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A Shander fer de Goyim
Michael Chabon on <I>The Yiddish Policemen's Union</I>, Yiddish, and being exiled from exile.
40 Years On
I don't know about you, but I got a little bit bored with the wall-to-wall coverage of the 40<SUP>th</SUP> anniversary of <I>Sgt. Pepper's</I> last week. So why am I linking to Jody Rosen's article on the subject? Because it actually has something to say and says it well.
When Drumming Stops
Keith "tha missile" Bailey played bass for Gong, many years ago. After that, for his sins, he served as Gong's booking agent. He tells the tale of what happened one night in Hamburg when famed drummer Pierre Moerlen went AWOL, Daevid Allen went into a wizardly rage, and Bailey went on as the band's drummer.
What audio product spent the least amount of time in your system?
We all pick a dud from time to time, waking up the next morning thinking "why did I buy that thing!" What audio product spent the least amount of time in your system?
New Stereophile Jazz CD Available
In his <A HREF="http://www.stereophile.com/news/061107compression">primer</A> this week on compression, Wes Phillips mentions the now-ubiquitous use of "louderization" in CD production, which fills in the musical valleys and flattens the expressionistic hills to make a recording sound uniformly loud. <I>Stereophile</I> editor John Atkinson has long railed against this practice, so when Bob Reina asked John to record his new jazz quartet, Attention Screen, John felt that this would be the opportunity to put his money where his mouth was. He would record the band, which mixes electric instruments—guitar and bass guitar—with acoustic—piano and drums—as though it was a classical acoustic ensemble, with no equalization and no compression. By doing so, he would demonstrate that even so, the sound would still have dynamics and impact, that making an honest recording does not have to be an obstacle to powerful sound quality.
MusicGiants Floats High-Rez Files without DRM
Scott Bahneman, CEO of MusicGiants, called earlier this week to announce what he called big news. "Actually," Bahneman said, "we're not going to issue an official press release—yet—but MusicGiants is going to offer Windows Media Audio (WMA) lossless music downloads without DRM.
Compression 101
We were taking our morning constitutional around the Interwebs one day last week when we happened upon an article on <I> Timesonline</I> titled <A HREF=http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/music… Music Really Is Getting Louder"</A>. <I>Oh boy,</I> we thought, <I>a mainstream outlet is catching on to the whole issue of dynamic compression</I>—a subject we have inveighed against repeatedly over the years. (JA first preached that particular sermon back in <A HREF="http://stereophile.com/asweseeit/177/">1999</A>.)
The Truth About High End
The October 1982 issue of <I>Stereo Review</I> published what must be hailed (or derided) as the first reasoned assessment of high-end audio ever presented in a mass-circulation hi-fi publication. We disagreed with a few of the author's points, but our main gripe about the piece prompted a letter to <I>Stereo Review</I>. This is what we wrote:
A View Into the Soundstage
Stuck out here in the <A HREF="http://www.stereophile.com/asweseeit/498awsi">desert depths of the Southwest</A>, we look forward to visits from out-of-towners. So when <A HREF="http://www.stereophile.com/interviews/478">David Wilson</A>, one-time audio reviewer but now full-time high-end manufacturer, called to say he was going to be in Santa Fe, there was a flurry of activity. David had agreed to an <A HREF="http://www.stereophile.com/interviews/690wil">interview</A>, so I started going through back issues of <I>The Absolute Sound</I> and <I>Stereophile</I> for background. Vol.6 No.2 of <I>Stereophile</I> from 1983, with its front-cover photograph of David and Sheryl Lee Wilson with their WAMM speaker system, seemed a good place to start—except that nothing inside the magazine corresponded to the cover picture. It was the <I>next</I> issue that had featured Larry Archibald's write-up on the WAMM, and once I opened its pages, I got trapped into reading the entire issue.