A Visit To Abbey Road Studios

A Visit To Abbey Road Studios

Call me a hopeless romantic but I could not get “Penny Lane” out of my head as I sat in the back of a black cab whizzing across a remarkably deserted London early one morning a couple weeks ago. “On the corner is a banker with a motorcar…” I was on a pilgrimage. More like THE pilgrimage. The one every serious fan of twentieth century music needs to make at least once. Out to St. John’s Wood and Abbey Road Studios.

You're Surrounded & Chesky Records Special Deal For Stereophile Readers

You're Surrounded & Chesky Records Special Deal For Stereophile Readers

We've worked out a special deal for readers to celebrate the new Chesky You're Surrounded release.

From now until September 7, 2015, readers of this website will get a 25% discount on the new 24-bit high resolution You're Surrounded album and/or anything in Chesky's hi-res catalog on HDTracks.com.

[This offer has expired.]

Gramophone Dreams #5

Gramophone Dreams #5

I believe in historical consensus. I believe in hi-fi gear that reveals its quality slowly and holds it value over time, irrespective of technology. I have never bought into the superiority of one technology over another. The art of audio engineering lies in the wisdom and vital energy of the designer's viewpoint within whatever technology he or she has chosen to work with. I call this the designer's qi or chi. Every audio product's most important specification is who created it, followed by the spirit in which it was fostered—and, of course, how it was made and what it is made of. These are the determining factors for long-term audio relevance.

Fried R/4 loudspeaker

Fried R/4 loudspeaker

If anyone can be said to be the guru of the transmission line, that would have to be Irving M. "Bud" Fried. He has been promoting the design for years now, first with the made-in-England IMF designs, later with the designs of Fried Products, made right here in the US of A. He has long been convinced of the basic superiority of the design, and still uses it in his top-of-the-line systems. But true transmission lines are invariably big, heavy, hard to build, and, for all of those reasons, expensive. Essentially, they involve a long, convoluted, heavily damped tunnel behind the bass driver which channels the back wave to the outside world. The length and cross-sectional area of the tunnel are of some importance, although the technical basis for the transmission line, as applied to a loudspeaker enclosure, has never been firmly nailed down. Certainly there is no mathematical model for the transmission line as complete as that developed over the past two decades for the sealed or ported box (footnote 1).

But Bud Fried has clung to the transmission line, for all of its complexities. In order to bring at least some of its touted advantages to a lower price point, he had to come up with a variation which would work in a smaller enclosure. That variation was the "line tunnel," which, according to Fried, originated in an early-1970s Ferrograph (a British company specializing in tape recorders) monitor which was later adapted by IMF. Basically it consists of a short (compared with a transmission line) duct from the inside to the outside of the heavily damped enclosure. The duct is designed with approximately the same cross-sectional area as the loudspeaker cone.

Klaus Heymann: A Naxos World

Klaus Heymann: A Naxos World

Is it because no one takes pot shots at you unless you're on top? Or are the most recent criticisms of Klaus Heymann and his diversified Naxos Digital Services empire on to something more?

To refresh: Heymann, a German entrepreneur who began selling cameras and stereos to American GIs in Vietnam, and later become the Hong Kong distributor of Bose and Studer audio gear, launched Naxos, a classical-music label specializing in budget-priced CDs, in 1987 (footnote 1). The label's name is also easy to pronounce in any language. Heymann began to build the Naxos catalog—now one of the largest classical labels—by recording young and often unknown artists and orchestras, most from Eastern and Central Europe. Soon, displays of Naxos CDs, all of their covers conforming to a uniform, instantly recognizable design, became to crop up in record stores large and small.

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