LATEST ADDITIONS

Nigel Tufnel gets an <A HREF="http://chronicle.com/media/flash/v54/i18/guest/">honorary degree</A> at the Berklee College of Music.

Stop me if you've heard this one: Back in the early 1990s, just after the fall of the Soviet Union, I debated professor of music engineering and magazine columnist Ken Pohlmann on a talk show on the CBS radio network. The subject was analog sound vs digital sound, but I guess when Pohlmann felt I was getting the upper hand, he felt he needed to play the tube card. Derisively, he said, "I bet you're one of those tube guys, too, aren't you?" Before I could open my mouth, he continued: "You know, the Soviet Union's military gear, including the MIG fighters, ran on tube electronics, and look what happened to them!"

I was eating tagine with John Atkinson and Cantus' Erick Lichte a few nights ago and mentioned having read Anne Midgette's essay about her <A HREF="http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/01/21/AR20080…; towards Brahms.

Enid Lumley accosted me in the corridors of Santa Monica's BayView Plaza Hotel in March: "That doesn't sound like a real piano!" I was taken aback. The sound to which the redoubtable Ms. Lumley was referring emanated from a 7' Steinway we had hired for <A HREF="http://www.performancerecordings.com/">James Boyk</A> to play at the <I>Stereophile</I> show. Jim was conducting a series of tutorials on how the sound of a real piano is constituted, so Enid's criticism, on the face of things, seemed absurd. As my face obviously showed this conclusion, she hastily explained that, of course it <I>was</I> a real piano, but the fact that it overloaded the 40-seat room in which it was being played caused it to sound different from the sound of a real piano played in a concert hall. To lead visitors to the show to expect piano records to sound similar to what Jim was producing was dishonest.

Physical sales of music <A HREF="http://www.ifpi.org/content/library/MUSIC-MARKET-DATA-2007.pdf">plummet…; at a rate that exceeded the sales growth of legal downloads in 2007, according to the IFPI. While global digital sales grew by 40% in 2007&mdash;representing about 10% of all music sold&mdash;IFPI figures suggest that CD sales in the US dropped by 19% (10.5% in the UK).

This is just so wrong, it's right.
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Huckleberry likes to sleep just above my keyboard. That part's cool, but when he wakes up, he'll decide to play swat the fingers until I give chase.