On August 29, 2024, Wm. R. Kennedy Buhler, aka Wil Buhler, informed Krell dealers, distributors, and customers that Krell is well on the path to reopening.
Rabbit Holes #11: Chasing John Lennon's Mind Games
Aug 29, 2024
After a wild decade in the biggest pop music group ever, John Lennon's post-Beatles years were spent in protest, in various kinds of therapy, in immigration court, and in search of a new musical identity. He had been a musician since age 16 and a superstar since his early 20s. He was only in his 30s.
By summer 1973, when Lennon's fourth album, Mind Games, was recorded at New York's Record Plant Studios, the turbulence of Lennon's life seas was at gale force. He was separating from Yoko Ono and starting a 16-month relationship (consummated at Ono's suggestion) with their shared administrative assistant, May Pang. The Nixon Administration was targeting Lennon and Ono for deportation because of their left-wing political activities, mostly focused on the Vietnam War.
Spin Doctor #16: Sutherland Dos Locos Phono Preamp, Dynavector XX-2A Phono Cartridge
Aug 28, 2024
Ron Sutherland makes a strong case for being crowned the king of all phono preamps, though I expect he would blush at any such suggestion. In 1979, with degrees in physics and electronic engineering (where his final project involved designing and building a digital logiccontrolled preamp), he teamed up with Gayle Sanders to found electrostatic speaker company MartinLogan. ("Martin" and "Logan" are Sanders' and Sutherland's middle names, respectively.) But after a few years, he found the increasingly corporate mindset at M-L a bit stifling, so he decided to go his own way. Ron wanted to build gear he thought was cool and fun while not being directed solely by its commercial potential. He joined up with his brother to start Sutherland Engineering, creating hi-fi equipment that piqued his own interest and hopefully that of a bunch of customers.
At first, Sutherland made a wide range of components, including preamps, power amps, and DACs, but gradually he focused more and more on phono preamps. Today that's the only thing he makes...
At this late date, it seems impossible that there could still be "lost" albums lingering in the vaults by musicians as important and successful as Johnny Cash and Paul McCartney. And yet Universal Music has just released "new" albums by both artists that significantly add to their already hallowed recording catalogs.
Ah, Denmark. Land of the Vikings and blue-eyed, blond-haired folk with faces sculpted just so. I loved my week there as a Stereophile correspondent and member of a scraggly scrum of audio journalists whisked to DALI headquarters on a promotional junket.
Aside from its universal attractiveness, what struck me during my stay in the southernmost and smallest of the Scandinavian countries was how by North American standards the more densely populated cities I visited, Copenhagen and Aarhus, seemed orderly and clean. Cars, pedestrians, and cyclists kept tightly to their lanes. I saw no cigarette butts on the sidewalk and only sparse pockets of graffiti. There seemed to be a natural, sequential flow to everythingan evenness and balance that was close to idyllic.
Outside its bigger cities, Denmark looks pastoral, with long stretches of grassy fields sporadically interrupted by broad bodies of water, and bucolic towns that seem to have sprouted in the middle of nowhere. It's in these towns that a lot of Danish hi-fi is made: DALI in Nørager (population 1143); Dynaudio in Skanderborg (population 20,000). Skanderborg contains evidence of human settlements belonging to the earliest Nordic Stone Age, starting some 100,000 years ago.
Dynaudio doesn't go back quite that far; the company was founded in 1977...