People love it when audio reviewers reach for that highest of all compliments: "I enjoyed the thing so much, I decided to keep it" (footnote 1). Manufacturers love it for obvious reasons. Readers love it because nuance is out of style at the moment, and the ambiguities implied by less decisive conclusions can be frustrating to adults who read with their mouths open. Publishers love it because strong, declarative statements have been scientifically proven, in double-blind reading tests, to attract subscribers.
Here's something that's difficult to visualize but nonetheless true: If you attempt to isolate from their environment the working bits of a record player—the main bearing, platter, tonearm, and cartridge—by means of an elastic drive belt and a suspended subchassis of the usual sort, you'll create almost as many problems as you solve.
Moderation, like a natural death, is what most thinking people roll toward, if only because extremism requires too much energy: Extreme points of view are hard to hold without a certain amount of self-delusion, and the brighter you are, the harder your self-deluder has to work.
I was going through a box of old photographs, lingering over some pictures I'd taken at the Quad loudspeaker factory in Huntingdon, England, a number of years ago. It was my second trip overseas—1994 or '95—and while I remember being intrigued by the machinery and the test equipment and all, I know that the real impact of the tour was probably lost on me: I wasn't yet a Quad owner.
Today is Monday, February 5, and it's so buttercupping cold outside that the custodian couldn't get our school's oil burner started. Consequently, my daughter is home for the day, playing on the rug in front of the fireplace. (Santa brought a wooden castle and a fine selection of medieval figurines, some of which are headed for the dungeon as we speak.) I'm at my desk in the music room, on the upwind side of the house—and the wind is murder. The west wall is cold. The north wall is cold. The floorboards are cold. But the air inside is warm as toast: I'm driving my Quad ESL speakers with a Joule Electra VZN-80 amplifier ($12,000) that isn't at all bashful about squandering a goodly amount of energy as heat. I can't think of a more delightful quality for an amp to have, at least on a day like this.
When audio designer Ken Shindo was a little boy, his father kept an enormous collection of 78rpm records in their home in Tokyo. During the final days of World War II, the Japanese authorities did their best to evacuate the city, but the elder Shindo was steadfast: He refused to leave, for fear that the records would be gone when he returned.
A moment of silence, please, for the mouse in my shed: I've had a trap there for weeks, baited with peanut butter—I should have just waited for the food poisoning to do its work—and the poor little bastard finally found it.
Is it my imagination, or has the low-power tube movement of the last 15 years gone hand in hand with a renewed interest in moving-coil step-up transformers? Trannies remain misunderstood or ignored by most of the audio press—requests for review samples continue to be met with genial shock, rather like tourism in the Budapest of the 1990s—but enthusiasm for the practice seems only to grow. That leaves me to wonder: Did the unquestioning use of active pre-preamps for so many years grow out of the same bad attitude that gave us all those awful-sounding high-power amps and low-sensitivity loudspeakers? You know the mindset: Parts are cheap. Gain is free. Do it because you can...
I'll spare you my thoughts on the matter—they're guessable anyway—and simply say that the war with Iraq has given me and my family the jitters, just as it seems to have done with millions of other people. But rather than giving 10 more dollars to Henkel Consumer Adhesives, my wife and I have taken a different tack: We made up a Road Box. A Road Box is a cardboard box full of things for us to take from our home if we have to leave in a hurry. We keep it near the door that leads to the garage.