I was visited yesterday by Steve Krampf, CEO of Chestnut Hill Sound and designer of the George sound system. As we walked from our 6th floor lobby down the long hall to my office, the conversation somehow turned to various loudspeaker drivers. (That's just something that happens when you're in our office.)
Dr. Lajos Nagy offers cosmetic surgery that shapes your pinnae to points. Why? I'll let the good doctor tell you.
I've written before about my immense regard for Garry Trudeau's <I>The Sandbox</I> milblog. Today, Owen Powell (<I>aka</I> SGT Roy Batty) posts about his experiences in DC promoting the book <I>Dunesbury.com's The Sandbox</I>, visiting the Pentagon, the Vietnam memorial, and Walter Reed Hospital.
Uh oh, that never turns out well.
So Bagheera don't stare.
And Huck will stare at you for hours attempting to convince you it's kibble time.
Audiophiles well know the glories of a 12-inch slab of 180-gram virgin vinyl cut for 45-rpm playback. Compared with a normal LP’s 33-1/3 revolutions per minute, the grooves on a 45 are stretched out over a wider space, allowing the stylus to track them more accurately and to give voice to the music’s minutest details. The non-‘philes among you may be shaking your heads (<I>Oh, no, Is this guy a nutball?</I>) but, believe me, it’s true. A few years back, Classic Records, Mike Hobson’s L.A.-based audiophile label, put out a series of limited-edition <I>single-sided</I> 45 rpm LPs, one album stretched out on four slabs of vinyl, each of which had grooves on one side but <I>nothing</I>, just plain black vinyl, on the other. The theory was that a perfectly flat bottom surface would couple more firmly to the turntable’s mat, eliminating the distortion of vinyl resonances. That may sound nuttier still, but, believe me, it’s true, too. (I’ve compared single-sided and double-sided 45 rpms of several albums that Hobson released in both formats—especially Sonny Rollins’ <I>Our Man in Jazz</I> and the Chicago Symphony’s performance of Prokofiev’s <I>Lt. Kije</I>, conducted by Fritz Reiner. The differences were not subtle. I value those albums as much as any in my collection, for musical and sonic reasons.)
Greg Stepanich ponders the 25<SUP>th</SUP> anniversary of Glenn Gould's death, commenting that "1982 was an unpropitious year to die for a man who found such a great creative outlet in technology."
Sam Anderson knows exactly how to talk about a book called <I>How to Talk About Books You Haven't Read</I>.
Michael Church writes an incendiary review of Anne Sofie von Otter's newest CD, which won't be released here until spring.