Art Dudley Listening

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Art Dudley Listening
Listening #126
Art Dudley  |  Jun 19, 2013  |  First Published: Dec 31, 1969  |  1 comments
Swiss Precision: The Story of the Thorens TD 124 and Other Classic Turntables (2007), by Joachim Bung (reviewed in April 2008) also tells the story of Fritz and Marie Laeng, the couple who founded Lenco, Switzerland's other turntable company. Thanks in equal parts to Fritz's engineering talents and Marie's business acumen—her idea to sell turntables through a popular book-and-record club is remembered as the company's turnaround point—Lenco swiftly became one of the most successful and well-regarded makers of hi-fi turntables through the 1960s and early '70s. Then, almost as swiftly, Lenco went from having three factories in two countries to vanishing from the scene with scarcely a trace . . . but that's another story for another day.
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Art Dudley Listening
Listening #125
Art Dudley  |  May 06, 2013  |  4 comments
Monday, January 14, was a difficult day for the abandoned amusement park that is my body. In the morning, I packed two Lamm ML2.2 amplifiers into their wooden crates and wrestled them outside for collection by some unlucky air-freight courier. After that, I backed up my car to the tiny front porch of our house so I could unload a pair of 1966 Altec Valencia loudspeakers I'd collected the day before: in excess of 100 pounds each, just like the crated Lamms, but considerably larger.
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Art Dudley Listening
Listening #124
Art Dudley  |  Apr 09, 2013  |  4 comments
Beethoven understood the pathos of the gap between idea and realization, and the sense of strain put on the listener's imagination is essential.—Charles Rosen

Bass, like sex, is something most young men desire in excess: To the novice, quantity trumps quality, and as long as he can hear from his playback system the deepest sounds of an orchestral bass drum or five-string electric bass (low string tuned to B-0 or C-1), he is completely satisfied.

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Music and Recording FeaturesArt Dudley Listening
Listening #123
Art Dudley  |  Mar 07, 2013  |  9 comments
Let's say you're lucky enough, or just plain old enough, to have bought a copy of Truman Capote's In Cold Blood on January 12, 1966. Let's say you're lucky enough or just plain smart enough to have held on to it and kept it in perfect shape for the past 47 years. And let's say it was one of the first 500 copies, which the author signed. If so, congratulations: For once in your life, even the smuggest collector can't claim that his copy of a book is "better" or more valuable than yours.
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Art Dudley ListeningTonearm Reviews
Listening #122
Art Dudley  |  Feb 06, 2013  |  2 comments
Sad though they may be, Flat Earthers endure in getting two things right: In any music-playback system, the source is of primary importance; and in a music system in which LPs are the preferred medium, the pickup arm is of less importance than the motor unit—but of greater importance than just about everything else.
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Art Dudley Listening
Listening #121
Art Dudley  |  Jan 04, 2013  |  3 comments
By the end of last month's column I'd invested a total of $290 in acquiring and refurbishing a 55-year-old Rek-O-Kut Rondine Jr. turntable. In the weeks that followed I spent just a few dollars more on some small parts—one of which sprang from a technology that I don't believe existed in the 1950s—that made small but welcome improvements in the performance of this outwardly simple player. I'll come back to those improvements in a moment, but for now let's get started on putting Junior back together again.
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Art Dudley Listening
Listening #120
Art Dudley  |  Dec 12, 2012  |  8 comments
For the qualities I most value in a music system—impact, substance, texture, color, and, above all, the ability to play lines of notes with a realistic sense of momentum and flow—the venerable Garrard 301 and similar well-made turntables with powerful motors and idler-wheel drive are the sources to beat. Unfortunately, good-condition samples of the Garrard 301 and 401, the Thorens TD 124, and any number of exotic EMTs have become scarce and ever more expensive.
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Art Dudley Listening
Listening #119
Art Dudley  |  Nov 14, 2012  |  6 comments
Apart from a 2004 column in which I made cruel fun of the angriest (footnote 1) complaints I'd received to that point—an entertaining if lazy template I hope to re-use before long—I've done little to acknowledge the mail I receive every week, most of it thoughtful and positive. I'm especially grateful for the nice letters I get every time I write about vintage audio, as I did in Stereophile's August issue ("Five vintage loudspeakers you should hear before you die"): The art of music is best served by an open-minded approach to playback gear, and I'm encouraged to think that some Stereophile readers actually understand that.
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Art Dudley ListeningTonearm Reviews
Listening #118
Art Dudley  |  Oct 05, 2012  |  1 comments
Until recently, my favorite shirt was one I'd found on a clearance table at Macy's: a red paisley thing with long sleeves and a button-down collar, not unlike the ones seen in photographs of Peter Holsapple or the young Syd Barrett. When I first found it, this shirt was dusty, and appeared to have been marked down at least a half-dozen times before bottoming out at a price that wouldn't buy a six-pack of Mountain Dew at the local stop-and-rob. Maybe it was on the verge of being discarded, but I suspect that the people at Macy's had simply forgotten it was there.
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Art Dudley Listening
Listening #117
Art Dudley  |  Sep 07, 2012  |  4 comments
When I was seven years old, my father brought home an air-conditioner: a flimsy, hulking thing that sat in an open window just as a frame of X-ray film sits in an open mouth. It worked by consuming a steady diet of ice cubes and water, then blowing a fan across the slurry and into our grateful living room. It was loud and it stank and it wasn't very cold at all.
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Art Dudley ListeningHistorical
Listening #116
Art Dudley  |  Aug 03, 2012  |  12 comments
This month I am writing about five vintage loudspeakers you should hear before you die.

Why vintage? Because the best vintage gear offers an abundance of musically agreeable qualities that are missing from even the best contemporary gear.

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Art Dudley Listening
Listening #115
Art Dudley  |  Jul 10, 2012  |  5 comments
In the early 1980s, not long after I moved to New York City, I went shopping for a new pair of speakers. I already had a Rega Planar 3 turntable, an NAD 1020 preamp, and an Amber Series 70 amplifier (the second-most-powerful amp I've ever owned); what I now had in mind was to replace my aging EPI 100s with something bigger. Like them though I did, the EPIs were too tight and light for my new apartment, and I was certain I could find something with more bass and better scale—and still stay within my less-than-lavish budget.
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Art Dudley Listening
Listening #114
Art Dudley  |  Jun 14, 2012  |  2 comments
In spite of having one end of my listening room devoted entirely to record shelving, there are now 15 cartons of LPs and 78rpm records scattered throughout my house, said bounty enduring as a source of distress for The Management. That prompted me to set about building a new record cabinet and equipment support to handle the spillover. That prompted me to take a fresh look at how my records are catalogued. And that prompted me to cull from my collection every mono record I own, thinking I would keep them separate from the rest.
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Art Dudley Listening
Listening #113
Art Dudley  |  May 10, 2012  |  2 comments
In last month's column we met May Belt, whose contributions to domestic audio—made alongside her husband, designer Peter W. Belt—all have to do with reflexive perception: conditions under which a listener's comprehension of music can be altered, given the presence or absence of certain nonsonic stimuli.
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Art Dudley ListeningInterviews
Listening #112
Art Dudley  |  Apr 20, 2012  |  10 comments
In 1862, skepticism among the educated was exemplified by the medical establishment, which ridiculed Joseph Lister's notion of "animals in the air." By contrast, the professional skeptic of 2012—yes, it's now possible to make a comfortable living in the field—finds himself inconvenienced by 150 years of discovery, and makes do with ridiculing Lister for his Quaker faith. I guess that passes for progress in some circles.
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