LATEST ADDITIONS

“What does it mean to love your father?” the therapist asked.

Over the past two and a half years, I've auditioned and reviewed a number of digital audio products. It has been a fascinating experience both to watch digital playback technology evolve and to listen to the results of various design philosophies. The road to more musical digital audio has been a slow and steady climb, with occasional jumps forward made possible by new techniques and technologies. Making this odyssey even more interesting (and confounding), digital processors seem to offer varying interpretations of the music rather than striving toward a common ideal of presenting what's on the disc without editorial interjection.

While brushing my teeth this morning, it occurred to me that there are significant similarities between a toothbrush and a tonearm/cartridge. The bristles would be analogous to the cartridge and the brush handle to the tonearm. In either case it is the business end of the device that does all the work. The bristles track the contours of your ivories in search of hazardous waste deposits, while the cartridge tracks the record groove transducing wall modulations into an electrical signal. I think that this is where the old adage came from: "A used cartridge is like a used toothbrush—nobody wants one!"

Many loudspeakers come with five-way binding posts, allowing a choice of connectors. Others are specific to one type of connector. How do you terminate your speaker cables on the speaker end?

Wandering through Tower Records the other night, I was struck by the amazing diversity of music available to us. There's music from every part of the globe, for every taste and interest, from "show-me-the-good-parts" compilations of classical highlights to obscure releases by unknown artists. There's music for the ecstatic, music for the angry, music for the straight, the gay, the bent, and the twisted. The subcategories replicate like rabbits, as if in a demographer's nightmare. Genus spawn species, which quickly mutates into subspecies, race, tribe: cult begets subcult.

Strange thing about cassettes and vinyl records: Every now and then, while listening to them, I find myself wondering what’ll happen to them when I’m dead and gone. These beautiful things will outlive me and someday someone else will “own” them. What will that person think of me? <i>Will</i> that person think of me? What do my records say about me?

We were bummed out when we heard that Steve Gritzan was closing down his wonderful and dusty record shop, <a href="http://blog.stereophile.com/stephenmejias/iris_records_closes/">Iris Records</a>, in downtown Jersey City, but heartened in knowing that he’d continue to sell albums at street fairs and at his outstanding Brooklyn Record Riot conventions.