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The Rocky Mountain Audio Fest 2010, held last weekend at the Denver Marriott Tech Center Hotel, showcased the best and brightest high-end audio designs.

Hundreds of high-end manufacturers from North America, Europe, and Asia, from tiny one-person operations all the way up to industry giants like JBL were on hand. RMAF has a very different vibe than the Consumer Electronics Show held in Las Vegas every January--RMAF is a more grassroots affair.

Vandersteen Audio's incredible Model 7 ($45,000 per pair) features balsa wood/carbon-fiber woofer, midrange, and tweeter drivers individually hand-crafted by Richard Vandersteen himself. Each driver can take up to one day to build. The sound is more believably natural and realistic than that of any other speaker at the show. Stereo imaging was full-bodied and dimensionally convincing in ways no other speaker can match. Vandersteen speaker prices start under $1,000, and they're all made in Hanford, CA.

Vandersteen's sound just nudged past Kaiser Acoustics' stunning Kawero speakers. These slender towers are priced about the same as the Model 7, but were even more transparent and pure sounding. The made in Germany speaker's transient speed and dynamic punch were spectacular. The design is said to produce excellent sound quality in real rooms, without any acoustic treatment. Kaiser invested seven years into research and development of the Kawero speakers.

Entry-level audiophile gear from Napa Acoustic made an immediate strong impression. Their NA-208S ($199 a pair) speakers, mated with their NA-208A ($399) tube integrated, 25-watt amplifier sounded rich, with lots of detail. Napa's build quality is the best I've seen for budget-priced gear.

The best headphone sound came from the Audeze LCD-2 ($945). These full-size headphones had a huge, open sound, with effortless clarity. Audeze has a hit on its hands, and its customer waiting list is currently running to four weeks! I hope to get a pair for review soon. The LCD-2 was plugged into Red Wine's Isabellina HPA headphone amplifier, but the headphone can also work with iPods.

I had a great chat with headphone guru and Head-Fi founder Jude Mansilla about the future of high-end audio. Our conclusion: today's younger headphone audiophiles will be tomorrow's high-end audiophiles. That is, headphones are a great way to discover what high-end sound is all about, for a fraction of what a speaker-based high-end system would cost. Mansilla promised to introduce me to a bunch of young Head-Fi-ers, who are just starting to get into speakers. The next-generation audiophiles are an intensely passionate group of people! I'll report back soon about what they have to say. … Read more

Here's proof entrepreneurial spirit is alive and kicking in the U.K.: And Vinyly will press your (or your pet's) cremated ashes into 30 custom LPs, for a rather hefty fee!

You can record anything you want; just don't exceed the maximum playing time of 12 minutes per side. You can use a recording of your voice, play a banjo, or recite your last will and testament. Some And Vinyly customers opt to just press the ashes in the grooves and let the clicks and pops "speak" for themselves. Hey, it's your sound after … Read more

Times are tough, and even tougher for the music business, but that didn't stop Jeff Ogiba and Sommer Foster-Santoro from opening a new record store, Black Gold.

It's in Carroll Gardens, Brooklyn, and I dropped by on Thursday to see how they were doing. Black Gold also sells freshly brewed coffee from Rook Coffee Roasters and baked goods from Scratchbread, so the shop has great ambiance. The vinyl selection covers rock, punk, hard-core, blues, jazz, hip-hop, and everything in between. Prices seem very fair, and I spotted one of my favorite Rolling Stones LPs, "Love You Live,&… Read more

Every sound you hear in real life that doesn't come out of a speaker is analog. Analog audio is, simply put, an analogous record of sound, and an LP's groove is a literal imprint of the music's soundwaves. Analog magnetic tape is just as analog, but the waveform is recorded to the orientations of the iron oxide particles bonded to the tape. Tape or LP, analog recordings store audio signals as a continuous wave in or on the media and therefore have theoretically infinite resolution.

Digital audio recording converts the original sound into a sequence of numbers; sampled to convert the analog signal to a digital representation. Sampling is the division of the signal into discrete intervals (CD's sample rate is 44.1 thousands of samples per second). CDs have a 16-bit resolution and DVD-Audio discs can be encoded with a maximum of 24-bit resolution. DVD-A's have greater bit depth results in finer gradations of sound compared with CDs and MP3s, and is subjectively on par with analog recordings. Analog-to-digital processing is performed by a converter in the recording studio; and must be converted from digital-to-analog to be listened to.

If I lost you with all that talk about sampling and conversions, let's just say the prime difference between analog and digital is that analog recordings are continuous in time, and digital is sampled at distinct intervals. What happens between samples? Not much. Analog is always "on," digital is either on or off. Analog recording's theoretically infinite resolution refers to its continuity, compared with digital's on/off sampled nature.

If digital audio sounds a lot more complicated than analog, that's because it is. But digital recording offers very significant advantages over analog recording; it has inherently lower noise, perfect duplication capabilities, and superior speed accuracy (lower wow and flutter).

Most of the digital audio advances since the early days in the 1970s come from today's superior A/D and D/A converters. Digital audio has never sounded better than it does now.

The same can be said about analog: the best LPs, played back on a good turntable sound more like real, live music played by human beings than digital recordings ever do. That's my subjective opinion. On a more objective basis I'd say digital eliminates, or lowers analog-type distortions (noise, speed variations, and so on), but it suffers from far from perfect analog-to-digital and digital-to-analog conversion processes. To many, but not all, audiophiles and recording engineers, the best digital still sounds sterile, cold, and lacks natural warmth.… Read more

Vinyl accounts for less than 1 percent of overall music sales, but it's been making a bit of a comeback: sales almost doubled between 2007 and 2008 and grew another 33 percent in 2009, according to Nielsen. That's only 2.5 million records out of a total of more than 370 million albums sold in all formats, but record companies don't see many growing business areas, so they're suddenly jumping aboard.

New vinyl hasn't been this abundant since the mid-1980s--you can even find it in Best Buy and Wal-Mart. I give particular props to independent … Read more

Dave McNair has been playing, recording, mixing, producing, and mastering music for more than 30 years and has worked with a wide range of artists including Los Lobos, Stevie Ray Vaughan, Patti Smith, Miles Davis, Willie Nelson, Angelique Kidjo, and John Mayall. He now works for New York City's top mastering house, Sterling Sound.

I interviewed McNair for Tone Audio magazine, this is just a small part of it.

Q: How has the mastering engineer's work changed from the days when analog audio ruled the roost?

When they were cutting records from analog masters, mastering engineers were caretakers of rather fragile analog signals. It wasn't an easy thing, trying to get it from Point A to Point B without losing the music. Back then the mastering engineer didn't compress or limit the signal all that much, you wanted the end user to hear all of the punch and leading edge dynamics. But now that things are so clean on the recording end mastering is a bridge from mixing to the duplication process. You might be adding the color that might have once been added by analog processors or mixing consoles.

Q: 'Color,' is that the same thing as sweetening?

Right, I'm chasing this idea, I want to make CDs sound like LPs.

Q: By adding complementary distortions?

Not always, but sometimes. I want to get more of the effortless sound of vinyl on CDs.

Q: It's pretty complex, but I agree, analog distortions can sound more musical than digital, even high-resolution digital.

Right, they add flavor, texture, and harmonics, but I'm not speaking for all mastering engineers; many still use a very simple path and stay away from enhancements.

Q: Like compression, you guys love compression. But the music was already compressed during tracking and mixing, why compress it again?

 Not always, maybe 20 percent of the time I get stuff that's not compressed enough. That's only because there's so many more new-to-the-game, semiamateur engineers making records these days. They're recording some really great, artistically valid bands, but it winds up sounding like a documentary style of recording. They leave it to the mastering guy to make it work, so I need to make the sound more dense, gluing the elements together. … Read more

Mobile Fidelity Sound Lab has been perfecting the art of remastering audio since 1977. It currently offers a broad catalog of music, from Frank Sinatra and the Pixies to Yes and Little Richard on LP, SACD, and CD.

I recently chatted with Rob LoVerde, one of MoFi's mastering engineers,  about how the company's remasters differ from the original label's product.

First and foremost, he said that every MoFi LP--which was originally recorded to analog--is cut from an analog master tape. That's interesting  because ever since digital came onto the scene, most, probably about 99 percent, of LPs for sale now are cut from digital masters. So unless you're already buying MoFi LPs, you still haven't heard what a pure analog recording sounds like--older LPs, pressed before the 1980s are all-analog.

Second, LoVerde said that  MoFi never uses dynamic range compression.  Virtually every new recording is compressed during recording, mixing and mastering. But MoFi eliminates the last compression stage. He also said that equalization is either avoided completely or used sparingly.

LoVerde came to MoFi from Sony, so I was curious about how the two companies approached mastering. At Sony, LoVerde worked within a team, at MoFi each mastering project he takes on is controlled entirely by him. And at Sony, LoVerde had to work fast and complete one or two projects a day. At MoFi he can take his time and track down the best possible master tape. I was surprised to learn that LoVerde doesn't go out of his way to listen to previous remasters.  Instead, he's trying to transfer as much of the original master's sound to the final product as possible.

The analog master is also used for MoFi's SACDs and CDs. That means MoFi's analog sourced SACDs are totally PCM-free, which is extremely rare.  Most SACDs on the market have at least some PCM digital in them, which means they're not really delivering the format's true potential. MoFi SACDs are the real deal, pure SACD--using Direct Stream Digital DSD coding.

LoVerde said he knows that MoFi customers expect the best possible transfer, so he can't let a "good enough" mastering leave the plant. MoFi has occasionally bailed on a project because the sound wasn't up to its  standards.

I listened to a stack of MoFi vinyl and the sound was awesome. Yes, there's more bass, a near absence of vinyl's old friends--clicks and pops--but it's the clarity improvements that were the most impressive. … Read more

Maybe it's an American thing; we love big stuff. We equate size with quality, and think that exquisitely designed, silly, expensive products are always better than more affordable alternatives. Is the new iPod always better than last year's model? Then again, how do you define "better"?

A lot of audiophiles believe more watts, more power, higher digital sampling rates, higher resolution, heavier turntable platters, speakers with more drivers, bigger drivers, or more channels of sound will always produce better sound. It ain't necessarily so.

Don't get me wrong, I love high-end audio. But I … Read more

I don't care how many people get their music online, it'll never replace the joys of perusing CDs and LPs in brick-and-mortar record stores.

My Morning Jacket's Jim James apparently agrees with me. He said recently, "I think the thing that people forget about is the community and the memories that are created when you come to an independent and locally owned record store that you can only get in that town."

That's right. There are other humans there, looking at and buying music. The store, if it's any good, plays great stuff … Read more