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.
Whenever my family and I travel together, I catch a glimpse of how the human mind works. Immediately after checking into our hotel, my wife goes to work distributing the contents of our suitcases among the room's various cabinets, closets, and drawers. Then, the next morning, I discover the location of my underpants heuristically: seeking without knowing, in the hope that some newly learned pattern will be imprinted on my brain. Thus do I earn the luxury of complacence: Every morning thereafter, my things are right where I know they should be.
On weekends, I play guitar in a string band whose membership varies between two and five members, depending on the location of the job and the amount of pay offered. We're reasonably good at picking and singing, but we lack the originality that would make someone want to buy our albums, which is why we haven't made them. Our little group is McDonald's, not Le Circe or even Applebee's, and I'm at peace with that.
I'm old enough to remember my family's first table radio that was made out of plastic. It was cream-colored, and it sat on the rearmost edge of our kitchen table: a less-than-timeless design in its own right, destined to be discarded at the end of one era and treasured again at the dawn of another, for more or less the same reason. But in 1958, a cream-colored plastic radio looked fresh, clean, and right, and its cheap wooden predecessor seemed dowdy and sad by comparison. That would all change in later years, of course. Then it would all change again.
Today, as every Saturday, I brought my daughter to the stables where she has her riding lessons. But this time was different. As we pulled up the long gravel driveway, we found ourselves dodging a riderless horse, moving at a trot across our path. It turned out that the very cold weather had caused a latch to malfunction—"gate won't close, railing's froze"—and five horses had gotten loose.