Miscellaneous

They say that with age comes wisdom, and judging by some of my younger self's misguided choices, that adage could be true, at least for me. In 1984, after graduating from college with a degree in audio production, I moved back to England, where I had spent most of my teen years as a boarding school inmate. I had friends and connections there, and despite being a US citizen, I had some kind of sketchy work authorization that allowed me to work legally in the UK for up to six months. I connected with my old school friend Morris Gould, and we found a flat in South London to share as I looked for work.

Morris had been the de facto leader of my high school punk band, The Ripchords. Six years later, he was getting started with a career as ambient chill-out deejay Mixmaster Morris, releasing records as The Irresistible Force. Our apartment became a kind of hub in the South London music scene, with musicians and industry people circling through. Eventually, I found a job working at Music and Video Exchange, the gear-focused branch of the popular Record and Tape Exchange chain of secondhand record shops. At M&VE, the staff had first dibs on any cool gear that came in, and I remember being intensely envious when colleague Andy snagged a rare EMS VCS 3 synthesizer for almost nothing.

Some years ago, I visited the home of a well-known American author who happened to be an audiophile. His cramped, dimly lit listening room contained a tube amp, a DAC, and a pair of inexpensive floorstanding speakers surrounded by what looked like a museum of audio tweaks. I recall a scarecrow-like contraption with swiveling wood-and-metal arms that rearranged magnetic fields, assorted boxes and panels that promoted "quantum proton alignment," mysterious dots covering the walls like a rash, and nearly a dozen things dangling from the speakers' binding posts that were supposed to do something I can't remember. The author had an almost mystical belief in the power of these objects to bend the laws of physics and told me that he'd spent more on them than on the rest of the system, because in his opinion they were more important to the overall sound.

The thing that surprised me most is that despite the tweaks—or maybe because of them—his hi-fi sounded pretty terrific.

Does everything produce an improvement?"

My skeptical visitor, to whom I'd just pointed out some of the acoustic treatments and other accessories in my listening room, wasn't trying to push my buttons. He just wanted my opinion.

"No," I said. "Some things make the sound worse—way worse—but after all these years, I'm convinced that just about everything that can be done to a room or a system produces an audible difference, for better or worse."

"A switch? Why do I need a switch?" That was my response to Meredith Gabor, head of marketing and PR for cable and accessories manufacturer Nordost, after she dropped the news. She had just arranged with Jim Austin for me to write a shorter, "ancillary" review of the new Nordost QNet Network Switch ($3199.99) with its optional QSource linear power supply ($2749.99) and premium QSource DC umbilical interface cables ($339.99 for 1m). Why did I need an expensive QNet switch when my router was functioning reliably? Good question.

Memorandum:
To: Steve McCormack, Chief Designer, The Mod Squad
Dear Steve:

I cannot question the general value of Tiptoes in many specific applications. There are a great many areas where I, many other audiophiles, and a number of leading manufacturers have found that Tiptoes can improve any audio system in which the components are subject to. mechanical or acoustic vibration from speaker sound—that is, virtually any audio system.

Chairman at the Board: Recording the Soundtrack of a Generation, by Bill Schnee. Backbeat Books, 2021. 219pp. $24.49, hard cover; $21.49, Kindle e-book.

It was September 2012, and Sasha Matson and I were in Los Angeles to record the singers for his jazz opera, Cooperstown. We had already recorded the instrumental backing with engineer Mike Marciano at Brooklyn's Systems Two studio, and the venue for the vocal tracking sessions was Bill Schnee's studio in North Hollywood.

Book Review: Audio Research: Making the Music Glow
Written by Ken Kessler, designed by Henry Nolan. 220pp. $150. Available at Audio Research dealers and online at audioresearch.com.

I never met Audio Research Corporation founder William Zane Johnson, who died in 2011. But when he founded his now-legendary company in 1970, I and my ragged troupe of Dynaco modifiers were in the trenches, fighting the sand-warrior hordes during the first transistor onslaught.