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Brilliant Corners #21: German kitchens, Japanese amps, and Afropop gems
Dec 05, 2024
I have a day job at a museum. One of my favorite things about working there is taking the elevator from my office down to one of the floors open to the public; I walk into the galleries through a discreet panel in the wall. This makes me feel like I'm in one of those horror-movie manors with a tunnel concealed behind a bookshelf. Sometimes I startle people, which I kind of enjoy.
Mostly I like spending time looking at art, especially in the early mornings when the galleries are empty. Lately, I've been watching art handlers hanging a roughly 100'-long tapestry depicting some manner of planetary jetsamor maybe they are aquatic plantsby Nigerian artist Otobong Nkanga. And I make regular trips to a small theater to watch mesmerizing footage of Orchard Street in working-class lower Manhattan, shot in 1955 by veteran filmmaker Ken Jacobs. Captured on warm, saturated 16mm film, the long-gone people on the screen appear as vividly alive as the museumgoers around me.
My favorite-ever thing at the museum, though, is a life-sized kitchen. Austrian architect Grete Lihotzky designed it for a Frankfurt housing complex in 1927.
In Gramophone Dreams #88, I described the sound of TEAC's VRDS-701T CD transport as "dense and precise in a way I had never previously heard from digital." I went on to explain, "by 'dense,' I mean there was a tangible corporeality effected by seemingly infinite quantities of small, tightly packed molecules of musical information."
What I noticed most during the review period was the extraordinary volume of data the 701T was vacuuming off those pits and lands and turning into music. As I have gotten to know it better, what I've noticed most is how the 701T sorts and delivers all that data in a manner that makes every DAC I pair it with sound more corporal and dynamic.
As I wrote that review, I wondered how the 701T would perform partnered with its matching UD-701N converter/streamer/preamplifier and how the TEAC flagship DAC's sound character would compare to flagship DACs from HoloAudio, Denafrips, and dCS.
Mat and Harry Weisfeld presented two dedicated rock ‘em, sock ‘em systems at last month's CAF2024 show. The first room marked the debut of the new VPI Forever Series Model One turntable, which is currently in house at Chez Micallef under review.