Far Ahead
I often wanted to turn back, in fact, but Pete was so damn far ahead of me that I couldn't even get his attention. I kept following.
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A Strange Surprise
When we finally reached the top, we found a strange surprise: The rest of our classmates were there.
The Jagged, Gray City
At the top of what I'd later learn to call "Arthur's Peak," I looked out onto the jagged, gray city and felt immortal.
Two Fingers
Pete gave me the two fingers.
Feeling Immortal
(Who wouldn't feel immortal with hair like that?)
We Can Agree to Agree
In his essay, "<a href="http://stereophile.com/asweseeit/890awsi/">Can We Agree to Disagree</a>," Peter W. Mitchell states:
Too Hot, Sugar
This weather is pointless. Pointless! What's the use of all this snow and ice? Don't tell me it looks pretty. I'm just not fit for this sort of cold. It's days like today after windy winter nights like last, when the temperatures plunge into the single digits and my apartment's old pipes freeze, that I wish I had an entire fleet of fiery amps to keep me warm.
What would be the worst audiophile gift you could imagine?
Once you've been identified by your family and friends as an audiophile, they might try to give you gifts to support your habit. What would be the <I>worst</I> audiophile gift you could imagine?
Can We Agree to Disagree? (LP vs CD)
I had a wonderful chuckle while reading the reviews of the Finial Laser Turntable in the May 1990 issue of <I>HFN/RR</I>. Perhaps I should preface this by saying that, in the entire quarter-century since I became intensely involved in audio, I have always found the LP an unsatisfactory playback medium for music. As a regular concert-goer in Boston and an addict of WGBH-FM's simply miked, virtually unprocessed live broadcasts of BSO concerts direct from Symphony Hall, I never learned to ignore the many anti-musical distortions endemic to LPs—the ticks and pops, the inner-groove congestion and tracing distortion, the harsh mistracking of high-level climaxes and overcut grooves, the persistent static in dry winter air, the constant slight wow due to off-center spindle holes, the muddy bass due to resonances and feedback, the universal cutting engineer's practice of blending low bass into mono (which wipes out low-frequency hall ambience).
Were Those Ears So Golden? (DCC & PASC)
The whole field of subjective audio reviewing—listening to a piece of equipment to determine its characteristics and worth—is predicated on the idea that human perception is not only far more sensitive than measurement devices, but far more <I>important</I> than the numbers generated by "objective" testing. Subjective evaluation of audio equipment, however, is often dismissed as meaningless by the scientific audio community. A frequent objection is the lack of thousands upon thousands of rigidly controlled clinical trials. Consequently, conclusions reached by subjective means are considered unreliable because of the anecdotal nature of listening impressions. The scientific audio community demands rigorous, controlled, blind testing with many trials before any conclusions can be drawn. Furthermore, any claimed abilities to discriminate sonically that are not provable under blind testing conditions are considered products of the listeners' imaginations. Audible differences are said to be real only if their existence can be proved by such "scientific" procedures (footnote 1).