OK. First, let us talk up our new, easy-to-find location in Royal Oak. The DMA signage is now up, even if we’re putting finishing touches on the shop’s roomy interior, which sports a fetching industrial look with clean lines and soft neutral tones. More importantly, our two listening rooms are finally ready, beautifully stocked and systemized with some of the sweetest two-channel hi-fi gear you’ll find in Michigan and beyond. We’re ready for any audio head or passionate music fan who’s even considering a mind-blowing stereo experience for their home. Come see!

New Hardware!

Luxman DA-200 DAC

You will not find a better DAC at this price. In short, this sparkly Japan-crafted gem simply rocks. Here’s the deal. It can convert basically anything, has two line level single ended analog inputs, a pair of S/PDIF digital ins for 24/192, and a dedicated 24/96 USB input for both Mac and PC. There’s fixed and variable outs, balanced output and even an integrated, pure Class A headphone amp, which is shockingly good.

You’ll love it because the fully balanced DA-200 ($2795) gives up that luxurious Lux sound — tonally correct and goosebump-inducing — with incredible ambient retrieval, just like Lux’s line of SACD players. The front panel display screen boasts a seven-segment LED indicator that monitors all input and output sampling frequencies in real time … and … shall we bore you further with specs? Nah. All you need to know from us is this is the real deal, lovely and sleek, at a workin’ man’s price.

Price: $2795

Made in Japan
Available for Demonstration

VTL MB-450 MkIII Signature Monoblocks

VTL’s handsomely updated MB-450 tube monoblocks ($18,000/pair) offer a sound that’s too rich to describe without polluting this newsletter with more adjectives. But we’ll give it a go anyway. At a recent DMA open house, a roomful of ’philes and music connoisseurs mewed and marveled over these VTL amplifiers, thus validating the glowing review in Stereophile earlier this year. They loved the gripping low octaves, the lean, rounded top end and the rich and detailed mid-band. No one was walking out of this showcase.

Behind each of the amp’s graceful brushed aluminum and smoked-glass exterior sit eight 6550/KT-88s in the push-pull output stage, a 12AT7 input tube, and a 12BH7 driver. Each amplifier produces 425W into 5 ohms in tetrode mode or 225W in triode, from 20Hz to 20kHz.

More, VTL has mastered auto-biasing. This “smart” (our word, not theirs) amp continuously monitors each tube, and adjusts its bias on power-up and when it’s idling. There’s also an onboard diagnostic system. It’s a like a tube amp for those who hate the hassle of tube amps!

Price: $18,000/Pair

Made in USA
Available for Demonstration

MSB M-202 Class A Monoblocks and Platinum DAC

First, the MSB Platinum 202 Class A ($17,500/pair) amplifiers look like mini versions of some comely towers that Jean Nouvel might’ve designed. With 200 Pure Class A wpc, these upright, finned monoblocks sound exactly how they look — utterly magnificent.

MSB’s line of DACs (from $8500) with outboard power supplies, and optional attenuators, create an audio realism that stuns. Our blanket statement? We think the new MSB DACs are the finest for home audio in the world. We even have them in our homes.

Price: $17,500/Pair (M-202), From $8,500 Platinum IV DAC

Made in USA
Available for Demonstration

Music Reviews

Here are some album reviews of well-mastered new releases we thought you’d enjoy, including Björk’s latest, a Rhino Deluxe reissue of a Bobby Charles chestnut, and Wilco’s new one.

Bjork – Biophilia (Nonesuch)

The breadth and outlandishness of Björk’s multimedia project Biophilia makes it easy to forget that it’s really just a collection of songs — ten adventurous, multilayered new one by an artist for whom those attributes are status quo. Like her prior full-length, 2007’s Volta, the new material is a condensation of her first decade of aural stunt work; the tracks still go off on thrilling, surprising tangents, but Björk has little left to prove as a producer or songwriter.

What makes Biophilia a pleasure, then, is detail. Overflowing with good, bad, and bizarre ideas, the album rewards intense concentration, particularly when seen as a paean to science as art. It may be absurd to use a Tesla coil as an instrument (on the aptly titled “Thunderbolt”), but it’s a neat trick, as are the songs structured around lunar cycles and tectonic activity. But it’s the raw beauty of Björk’s singing, and the seductive thrust of the melodies (her best since Vespertine) that linger — the swirling vocals on “Moon” and the celebratory percussive attack that closes “Crystalline” will assure Biophilia’s place in fans’ hearts more than any iPad app experiment could. — Nathan Phillips

Bobby Charles – Bobby Charles (Rhino Handmade)

Musical archeology rewards. Look hard enough and you could discover each day until you die a mind-blowing record from any era of recorded music. This 1972 self-titled Bobby Charles album is one of those. It faded upon release and has only in recent years earned a word-of-mouth cult fan base; hence this three-disc deluxe reissue.

But this Louisiana-born singer-songwriter started long before that: At 15, he wrote “See Ya Later Alligator” and signed to Chess Records, but because he was the only white guy on that label’s tours he received death threats. He then chose a private life below cultural waterlines, embraced songwriting and in ensuing years saw his songs covered by many, from Fats Domino to Kris Kristofferson.
By ’72, Charles, on the lam from a Nashville pot bust, had landed in Woodstock, N.Y., a place that still seduced Dylan, and where Levon Helm, Richard Manuel, Rick Danko and Garth Hudson from the Band, and Paul Butterfield, Amos Garrett and others, would plug in and play sweat-soaked, drunk and sleepless until sunup.
The album features those guys, plus Dr. John, and pedal steel great Ben Keith, and it’s helmed by Danko and Band producer John Simon. So it’s at once wild-eyed and afternoon-nap lazy; the Deep South courted by hesitant piano melodies and backwater beats, shambling organ, roadhouse accordion, guitars and occasional knee-slap rhythms. It’s easy to be hypnotized by Charles’ talky, Southern-compliant croon and effortless-sounding narratives.

Day-to-day joys and sadness inform the songs, but listen deeper and it’s sometimes the sound of Charles’ ability to detect bullshit, or his quest for personal freedom, a place to lose those “Tennessee blues.” He’s both a sharp-witted stoner misanthrope and a man in love with everything around him. By that delineation, the singer defines the very idea of cool, and you can hear it — his is melody put to an earned wisdom told in deceptively simple folkish phrases: “It’s all small town talk … don’t believe a word/ They’ll try to do it every time.” Charles finds beauty within reach too; on “I Must be in a Good Place Now,” he sees “a butterfly and named it after you …”

The album’s frayed grace and blend of nomadic genres — gospel, rock, country, soul, R&B, folk and beer-drinker confessionals — sound as if Charles (who died last year) is unmoved by a world beyond the serpents of spliff smoke rising from his front porch in rural Louisiana.

This limited edition set is housed in a wooden case, complete with beautifully grainy photos and well-done Brian Baer liners; it features 25 songs beyond the original album’s 10, most of which have never been released — outtakes from the original sessions, plus a an album’s worth of songs recorded in ’74 with Doors producer Paul Rothchild. (Including the jaw-drop beauty of “The Jealous Kind,” on which the pedal steel drones a sunset melody as Charles’ weathered vocal croons, “You wonder how I spend my time/ And how I get along/Stayin’ stoned and singin’ homemade songs.” The long version (on Disc 2) soothes like narcotics. No wonder Joe Cocker, Ray Charles, Etta James and others covered it. Disc 3 contains an often hilarious 30-minute interview Charles did with Dr. Demento, in the argot of the time, shortly before the album’s release. — Brian Smith

Wilco – The Whole Love (Anti)

Wilco couldn’t have crafted a stronger refutation to nine years of agreeably fat-and-happy records than the crazed salvo that opens The Whole Love, “Art of Almost.” In this instantly disorienting successor to Yankee Hotel Foxtrot’s “I Am Trying to Break Your Heart,” Jeff Tweedy sneers with drunken desperation over an ominous wall of sound somewhere between Crazy Horse and trip-hop. It’s natural for fans who’ve missed the endearing imperfection of Foxtrot to feel disenchanted when the record seems to confine all its wildest abandon to the first seven minutes. Repeated listens prove that feeling unfounded. The music that follows builds from neither complacency nor bald experimentalism. Instead, this is soft, ethereal, intricate rock music that favorably calls to mind Neil Young’s messy late ‘70s records and R.E.M.’s difficult, overwhelming New Adventures in Hi-Fi.

Wilco will never be the hungry young band of 2002 again, but the group turned reluctant resignation itself into an urgent subject for addictive, sobering rockers and ballads that wander gracefully off into detailed oblivion. The cumulative effect is that we have here possibly the band’s most emotionally honest work to date, which is saying something. — Nathan Phillips

Reviews courtesy Detroit Metro Times