LATEST ADDITIONS

Back in October 1989, former publisher Larry Archibald told us to just have fun and buy cheap speakers.

At this moment in time, there’s honestly no way I can justify spending more money on sweet, wonderful, soul-stirring vinyl records. I just can’t do it. I have bills to pay. I have records at home that I haven’t listened to yet. I have laundry to do and groceries to buy. But, damn, am I tempted to go to the First Annual Collect-i-Bowl Record Show at <a href="http://www.brooklynbowl.com/">Brooklyn Bowl</a> this Sunday.

"Reviewed in the box!" is what <I>Stereophile</I>'s founder, the late <A HREF="http://www.stereophile.com/news/j_gordon_holt">J. Gordon Holt</A>, used to call it. You might think you're reading a review, but the realization slowly dawns that there's nothing in the text that could not have been gleaned from the manufacturer's brochure, nothing to indicate that the writer had even opened the box the product came in. When I read a review in another publication or online, I judge it by doing what I recommend <I>Stereophile</I>'s readers do when they read <I>this</I> magazine: I look for the nugget I <I>didn't</I> already know, the facet I <I>wasn't</I> expecting, the concluding jewel I <I>couldn't</I> have predicted without ever having tried the component myself. Sadly, all too often too many of what are promoted as "reviews" on the Web are merely descriptions.

I did not find what I was looking for at <a href="http://blog.stereophile.com/stephenmejias/jersey_city_record_riot/">the Jersey City Record Riot</a>, but I did find two reasonably priced Tom Waits albums (<i>Blue Valentine</i> and <i>Rain Dogs</i>) and Peter Lang’s debut, <i>The Thing at the Nursery Room Window</i>, on John Fahey’s Takoma label. I had forced myself to be extremely selective, and, though the many kind and interesting vendors were making it difficult for me to hold back from buying more, I did in fact hold back.

As I’ve mused before (though only twice), what’s the point of having a blog if you can’t indulge in a little self-promotion?

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&#151;nobody wants one!"