Wes Phillips on the Sessions
One of the enduring myths of audiophilia is that of the recording as a true and honest picture of a musical event—a sonic "snapshot" that captures a unique moment of time the way a photograph captures the light of a day long since past.
This is not to say that recording can't capture the magic of a musical event, or freeze a particular musical moment for all eternity, of course. We all have discs that transport us to what we think of as a single instant when the muses supped among us—such moments are what make audiophiles. Our search for more of…
At 1:06pm, almost precisely on schedule, we slated take 1 of "Shenandoah." At 1:44pm, in the middle of take 11, we heard the first pile driver through the omnidirectional mikes, with their extended low end. It goes without saying that the next song scheduled for recording was Sting's quiet "Valparaiso." "You can filter that out," Erick said to JA, "can't you?"
"No problem," said John through clenched teeth. That's another part of recording strategy, at least as taught by John Atkinson: The musicians must never know that what they are asking is impossible. They make the music; the…
John Atkinson on Capturing the Sound
As I had recorded Cantus in the Washington Pavilion's Great Hall in Sioux Falls back in 2003, for the group's Deep River CD, I had a good idea of where I was going to place the three distant microphone pairs for my main pickup. An almost coincident ORTF-arranged pair of DPA cardioids would capture the soundstage, a wide-spaced pair of Earthworks omnidirectionals would add bloom and spaciousness, and a more distant pair of high-voltage DPA omnis, mounted either side of a Jecklin Disc from Coresound and fitted with their special acoustic equalizers,…
The hum problem that developed on Day Two of recording turned out to be due to a voltage regulator going bad in the power supply of the other HV3B, which was being used to amplify the cardioids. The problem was terminal, so as the tubed Forssell M2a didn't have low enough noise to be used for the distant mikes and my Earthworks preamp was a single-channel unit, I used the working HV3B for the cardioids and replaced it with a DPA unit to power the high-voltage omnis. Like the Millennia, this supplies the necessary 130V to the mikes but has a fixed gain of 20dB rather than the Millennia's…
Sidebar 1: There Lies The Music
There Lies the Home Track Listing Total Time: 70:23
"Prelude (Before Dawn)"* Edie Hill (2005) 1:16
"Sea Fever" Amy Beach (1931) 3:04
Words by John Masefield
with Charles Kemper, piano
"Break, Break, Break"* Brian Arreola (1998) 2:41
Words by Alfred, Lord Tennyson
with Mira Frisch, cello
Songs of the Sea, Op.91 Charles Villiers Stanford (1904)
Words by Henry Newbolt; Kelvin Chan,
solo baritone; with Charles Kemper, piano
"Drake's…
Sidebar 2: There Lies The Gear
Microphones: two DPA 4011 cardioids (ORTF pair); two Earthworks QTC40 omnis (wide-spaced pair); two DPA 4003 omnis with acoustic equalizers (on Coresound Jecklin Disc); DPA 4006 omni (spot mike, cello); Neumann M147 tube cardioid (spot mike, voice, guitar); two Neumann TLM103 cardioids (spot piano mikes, as ORTF pair).
Microphone Preamps: two Millennia Media HV3Bs, Earthworks "Zero Distortion," Forssell M2a, DPA power supply/preamp, Metric Halo ULN2.
A/D Converters: dCS 904 (master), Metric Halo ULN2 (slave), Metric Halo MIO 2882 (slave), all…
"Hail, mortal!"
—Michelle Pfeiffer as Titania, reacting to Kevin Kline as Bottom, when he succeeds in operating a phonograph
Our shops are filled with clever answers. The trick is to find out which ones are attached to similarly intelligent questions.
Remember the Nakamichi "computing" turntable of the early 1980s? The biggest jewel in its engineering crown—the only jewel, some would say—was its ability to correct off-center records on the fly. The Nakamichi could determine, with astounding precision, how much correction a given record required, then compensate for the…
With that in mind, Bill Firebaugh applied yet another simple, clever construction technique to his first tonearm: He filled the tube with sand. Not just any sand, according to George Stanwick, of distributor Stanalog Audio, but the really good stuff that some of us daddies buy for our children to play in. That may have contributed to the findings of Stereophile founder J. Gordon Holt, who first wrote about the WT Tonearm in 1984 (Vol.7 No.8), and who declared that Firebaugh's tonearm was the first in his experience to prevent the average moving-coil cartridge of the day from sounding bright…
The Well Tempered Record Player, January 2008 (Vol.31 No.1)
A little over a year ago, I borrowed a sample of Well Tempered Lab's bread-and-butter turntable-tonearm combination, the Well Tempered Record Player. Distributor George Stanwick (of Stanalog) let me keep the review sample a little longer than usual, and that gave me a chance to make a few more notes.
Next to the Rega P9, which I also admire, the WTRP came closer than any other new turntable or tonearm to coaxing this Linnie into abandoning his LP12—or at least buying an alternative. The LP12 and the WTRP differ in their…
Anyone who knows me will be happy to tell you: I'm very bad at letting go of anger. I hold grudges. I'm unforgiving.
I can look back at 10 years' worth of my own phono-preamp reviews and the stain is unmistakable: In every one is the subtle anger, the subtle pissiness, that came from my having to write about such a thing at all. I found it difficult to forgive an industry that would expect preamp buyers to start paying thousands of dollars more, just like that, for a phono section: something that we used to get for free, like drinkable water or a good education.
Nowadays…
