⌈ THE EDITORS is a series of interviews with editors of audio magazines from all over the world – both printed ones, as well as online magazines and portals. It started on January 1st 2012 and 37 interview records have been published so far – the one below will be No. 38. Our aim is to make our readers more familiar with the people who usually hide behind the products that we review. It is the “WHO IS WHO?” of specialized audio press. ⌋

Online audio magazines are still referred to as “PORTALS,” “SERVICES,” or “WEBSITES” – as if we were still in the era of dial-up modems, when the series Dynasty was a huge hit on TV, the primary visual medium back at the time. Similarly, the activities of the SOUNDNEWS magazine are described in various ways.

Its headquarters are located in Bucharest, historically known as the “Paris of the East” (Micul Paris – Little Paris) due to its elegant, 19th-century architecture inspired by France. The magazine was founded in January 2019 and is run by Sandu Vitalie, a well-known Romanian audiophile and audio equipment reviewer. Although the website publishes content in English to reach a global community of audio enthusiasts, its team and operational base are situated in Romania.

‖ Catalin Cristescu, our interlocutor

The “Editors” tab on the website gives us the following information:

Below, in a section dedicated to the magazine's journalists, we’ll find biographies of the founder and three other reviewers. Among them is Catalin Cristescu, our today's interlocutor. A graphic designer and user interface (UI) designer, user experience specialist, and – as we read – “a tech addict, an enthusiastic entrepreneur and last but not least – a passionate music lover (...) I’m very much into Future-Fi listening, choosing wireless streaming and state-of-the-art digital to analog conversion techniques.”

‖ This is what the “Soundnews” home page looks like

As it turns out, he’s familiar with “High Fidelity” and has been reading our reviews for some time now; he often draws on them when writing his own reviews. So, when he sat down next to me in Vienna during one of the official dinners and introduced himself, I couldn’t miss the opportunity to learn more about the Romanian audio scene.

CATALIN CRISTESCU is interviewed by WOJCIECH PACUŁA.

CATALIN CRISTESCU I am an engineer, a designer, and a solutions architect. These three words describe my career, but they also describe my way of perception and I think that is why I ended up here rather than somewhere else.

I have loved music for as long as I can remember. But loving music and being transfixed by the reproduction of music are two different things, and the second one arrived later, and it was much harder to achieve. Somewhere along the way I heard a system that did not sound like a system. It sounded like people playing in a room. After that, there was no going back.

‖ One of Catalin’s latest tests

My working life has always been a mix of engineering and design: graphic design, UI design, advertising, and I have never been able to keep those two halves apart. That is probably the whole explanation. High-end audio is one of the very few fields where the technical and the artistic aspect carry equal weight, where measurements and emotions are both admissible evidence.

An amplifier is mathematics and an amplifier is a personality, and neither statement cancels the other. For someone who has spent a career refusing to choose between the engineer’s question and the designer’s question, that is an irresistible place to stand.

WP • How did your adventure with “Soundnews” start? When was the magazine set up, where and why?

AS • My adventure with “Soundnews” started thanks to a friendship, which is how most good things about this hobby begin.

I met Sandu Vitalie a few years ago through the hobby itself. He had already been running “Soundnews” for some time (since 2019), an online platform and a YouTube channel, and one day he asked whether I would like to write something. I wrote one review. By the end of it, we both understood we wanted the same thing and, more importantly, that we refused the same things. That was enough. We became partners in developing the magazine further together.

The division has stayed natural ever since. Sandu continues with the YouTube channel and his own written reviews; I continue with the long-form written work and photography. We are two different temperaments serving one set of values, and I think readers can feel that the site is made by people rather than assembled by a content schedule.

WP • How does “Soundnews” work? What are your criteria for selecting products for review?

AS • We receive a lot of requests, so selection is the real work.

The first question we ask is simple: does this product bring something to the table? It must sound good for the money. It must show honest design and honest manufacturing. I can forgive a modest product almost anything except pretense.

Then comes the part that surprises people. We don't review products we don't like. If something sounds bad, doesn't work properly, or disappoints us, we don’t publish a demolition. We go back to the manufacturer and tell them what we found: the problem, the discrepancy, the thing that does not behave. Very often that conversation is more useful to everybody than an article would have been.

‖ The Catalina audio system is based on the Wilson Audio WATT/Puppy 50th Anniversary speakers

I know this position is controversial, I know this position is contested, so let me defend it properly. I see no benefit whatsoever in trashing a manufacturer’s work in public. It serves no purpose. It does not make the product better; it does not make the reader richer, and it does not make me a more honest writer; it only makes me a louder one. Somebody spent years of their life on that product. If it failed, they deserve to hear why from me directly, not to read it from strangers in a comments section.

What that means in practice is that when we do publish a review, we mean every word of it. If we wrote about it, we believe in it, and we stand behind it. And the proof is embarrassingly literal: we end up buying a great many of the products we review. This is not the best thing for our financial health. But it is the clearest possible evidence that our enthusiasm is real, and I would rather have that reputation than any other.

A genuinely good product for sensible money, or a cost-no-object piece that pushes the state of the art – is worth writing about. Everything else is worth a private email at the most.

WP • Printed versus online magazines – what are their strengths and weaknesses?

AS • I still read printed magazines, but I read them online.

That sentence contains the whole contradiction. As a designer of many years, I am deeply attached to the page – to a considered layout, to typography, to the discipline that a fixed format imposes on a writer and an editor. A page has edges. Edges force decisions. Endless scrolling forces nothing, and it shows.

Photography is where I feel this most acutely. We are fanatical about it at Soundnews, and we work hard to produce the best product photographs we can. A well-designed spread gives a photograph the space and the silence it needs. A website gives it a slot between two adverts. But affection is not a business plan. The physical magazine, as a piece of paper you hold, died some time ago, and I do not believe anything can revive it. I would still choose a well-designed digital page layout over infinite scroll any day – that battle is at least worth fighting. The paper one is over.

And a harder commercial truth lies underneath. Every metric an advertiser cares about – audience, reach, engagement, attribution – exist only in the online world. A printed page cannot tell you who read it. In an industry where marketing budgets have to be justified line by line, that is decisive, and no amount of nostalgia will outvote it.

WP • What are your favourite types of audio equipment: vinyl or digital, tubes or transistors?

AS • I watched the return of vinyl and physical media with my eyes wide open, and it taught me something I did not expect.

‖ An integrated amp under test – the Lab12 Integre4

I will make no predictions. But I have learned what physical media give you, why streaming cannot replace it, and why it's not what most people assume. It is not about sound quality, and it is not about some unique analog magic. Digital equipment today can sound better than vinyl, with almost the same analog fingerprint. That argument is over, or at least it is no longer interesting for me.

What physical media give you is a sense of ownership, and I think this will matter more and more. You own that piece of music. You own that piece of art: the sleeve, the cover, the object. And crucially, you own one specific version of it. You know that this particular disc was pressed in a particular year, from a particular analog tape, mastered by one particular engineer, and that it sounds the way it sounds for reasons you can trace.

Streaming cannot promise you that. The version drifts. The master changes underneath you without announcement, and the file you loved last year may not be the file you play tonight. That inconsistency is, I believe, going to drive more and more people back to physical formats. And I have not even mentioned the flood of AI-generated music now polluting the catalogs, which is only going to get worse.

So my answer isn't “vinyl” or “digital.” My answer is that I want to know exactly what I am listening to. Physical media is currently the only format that will tell me. And the same goes for tubes or transistors. I have almost a full tube system right now (the LampizatOr Pacific DAC with gorgeous 300B tubes, Aesthetix Calypso full tube line preamplifier, Aesthetix Atlas hybrid power amplifier, and Aesthetix Rhea, one of the rarest tube-only preamplifiers for the lowest-current MC transducers).

I would say I have tubes tattooed on my forehead right now. This does not tell the whole story, still...

WP • What do you think about the present situation on the audio and high-end market?

AS • I have mixed feelings about their status, and I will try to be precise about both halves.

The technical advances of recent years have been tremendous. It is now almost impossible to buy something that sounds genuinely awful, regardless of the price. Everything sounds at least decent. That is a remarkable achievement, and we should say so more often. But the high-end part of our hobby, while riding this golden era of technology, is being poisoned by its own pricing. Everything is more and more and more expensive.

‖ The Lampizator Pacific DAC used here as the D/A converter

Let me give an example that made me angry. A manufacturer launches a state-of-the-art phono stage at 50K (fifty thousand) euros. Outrageous, but fine, let us accept the argument: it is a technical demonstration, a statement piece, a one-off proof of what is possible.

Except it never stays that way. Within months, every other high-end manufacturer sees a market segment they cannot afford to miss, and they all climb aboard. Suddenly there is a category of fifty-thousand phono stages. Then it happens with everything: million-euro loudspeakers, five-hundred-thousand amplifiers, and let us not even start on cables. With time, the situation becomes ridiculous. Not because the products are bad; most of them are extraordinary. But because the mechanism drags prices to levels that were unthinkable only a few years ago, and it does so with its own momentum, independent of cost, value, or sense.

That is one side. The other side is the business model itself: distributor, dealer, reseller, everyone wanting their slice of the cake. And once you understand that structure, you understand the fifty-thousand phono stage differently. The manufacturer may see only thirty percent of that number. The rest is consumed by the distribution chain and by the discount the end customer eventually negotiates. The price is not greed; it is arithmetic imposed by a structure.

This is precisely why I think that structure is now unsustainable. I am fairly certain we will see a shift sooner than most people expect, with more manufacturers choosing to sell directly and abandoning the traditional chain. It has already begun; Dynaudio’s withdrawal from the US market was a serious signal. Everyone in the industry is now watching to see what a brand of that size does next, and what happens to it. So am I.

WP • What do you think of audio shows, like the new Vienna High End destination? Are they necessary?

AS • Given everything I have just said about the crumbling business model, I think shows are about to become more important than they have ever been.

‖ The analog source in Catalina’s system is the Acoustic Signature Montana NEO turntable with the Acoustic Signature TA-5000 Neo arm

If the distribution chain thins out, the show becomes the place where a customer and a manufacturer actually meet. It becomes one of the few remaining opportunities to hear several serious systems in a single day and compare them, imperfectly, in bad rooms, under impossible conditions, yes, but compare them nonetheless. That is not nothing. For many listeners it is the only chance they will ever get.

And there is something beyond commerce. A show puts industry people and genuinely passionate individuals in the same rooms, breathing the same air, arguing in corridors. It keeps the hobby alive as a culture rather than a product catalog.

So yes. In a society being sorted into ever smaller digital compartments, I think physical gatherings will only grow in power. Shows are not a survival from the past. They are, increasingly, the point.

WP • Have you recently found anything new and interesting in audio, in terms of technology?

AS • I’ve been looking at a few things that are more closely connected with one another than they first appear.

• I am really interested in the new wave of Class D amplifiers, genuinely high-end Class D, not the compromise it had been for so long. What is being done now bears almost no relation to the reputation the topology carried a decade ago.
• The rebirth of vinyl and physical media in general, which extends much further than turntables. Everybody is building CD transports and players again, which would have seemed absurd not long ago.
• Loudspeakers keep getting technically better, and at a rate that is easy to miss because it happens quietly and continuously rather than in announcements.
• Acoustic room treatment that a real person can actually live with. This matters enormously. For years the choice was between a bad-sounding living room and a good-sounding room nobody wanted to sit in. That is finally changing, and it may do more for real-world sound quality than any component.
• The growing acceptance and, more importantly, the growing understanding of high-end networking equipment. The debate has moved on from whether it matters to why it matters, which is a much healthier place to be.

‖ The Aesthetix Rhea Eclipse phono stage under the turntable

WP • We have met in Vienna – a few words about audio in this rather small but wealthy country?

AS • A small correction first, and I hope you will forgive it: I am Romanian, not Austrian. So, I answer as a frequent and admiring visitor rather than an insider, and then, if you will allow me, I would like to say a few words about my own country, because I think the comparison is the interesting part.

What strikes me about Austria is that its audio industry did not appear from nowhere. It grew out of a musical culture that has been taken seriously for three hundred years. Vienna is not a city that discovered music recently. When Brodmann built loudspeakers on the principles of the Viennese piano tradition, on Bösendorfer’s heritage, that was not marketing. That is a country reaching for the thing it already knows better than anybody.

The industry itself is remarkably diverse for such a small country: Pro-Ject in Mistelbach, who almost single-handedly kept affordable turntable manufacturing alive in Europe when everyone else had given up on vinyl; Vienna Acoustics; Ayon and their tube electronics; Wiener Lautsprecher Manufaktur; and Austrian Audio, which was born out of the closing of AKG’s Vienna operation, when a group of engineers refused to let that knowledge disperse.

A pattern emerges in those company stories: a stubborn commitment to continuity, a refusal to let accumulated craft evaporate simply because a market moved on. Their manufacturers behave less like startups chasing a trend and more like custodians of something they inherited, producing a particular kind of products: unshowy, well-made, built for the long term. Not coincidentally, that is exactly the right temperament for a country now hosting the most important audio show in Europe.

WP • And what does this look like in Romania – what is the difference between your country and the rest of the world?

AS • Romania could hardly be more different from Austria in its history, and I suspect Polish readers will recognize this pattern immediately. We are a young market with many years of experience. Like Poland, we were cut off from Western hi-fi for decades, which produced a generation that learned to listen with enormous attention and very little equipment. You can still hear the consequences: Romanian audiophiles tend to be sceptical, patient, and unusually resistant to marketing. They want to hear it for themselves first, and they are in no hurry to buy.

‖ Our interlocutor uses two MC turntable cartridges: the Ortofon MC A95 and the Hana Umami Red

Where Austria inherited an industry, we are building one, and our market is small but disproportionately serious. It is served by a handful of dealers who genuinely know their products, such as AV Store, HiFi Expert, or e-audio.ro, and who function as clubs and listening rooms as much as shops. That personal, unhurried, in-person model is exactly what I described earlier as the probable future of this industry. In Romania, it never stopped being the present.

WP • What ten albums would you recommend to our readers and why?

AS • These are the records that have earned their place in my listening room over years of reviewing, and each one taught me something about a component at some point.

˻ 1 ˺ ETTA CAMERON & NIKOLAJ HESS, Etta, Stunt Records ⸜ 2009

It is my secret treasure that I share it reluctantly. Etta Cameron was a Bahamian-Danish singer, and this album was released one year before her death. Hers is one of those rare voices that translates directly into boundless emotion — sometimes it feels as though her soul has left the constraints of the body entirely. While listening to Summertime, You’ve Changed and Motherless Child I simply cried, more than once, and I am not embarrassed to say so. Start here.

˻ 2 ˺ BILL EVANS TRIO, Waltz for Debby, Riverside ⸜ 1961

Recorded live at the Village Vanguard on 25 June 1961, famous for the music and notorious for the audience chatter and clinking glasses. Scott LaFaro died in a car accident eleven days later, which gives the whole record an unbearable weight. On a great system, the trio is not projected in front of you; it is in the room with you. The best test I know of whether a system can make the past present.

‖ The Reliable UberLight Frame over the turntable, also present in the “High Fidelity” system

˻ 3 ˺ DUKE ELLINGTON, Ellington at Newport, Columbia ⸜ 1956

For Diminuendo and Crescendo in Blue and Paul Gonsalves’s twenty-seven choruses, played to a crowd that got up and danced in the aisles. What makes it extraordinary is that the orchestra behind him is not a backdrop; it breathes, shifts, and answers him, with every section holding its own physical space. When a system gets this right, it stops being a historical document and becomes an event happening now.

˻ 4 ˺ THE DAVE BRUBECK QUARTET, Time Out, Columbia ⸜ 1959 (Analogue Productions 45 rpm issue)

Take Five has been played so often it has become furniture, which is exactly why it is such a merciless test. A great front end makes it dangerous again: Joe Morello’s snare cracking with real speed and skin, Paul Desmond’s alto floating above it with that dry-martini elegance that must never harden. If the 5/4 pulse does not make your foot move involuntarily, something in the chain is wrong.

˻ 5 ˺ COLEMAN HAWKINS, BEN WEBSTER, Encounters, Verve ⸜ 1957 (the Acoustic Sounds series)

One of the most generous documents of instrumental personality ever pressed. Two giants of the same instrument and two entirely different souls: Hawkins muscular and architectural, carving phrases with harmonic authority; Webster arriving as breath itself, that smoky sub-tone blooming before the note fully forms. A lesser system homogenizes them into “beautiful saxophone sound”. A great one refuses.

˻ 6 ˺ ISAO SUZUKI, Black Orpheus, Three Blind Mice ⸜ 1976

A pilgrimage record. Suzuki’s cello and bass live in the shadowy lower registers where most equipment offers approximation instead of truth, and the legendary Three Blind Mice pressings capture it with a directness that still startles. Wood, rosin, string tension, room air – things I had genuinely never heard from this record before hearing it properly.

Follow it with Orang-Utan from the Suzuki Quartet for raw energy and almost brutal dynamics. If you have never explored the Japanese audiophile catalogue, begin here and reserve your whole evening.

˻ 7 ˺ ANOHNI AND THE JOHNSONS, Turning (Live), Rough Trade ⸜ 2014

A voice of trembling vigor and sensuality, captured live with extraordinary delicacy. I Fell in Love with a Dead Boy, Cripple and the Starfish, Find the Rhythm of Your Love, music in its purest form. It is also the best test I know for listening fatigue: on a system that is genuinely right, you can play this on repeat for hours and never want it to stop.

˻ 8 ˺ MARCUS MILLER, Laid Black, Blue Note ⸜ 2018

Miller is my favorite contemporary and electric jazz artist, and I make no apology for it. He wrote and produced three of Miles Davis’s albums: Tutu, Music from Siesta and Amandla, and won Grammys of his own. Laid Black is a superb test of effortlessness rather than force: when a system is truly capable, this record does not get louder; it gets easier. The bass texture goes deep and stays articulate.

˻ 9 ˺ LADY BLACKBIRD, Black Acid Soul, Foundation Music ⸜ 2021

Proof that this music is still being made now, and made properly. A voice recorded with real intimacy, in a mix that leaves it room to breathe, over playing of complete seriousness. It is also unexpectedly demanding on macro-dynamics; anything that plays it laid-back is telling you something about itself, not about the record.

˻ 10 ˺ THE THE, Ensoulment, Ear Music | Cinéola ⸜ 2024

Matt Johnson’s return after many years, and worth the wait. Darkly textured grooves, twangy guitar, bass, and piano framing that unmistakable baritone, played with an artful intensity. Tonal richness and bandwidth in equal measure. A reminder that records worth obsessing over are still arriving, and that we should not spend our whole listening lives in 1959.

WP • Thank you for the conversation and see you at shows!

AS • Thank you, goodbye!

▓ Catalin Cristescu’s audio system

‖ Speakers & amplification
• speakers: Wilson Audio WATT/Puppy 50th Anniversary
• amplifier: Aesthetix Atlas Eclipse (6SN7 input stage)
• line preamplifier: Aesthetix Calypso Eclipse (12AX7 and 6922/DJ8)
• phono stage: Aesthetix Rhea Eclipse (12AX7, 6922/DJ8)

‖ Sources
• DAC: LampizatOr Pacific DAC (KR Audio 300B, KR Audio 5U4G, Amperex 7119)
• file player: Rockna Wavelight Server (working only as a streamer/Roon endpoint)
• Roon server: Gustard S26
• network: optical network separation with Roboli Switch S80 ExpertLine
• turntable: Acoustic Signature Montana NEO with Acoustic Signature TA-5000 NEO tonearm
• MC cartridges: Ortofon MC A95, Hana Umami Red

‖ Cables
• speaker cables: Albedo Monolith Reference MKIII
• line interconnects: Albedo Monolith Reference XLR
• phono interconnects: Crystal Cable Van Gogh Interconnect
• digital interconnect: Pink Faun USB and network

‖ Power supply
• AC power strip: Tsakiridis Super Athena
• AC power cables: AudioQuest Dragon Source and High Current

‖ Lighting
• lamp: Reliable UberLight Frame