Spin Doctor

A lot of us are vulnerable to marketing and hype, especially when we are young and impressionable. As a young kid, I was convinced that Sea Monkeys for a dollar from the back of a comic book would bring me a bowlful of happiness, until my Uncle Jim convinced me that not all was what it seemed.

I get nervous when I hear that an audio company I like is suddenly under new ownership. Are the new owners planning to carry forward the legacy of the company's founders, or will they try to move things in a different direction?

When people ask me what I do for a living, I reply that I'm a turntable setter upper. That seems to me like it should be descriptive enough, but it typically results in follow-up questions that have me explaining a whole audiophile subculture that few nonaudiophiles even realize exists.

I was heading back home to New York in my old Mercedes diesel on a Sunday evening, having just attended the annual Capital Audiofest near Washington, DC. Riding shotgun was fellow Stereophile scribbler Ken Micallef, and as we puttered along the straight, featureless lower half of the New Jersey Turnpike, we started to reminisce about our audio show experiences.

Renowned British turntable manufacturer Rega once defined a turntable as a vibration-measuring machine; that definition became the title of a coffee table book tracing the company's history and design philosophy.

As the Spin Doctor, I tend to lead an analog life. I'm not just talking about my preferred ways of listening to music, but also my approach to other everyday technology. For decades, there has been a push to turn everything we use into a connected, "smart" device. We now have technology that allows us to change the color temperature of the lights in our living room while we sit on the sofa, or to answer our front doorbell from the other side of the world. I prefer an older-school approach.

The largest regularly scheduled choral singing event in the world is the Estonian National Song Festival, or Laulupidu, which comes around about once every five years in Tallinn, Estonia's capital city. The numbers are pretty mind blowing.