The walls of the Stereophile offices have been shaking to the sounds of Mogwai's latest, The Hawk is Howling. Yes, we know that hawks don't howl. (Or do they?) We also know the difference between a hawk and a bald eagle. (Sourpusses.)
Comparisons to a young Bob Dylan are inevitable. There’s the same sort of defiance, the odd insouciance, the long lines of poetry squeezed out and hacked out and blown out like kisses, too. The guitar work is very goodscintillating at times and always passionately wroughtbut it’s the voice that gets you. The voicechildlike but crotchety as hell, delicate but yearning, beautiful but completely wrong. The voice is what gets you. Kristian Matsson is The Tallest Man On Earth; he plays rock and roll, and plans to be forgotten when he’s gone.
The Tape Project’s Piper Payne is a talented mixing and mastering engineer and an active member of the Audio Engineering Society. (Be still, John Atkinson's beating heart!) She also enjoys origami, bunnies, the blues, and Bottlehead headphone amplifiers.
Look: I mean, listen: I mean, look: I'm the sort of guy who is comfortable with the idea that there's more than just music to this whole hi-fi thing. It's not all about the music. That's bullshit. It's also about friendship and peace and art and beauty. It's about belonging. You can get into hi-fi even if you don't listen to music. What? Yes! It's about getting drunk and high and lost. It's about girls and boys. It's also about the gear. But you can get into hi-fi even if you don't like gear. What? Yes! It's about more than just what the gear does. It's also about how the gear looks when it does what it does. Hi-fi is a full-on sensory attack, a blissed-out mind-fuck, an ocean, a sky, a lion in the tall, yellow grass. We feel with our heads and our hearts, with our ears and our eyes and every little bit of our little human selves.
We didn’t listen to the Thoress F2A11 integrated amplifier, but just look at it: It’s awesome.
Entirely hand-built by Reinhard Thoress, the amplifier uses NOS Siemens F2A11 power tetrodes, which High Water Sound's Jeffrey Catalano explained, were popular in the Klangfilm cinema amplifiers of post-war Germany. Three line-level inputs are selectable by a rear-panel rotary switch, while separate volume controls for each channel can be adjusted using carefully matched high-grade rotary potentiometers. Why? I don’t know why, but it’s cool.
According to Catalano, the sound of the F2A11 is crystal clear. It “just cuts through all the BS.” There you go. The Thoress F2A11 looks like some kind of a tank, delivers about 6Wpc, and costs $8000.
In the conference room, where I have lunch each day with two of my favorite people in the world (I am very lucky), I found myself tapping my fingers in constant rhythm against the long, veneered table. Why was I doing this?
That first morning, I woke and immediately began to worry. How would I know what to wear? What if there were train delays? What if there had been some horrible catastrophe requiring that I stay away from Manhattan?
If you were to do a Google image search on my work at Stereophile, you'd see that, basically, my days are simply filled with reading, writing, coordinating, and planning. No two consecutive days, however, are the same.