Most people are familiar, at least in outline, with the Hans Christian Andersen fairy tale "The Princess and the Pea." In the story, the Queen decides that it's time for her son to marry, and the Prince—apparently a very fussy young man—decides that he can marry only a true princess, as measured by her sensitivity to small discomforts. It's like being an audiophile, but with peas.
Is it my imagination, or has the low-power tube movement of the last 15 years gone hand in hand with a renewed interest in moving-coil step-up transformers? Trannies remain misunderstood or ignored by most of the audio press—requests for review samples continue to be met with genial shock, rather like tourism in the Budapest of the 1990s—but enthusiasm for the practice seems only to grow. That leaves me to wonder: Did the unquestioning use of <I>active</I> pre-preamps for so many years grow out of the same bad attitude that gave us all those awful-sounding high-power amps and low-sensitivity loudspeakers? You know the mindset: Parts are cheap. Gain is free. Do it because you <I>can...</I>
I think my favorite is #311.
Huckleberry lurks in the shadows.
Now that it's fall, Bagheera barely leaves the toasty top of the Mac music server.
The casual interest soon transformed into an addiction and an obsession. Does <i>obsession</i> come before <i>addiction</i>, or after? I'm not sure. Either way, the salsa didn't seem to mind. It started in early August with two albums: <i>Siembra</i> by Ruben Blades and <i><a href="http://blog.stereophile.com/stephenmejias/la_gran_fuga/">La Gran Fuga</a></i> by Willie Colon. These two led me to several others which led me to more still. I read one pretty crappy Hector Lavoe biography, sent dozens of fiery e-mails to my family in Puerto Rico, devoured tons of liner notes, and watched a gazillion YouTube videos. I've now collected over 20 albums (all on CD), have lured one uncle into sending me rare and classic songs from his library of MP3s, coerced another into donating to my cause his entire LP collection (we'll see about that), and uncovered an entire world of really deep, incredibly hot tracks. The addiction is not fading.
Taking a <I>really</I> close look at Leonardo's portrait.
At last, an explanation of why carefully coiled cables grow knots.
I read <I>Slate</I> primarily to catch my colleague Fred Kaplan's "War Stories" column, but whenever I read Fred, I also go to Garry Trudeau's "The Sandbox," a milblog that allows military personnel stationed in Iraq and Afganistan to "vent, rhapsodize, and [inform] the folks on the home front . . . what is going on from their point of view."
Haven't heard of it yet? You will. It's an opportunistic pathogen that is extremely resistant to antibiotics—some people call it a super bacterium. Jon Carroll writes about it in his <A HREF="http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/2007/…; today, which, like all of his columns, is a great read.