitable sequel and companion to high-quality audio.

It is impossible to be heavily involved with the latter without being at least somewhat involved with the former. To me, as a reviewer, that presents a problem. I am equipped to review audio components objectively, with measurements, but when it comes to TV I am basically in the same boat with all the subjective reviewers I want to distance myself from. I have no laboratory instruments for measuring video, just a few test discs for the visual evaluation of test patterns, color bars, etc.

These can’t separate the performance of the disc player and of the TV monitor; the two must be connected and viewed as a single unit. I simply can’t compete with the likes of Joe Kane (he’s Mr. Video himself, the techno guru of Joe Kane Productions), but I would still like to report my experiences with an unusually high-quality and cost-effective video setup I recently acquired. Call me a closet subjectivist if you think I have betrayed my objectivist principles. It’s only TV, after all. The Blu-ray Player The BDP-83 is obtainable directly from the OPPO Digital company, without the in-between step of a retail outlet. If that were not the case, the price would probably be around $1000 instead of $499, and even that would be a bargain.

I really don’t know what one of those multithousand-dollar players can do that the BDP-83 can’t. In circuitry and construction, the BDP-83 is a high-end product, regardless of its price. You don’t ask what features it has; it’s much simpler to ask what it doesn’t: no HD DVD playback (they’re history, in any case)—and that’s it. This is about as “universal” as a disc player can get.

For a detailed list of its stupefying range of features and capabilities, go to; I see no reason to repeat what is available with a click of the mouse. It takes a 74-page user manual to cover all the bells and whistles, so don’t expect an exegesis here. I did not measure the audio output of the BDP-83, even though I have the instrumentation to do it. The DACs and op-amps in the current generation of digital audio products are good enough to make it a meaningless exercise, except perhaps at the junk level. Minuscule differences in measured performance are strictly academic as far as sound quality is concerned. I was really interested only in video performance, where fairly large differences still exist. The 73-Inch DLP Television I cut through the maze of claims for the various competing HD video technologies—DLP, LCD, plasma, LED, etc.—by applying the following criterion: which of them would allow me to have a huge screen at a less than exorbitant price?

The answer: only DLP. I want to watch baseball and football on the largest screen available, because it’s more like being there; a 73-incher is about the minimum that satisfies me. I actually switched to the 73-inch DLP from a 100-inch projection screen and an LCD projector; the small loss in screen area was more than made up for by the vastly brighter picture. DLP is a projection technology (in this case rear projection) that uses an optical semiconductor chip containing an array of millions of microscopic mirrors.

You’ve seen the TV commercial; a young girl with a nasal New York accent (maybe she’s the client’s niece) exclaims: “It’s amazing! It’s the mirrors!” I’m not saying DLP is either superior or inferior to all the competing technologies. It’s just that the Diamond Series WD-73835 happened to be Mitsubishi’s top-of-the-line DLP rear-projection set when I acquired it, and it was more affordable than the largest plasma or LCD sets. You can buy it these days for around $2000 from many of the standard Internet sources. It’s not nearly as flat as the plasma and LCD sets; the projection mechanism bulges out in the rear; but I had no intention to mount it on the wall in any case.

Again I refer you to for the technical details; no need to be redundant. The owner’s guide is 88 pages long; it’s also downloadable from mitsubishi-tv.com if you really want to get involved (I didn’t think so). The point is that there are more features, settings, adjustments, bells and whistles than can be even briefly summarized here. The Video Experience This is really the only reason I am posting this review—to tell audio people who don’t pay too much attention to video that there is extreme high-fidelity TV available at a price well below the insanity level. The picture I am getting with this equipment is incredibly lifelike.

The resolution is 1080i on HD channels via Verizon FiOS (not available everywhere but the best provider where it is) and 1080p with Blu-ray DVDs played on the OPPO BDP-83 through its HDMI output into the TV’s HDMI input. I cannot say that 1080p is vastly superior to 1080i because even the latter is breathtakingly real when the transmission is faultless. You can count each hair in the stubble on the pitcher’s chin; you can see the threads in the buttons on somebody’s suit.

The colors are extremely vivid but still quite natural in the default mode, and best of all the picture remains very bright in a well-lit room. With Blu-ray at 1080p turn the same observations up a notch; the small details aren’t really crisper, just more fine-grained, more natural; indeed, the whole presentation is more natural, more film-like, more convincing in the gradations of color. It’s a truly beautiful picture.

Visitors who haven’t been exposed to really.