LATEST ADDITIONS

"The crying rain like a trumpet sang
And asked for no applause."—Bob Dylan, "Lay Down Your Weary Tune"

I remember as a toddler sitting in the kitchen on a highchair, watching my mother smoke a cigarette, apply red lipstick, and tune a turquoise table radio from one news station to another. Between the strange, nattering voices, the radio emitted a sharp hissing sound. That's my first memory of human voices coming from a little box.

"Stirring the stew" is what I've heard it called when a company introduces a new version of a product every three or four years. When a new product is launched, sales generally rise rapidly to a maximum and then slowly decline. If the stew is stirred every few years, plotting the product's sales volume against time results in a sawtooth wave, without sales ever dropping close to zero.

The Doors: The Soft Parade (50th Anniversary Deluxe Edition)
Rhino Records R2-596001 (3CDs, 1LP). 1969–2019. Paul A. Rothchild, prod.; Bruce Botnick, eng. ADD. TT: 146:47
Performance ****
Sonics ****

The Soft Parade has long been the Doors' most under-valued album. After the revolutionary impact of the band's first two LPs, The Doors and Strange Days, and the commercial consolidation of the band's popularity on the third, Waiting for the Sun, Soft Parade was perceived as a fall from grace. The charismatic Jim Morrison, famously dubbed "The Lizard King" by Crawdaddy! guru Paul Williams, had transitioned from perhaps the most sexually powerful rock'n'roll figure since Elvis Presley into a troubled frontman bent on self-destruction.

About a year after settling into my new house, I decided to buy a pair of Monitor Audio Silver 10 floorstanding loudspeakers, which I had reviewed in 2014 for our sister publication Sound & Vision. I wound up buying three of them, with the intention of cannibalizing the drivers and crossover from one to make my own three-way center-channel speaker. But that project was long delayed, and I never got around to doing anything with the third Silver 10: It now sits in a closet as a spare.

"Let's get real, real gone for a change."—Elvis

I.
As Plato mentioned in The Sophist and thousands of art historians have noted in the years since, Greek sculptors distorted the human figure by enlarging the head and shoulders. They did it on purpose. If they didn't, when viewed from below, it would look wrong. Poets—real ones, I mean—distort smaller truths in order to create larger ones.

Another room where the sound warmed the cockles of my heart was hosted by Gershman Acoustics, Krell, and VPI. There, I re-met Gershman Acoustics' Ofrah and Eli Gershman (in the photo above), whom I see regularly at the Montreal Audio Fest—is there a harder working husband-and-wife team working the audio show circuit?—and had the pleasure to meet for the first time Krell's congenial COO Walter Schofield. The gang (minus VPI's Mat Weisfeld, who's often in the picture but wasn't this time) was demoing a system that was another of my show highlights.

Imagine an audiophile system assembled by the UN and you might end up with something that looks a lot like what I discovered in the Wynn Audio room. Among the countries being represented there were: France, with the Metronome AQWO CD/SACD player ($CAD22,000), with tubed output stage and USB input; Switzerland, with the 215Wpc Goldmund Telos 590 NextGen integrated amp ($CAD33,800); Germany, with the Vimberg Mino speakers ($CAD41,900/pair), built in the same factory as its sister company Tidal Audio (not to be confused with the streaming service); Sweden, with the Entreq Olympus Infinity ground boxes ($CAD5800 each); the Netherlands, with Crystal Cable cabling and rack; and the US, with Critical Mass Systems footers.