Last week I went to an advance screening at Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM) of <I>Billy Strayhorn: Lush Life</I>, a new film about the short, creative, and ultimately kinda sad life of songwriter/arranger Billy Strayhorn. "Strays" or "Sweet Pea" as his friends knew him was part, some would say most, of the brains behind Duke Ellington's success in the forties and fifties. The film will be shown on PBS around the country in February.
Using the acoustics of gunfire to calculate the location of snipers. It doesn't work the way you might imagine.
Guitarist Barry Finnerty remembers his bandmate, friend, and rehab mentor.
"The United States Commerce Department's National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) spectrum chart, dated October 2003, depicts the radio frequency spectrum allocations to radio services operated within the United States. This chart graphically partitions the radio frequency spectrum, extending from 9kHz to 300GHz, into over 450 frequency bands, and uses distinct colors to distinguish the allocations for the thirty different radio services."
So string theory <I>is</I> good for something?
There are three requirements: You must invent a very good loudspeaker that sells for between $1000 and $2000/pair. You have to make enough of them, over a long enough time, to achieve a certain level of brand recognition and market penetration. And you must create a dealer network of reasonable size, with an emphasis on well-promoted specialty shops.
The first time I attended the Las Vegas Consumer Electronics Show, in January 1986, I didn't get there until the second day of the Show. Still, by the beginning of the fourth and final day I'd managed to visit every high-end audio exhibit, and still had time to go back for seconds to the rooms that had sounded the best. Twenty years later, CES has grown so much that it's impossible for a single writer to visit even a quarter of the exhibits in which he might be interested. And even with the sort of <A HREF="http://blog.stereophile.com/ces2007/">team reporting</A> <I>Stereophile</I> now practices, covering the Show has become an exercise in applied logistics for the busy journalist: "Should I wait for the free shuttle bus? Should I get a taxi—though I might get caught in Las Vegas's increasing traffic jams, or even just get stuck at the city's interminable traffic lights? Or should I take the new monorail—though that goes nowhere near the hotel in which [<I>insert name of hot company</I>] is demming its products?"
Tony, a mechanic friend of mine, once ran down for me his "national characteristics" theory of automobile engineering. Germans, he said, love precision engineering but don't take repair into account, so their engines are always placed in wells so perfectly proportioned that skinned knuckles are inevitable. British cars, he said, are marketed to a nation of tinkerers, hence the existence of dual carburetors. And Italian cars? "Well, let's just say they all resemble espresso makers." <I>He</I> said it—and he <I>was</I> the proverbial Fiat mechanic named Tony.
All right, it's time for a pop quiz in Loudspeaker Design 101. Answer the following, and justify your answer.
Let's forget about buying re-releases or back-filling an artist's catalog for a moment, what is the <I>primary</I> way you discover brand-new music to buy?