Getting Medieval
"'When you say <I>fantasy</I>,' said a tall, pale, blonde woman, 'you think <I>medieval</I>. So: Why?'
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Katie Roiphe, Gay Divorcee
"In the weeks after my husband moved out, I received an email from someone offering to help me clean the house or cook, an email that evokes images of dishes piling up in the sink, flies hovering around half-eaten peanut-butter sandwiches, laundry accumulating. I wonder where these nightmarish visions of our domestic situation are coming from. Why would the departure of my husband launch me and my daughter into a life of squalor? Someone else writes: 'There are no words for a catastrophe of this magnitude. I am thinking of you.' And it begins to seem as if my husband has, in fact, not moved five minutes away but died."
Summing Up Literature
A statistical analysis of literature yields some surprises.
The Face of Age
Mark Story photographs faces that have been lived in.
The New Age of Ignorance
Tim Adams was interviewing James Watson one day when he innocently remarked upon the "perfect simplicity" of Watson/Crick's revelation of the genetic code.
Are there any new music artists you are wild about?
Sure we keep buying the old favorites over and over, but are there any new music artists you are wild about?
Listening #54
Just about any consumer-electronics product that needs to generate voltage gain can be made with a vacuum tube. It isn't hard to do. <I>It's no big deal.</I>
Luke Manley and Bea Lam of VTL: Vital Sound
Our meeting was propitious and totally unexpected. The locus was Los Angeles' Sheraton Gateway Hotel last May, on which we had all descended for Home Entertainment 2006. As a contributor to <I>Stereophile</I>'s <A HREF="http://blog.stereophile.com/he2006">Show blog</A>, my assignment was as liberal as they come: Go where you are drawn, listen as you will, and record your impressions.
Sonic Frontiers Phono One phono preamplifier
I've been in love with British sports cars ever since a visiting highway engineer brought a green MGB-GT to my tiny Nebraska town 30 years ago. Since then, there's been a steady stream of ferocious little cars in my life. Triumphs, MGs, Healeys, you name it—right up to my current crop, a Triumph TR6 and roughly two-and-a-half Jensen-Healeys.
Noel Lee: The Monster is 10!
They say that time flies on faster wings once you pass 40, something that I have found to be more true than I care to think about. Yet even considering the unfortunately subjective nature of time, it hardly seems possible that it was 10 years ago, in those golden days of the first Conrad-Johnson preamplifier, <A HREF="http://www.stereophile.com/floorloudspeakers/579infinity">Infinity RS4.5</A> and Hill Plasmatronic loudspeakers, Infinity class-A and Audio Research D110B power amplifiers, that a small San Francisco company, led by a drummer and mechanical engineer who had previously worked on laser-fusion target design at Lawrence Livermore Laboratory, virtually invented the high-end cable industry. I say "virtually," because Jean Hiraga in France, Robert Fulton in the US, and Saboru Egawa in Japan had laid down considerable experimental work in the mid-'70s showing that interconnects and speaker cables were hardly the passive devices conventional engineering considered them, and the highly capacitative Cobra Cable, distributed in the US by Polk and in the UK by Monitor Audio, was already destroying marginally stable power amplifiers in 1977.