Vinyl Record Day
Today is/was/forever will be remembered as: <a href="http://www.stereophile.com/news/11713/index.html">Vinyl Record Day</a>. August 12th, the day Thomas Edison blessed us with the phonograph.
LATEST ADDITIONS
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As Lovely and Troubling As
Which brings me to my latest recommendation: Xiu Xiu's <i>Women As Lovers</i> takes its alluring title from a novel by Austrian author Elfriede Jelinek. The album, Xiu Xiu's sixth full-length, was released much earlier this year, but I only got around to it this weekend, during a trip to <a href="http://www.vvinyl.com/">Vintage Vinyl</a> in good ol' Fords, NJ, along rich and wild Route 1.
On a Dissecting Table
AlexO's response to Leila's <i>Blood, Looms, and Blooms</i> made me chuckle. AlexO wrote:
Have you spent any money on your turntable rig (not including records) in the last 12 months?
Who would have guessed? As the CD falls, vinyl rises again. Online readers have probably noticed Stephen Mejias diving deep into the black art this year. What about you? Have you spent any money on your turntable rig (not including records) in the last 12 months?
MartinLogan Sequel II loudspeaker
Loudspeaker designers are dreamers. Something takes hold of a man—the fact that loudspeaker designers are <I>all</I> men must be significant—and he wrestles with recalcitrant wood, arcane drive-units, and sundry coils, capacitors, and cables, to produce something which will be individual in its sound quality yet inherently more true to the original sound. An impossible task. Yet if there were to be an aristocratic subset of those dreamers, it would be those who have taken upon themselves the burden of producing <I>electrostatic</I> loudspeakers. For these farsighted engineers, there is no standing on the shoulders of others, there is no recourse to tried and tested combinations of other manufacturers' drive-units. Every aspect of the design, no matter how apparently insignificant, has to be created afresh from first principles. For a new electrostatic design to produce a sound at all represents a great triumph for its progenitor, let alone having it sound musical. And to produce an electrostatic loudspeaker that is also possessed of great visual beauty is indeed a bonus.
Blood, Looms, and Blooms
Tighten the laces on your Vans and jump on your skateboard, strap on your helmet and hop on your scooter, pump some air into the tires of your cruiser, do whatever you have to do, dudes; Dash, sprint, leap, fly like Olympians to your nearest record shop and lay down the $19.99 for the new Leila Arab album.
Recording of November 1991: Discovery
<B>GONZALO RUBALCABA: <I>Discovery</I></B><BR>
Gonzalo Rubalcaba, piano; Charlie Haden, bass; Paul Motian, drums<BR>
Blue Note CDP 7 95478 2 (CD only). Charlie Haden, prod.; David Richards, eng. DDD? TT: 54:06
How Hi-Fi are Stereo Discs?
Editor's Note from 1992: This seminal J. Gordon Holt essay on how the art of recording natural sound became compromised in favor of unmusical artificiality for good commercial reasons was originally published in August 1964, in Vol.1 No.8. Though most people these days listen to classical music from CDs, not LPs, in the intervening decades, recording technology has not changed for the better as much as one might have hoped. Nevertheless, the days of wretched multimiking excess described by Gordon are past, and it's rare to find the music treated with the lack of respect typical of a mid-'60s Columbia session. Although some of the smaller companiesReference Recordings, Delos, Chesky, Mapleshade, Dorian, and Sheffield Lab in the US; Meridian, Nimbus, and Hyperion in the UKconsistently use honest, minimal miking, it is not unknown for the majors in the '90s to do likewise. And the use of time delay for spot microphones, pioneered by Denon in the mid-'80s, means that instruments that might tend to become obscured at orchestral climaxes can now be brought up in level without unnaturally time-smearing the sound. I still find it sad, however, that it is rare to hear the sheer dynamic range of a live ensemble successfully captured on a commercial recording.John Atkinson
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Food Fit for Heroes
A <A HREF="http://www.telegraph.co.uk:80/news/uknews/2505034/Culinary-secrets-of-D… cookbook</A> of 58 dishes, meticulously hand-written and illustrated by Corporal James Abraham Harrison will be auctioned next month. The gimmick to this cookbook? Harrison was one of Montgomery's Desert Rats and served as mess chef in the North African desert.
A Stable Medium
Chris Sommovigo sent out a message this morning: