We're always asking the big questions: Are we really alive? Will we ever find true happiness? How can we be better human beings? What's love, but a secondhand emotion? Who needs a heart when a heart can be broken? How can the high end audio industry reach a wider audience?
On the train this morning, a pretty girl sitting directly in front of me, with a large purse in her lap, and connected to it, an iPod. Earbuds to her pretty, little ears letting loose the music, the most appalling of all songs ever to hit the Top 40: The Beach Boys' "Kokomo."
George Russell died today, at the age of 86, after a long bout with Alzheimer’s, and if you’ve never heard of him, all the deeper pity.
When John Atkinson reviewed Sonos's original <a href=" http://www.stereophile.com/budgetcomponents/1006sonos/index.html">ZP80 Bundle</a>, he fell in love with the company's CR100 controller which uses a full-color, 3.5" LCD screen to provide easy navigation of music files on up to 16 network devices and displays all the metadata associated with each track, including album art. JA wrote:
The Yardbirds' version of "Train Kept A-Rollin'" has been sharing space in my mind with Outkast's "Ms. Jackson." Makes no sense. It's like the train keeps rolling right <i>into</i> Ms. Jackson. Only my subconscious knows why.
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The Pharcyde's "Otha Fish," from their crazily good 1993 album, <i>Bizarre Ride II the Pharcyde</i>.
Back in 1992, J. Gordon Holt stated "we haven't accomplished what we set out to do. The playback still doesn't sound 'just like the real thing.'" Is Holt still right, has high-end audio lost its way?
We audio writers have our niches. Mikey loves analog, Artie likes to play with horn speakers and assorted oddball British kit, and I really enjoy reviewing affordable speakers. There's something exciting about hearing the fruits of the labors of a creative designer who's applied his talents to meet a stringent price point and created a speaker that can entice into our hobby the financially challenged music lover.
A compact horn loudspeaker. Isn't that an oxymoron, like jumbo shrimp, or military intelligence? From such venerable speakers as the half century-old Altec Voice of the Theater and the Klipschorn, as well as more modern examples like the Avantgarde Acoustic Trio, horns have always been big. The original Avantgarde Uno was the smallest speaker in Avantgarde's line, but it was still visually imposing, with a big horn midrange on top, a horn tweeter below that, and a powered sealed-box subwoofer at the bottom. (I reviewed the Uno 2.0 in <I>Stereophile</I> in <A HREF="http://www.stereophile.com/floorloudspeakers/287">August 2000</A>, Vol.23 No.8, and the Uno 3.0 in <A HREF="http://www.stereophile.com/floorloudspeakers/287/index11.html">August 2002</A>, Vol.25 No.8.) The Uno and its siblings, the Duo and Trio, are perhaps the antithesis of the in-wall loudspeakers beloved by interior designers. These speakers do not fade into the background—not visually or sonically.