Luxman's new flagship integrated, the L-509Z, has the same thick aluminum top plate and steel casework as its forebear and weighs a similarly knee-crushing 64lb. The older L-509X cost $9495; its newer, younger sibling rachets that up to $12,495. The front-panel controls are nearly identical, including those big, eye-catching dual VU meters; except for a new 4.4mm Pentaconn five-conductor mini headphone jack and a mute button, the Z matches the cosmetics of the X to a T. But as in all things, appearances can be deceiving.
I don't know anyone who, having heard the JMF Audio system at AXPONA 2023the HQS 6002 dual-mono power amplifier ($40,000; footnote 1) and PRS 1.5 dual-mono line stage preamplifier ($36,000) with Harbeth M40.3 XD speakersdid not rave about the sound. In my show report, I credited the system, assembled by Fidelis Distribution and Audio Skies, with delivering "some of the finestsounding music" I heard at the show. "This is the perfect sound for mellow music," I proclaimed. "Bliss."
When I was a child growing up in Moscow in the 1970s, our pop-musical landscape was dominated by the so-called bards. They were Soviet counterparts to singer-songwriters from the West, and they sang literate, knowing lyrics while accompanying themselves on acoustic guitars. Even the word used to describe thembard'iwas adapted from English. And because they sometimes sang about aspects of day-to-day life that were off limits in public, their music rarely appeared on records and was circulated mostly on fuzzy-sounding homemade tapes.
The best known among the bards were a Georgian-Armenian poet named Bulat Okudjavawho sang sentimental ballads about (chaste) romantic love, childhood friends, and The Great Patriotic Warand an altogether more daring performer named Vladimir Vysotsky.
Anthony H. (Tony) Cordesman, who wrote high-end equipment reviews for Audio, Stereophile, and The Absolute Sound (TAS), died suddenly last week.
That quest may be ongoing and never-ending, because our tastes and preferences evolve over time, money comes and goes, and we're simply never satisfied. And even if we are, eventually, we're audiophiles, and the industry always offers something interesting and new, or something old that's new again.
My time with a pair of Klipsch The Nines speaker-gadgets reminded me of the exciting, youthful bloom of my first serious sound system: a Technics SL-D2 turntable with Audio-Technica cartridge, a Philips 45Wpc receiver, and New Advent Loudspeakers.
That quote rings in my head each time I listen to Bruce Springsteen's still-astonishing 1973 debut album, Greetings from Asbury Park, N.J., which has just turned 50 and been reissued in Mobile Fidelity's Ultradisc One-Step series.
There was a time in London, in the mid-'80s, when a party would invariably close with a couple of Pogues songs. It didn't matter what music had preceded themit could be reggae or soul or whateverbut the Pogues would be played, to enthusiastic sing-a-longs by the party guests. Even I was known to join in occasionally.
As often as not, one of the songs would be the Pogues's cover of Ewan MacColl's "Dirty Old Town." It didn't matter that the song had been written about Salford (a city in Greater Manchester): Everyone would feel it had been written about their own town. This wasn't true just in my part of London, which has a large Irish diaspora, but in many other places across the world.
This was one of several gifts possessed by Shane MacGowan, who died November 30, 2023: Whether he had written the song or not, you felt he was singing about your world, your life.
Girard explains how this not knowing drives history and invention. His main premise is that we feel desire but, not knowing what we desire, mimic the desires of others. These "others" we mimic constitute a third element, interrupting the lines of force between a person and the objects desired. This, according to Girard, makes desire, and by extension human evolution, a nebulous but powerful anthropological force engaged in forming human cultures.
In other words, you might like big speakers and fat speaker cables, but maybe only because people around you appear to like them. Same with cars and clothes and lovers.
The love of music can drive human beings to astonishing lengths. For Prinz, cofounder/owner of California's Amoeba Music chain, that fervor revolves around the work of country-rock pioneer Gram Parsons. Despite the often-outlandish mythology that's grown up around this shooting star since his tragic 1973 overdose at age 26, Prinz has made it his quixotic mission to find, restore, and release unreleased Gram Parsons live shows.