Sidebar: Recordings In The Round: Special Opera Edition
RUED LANGGAARD: Antikrist
Soloists: Sten Byriel, Helene Gjerris, Morten Suurballe, Jon Ketilsson, Johnny Van Hal,
Poul Elming, John Lundgren, Susanne Resmark, Camilla Nylund, Anne Margrethe Dahl. Thomas Dausgaard, Danish National Symphony & Choir.
DaCapo 6.220523-24 (2 SACD/CDs)
Fasten your seatbelts! From the spine-tingling opening through passages of power, beauty, and even great nastiness, the opera Antikrist, by Danish composer Rued Langgaard (1893–1952), stands, for me, as the latest in a historic series…
When audio designer Ken Shindo was a little boy, his father kept an enormous collection of 78rpm records in their home in Tokyo. During the final days of World War II, the Japanese authorities did their best to evacuate the city, but the elder Shindo was steadfast: He refused to leave, for fear that the records would be gone when he returned.
The evacuation was inevitable, and the worst came to pass: Virtually all of the family's belongings were destroyed. Yet by the end of 1947, according to one of Ken's sisters, the record collection had been replaced entirely—and a fine new music…
Equally impressive—and altogether unexpected—was the Montille's extraordinarily high value for the money. I've opened its chassis a number of times and marveled at the Montille's build quality, not to mention the provenance of its parts. More important, I've listened to it for hours on end, and been thoroughly enchanted by this little amp's performance every single time I've powered it up. To think that so unique and musically superior a design, hand-built to such a high level of quality, can sell for only $3995 is nothing short of wondrous.
Shindo Masseto preamplifier
So there I…
Why, in loudspeaker reviews, is impedance measured (assuming that the magazine in question bothers to measure anything)? Generally, for one principal reason only: to establish whether the speaker presents an "easy" or a "difficult" load to its partnering amplifier. In the design context, much more information can be extracted from a graph of speaker impedance vs frequency—such as details of the bass alignment, and indications of internal or structural resonances that can be difficult to identify by acoustical measurements. But for a magazine audience, the principal interest in a loudspeaker's…
All this was clear from Eric Benjamin's aforementioned AES article, but the message seems not to have filtered through in the 13 years since (footnote 5). Loudspeaker impedance continues to be assessed by considering modulus and phase separately when, as Benjamin showed, there is a much better way to reflect the load's severity from the amplifier's viewpoint. What he did—as Douglas Self did later (footnote 6), though by the less elegant means of SPICE circuit simulation rather than mathematical analysis—was to plot peak output-stage power dissipation vs frequency with respect to a stated…
So is this the real Otala effect we are looking at here? Do some speakers present more difficult loads than their impedance measurements suggest, not because of a failure of conventional measurement but simply because the data are not interpreted properly? To be certain about this, we must do what Otala and his coworkers failed to do: put the idea to the test using representative music signals. Eric Benjamin performed this crucial reality check and concluded that the dissipation behavior depicted in figs.5–10 is relevant to music signals. Let's see if we achieve a similar result using a…
Nirvana: Nevermind
Geffen/Sub Pop DGCD-24425 (CD only). Butch Vig, Nirvana, prods. AAD. TT: 59:22
I was driving home from work the other day when I saw a group of three boys, all around 13, sauntering down Guadalupe all attitude, wearing ratty skateboard chic and holding their skinny-ass arms out away from their sides like they were too muscular to swing freely. Nothing very extraordinary as far as 13-year-old boys go. But just as they got to the corner, one of the boys took a running leap and karate-kicked the massive steel signal-light pole. I mean, he whaled that sucker. It being…
If you think I burned out cartridge-wise at the end of my and JE's It's A Mad Mad Mad Mad World cartridge survey at the beginning of the year (Vol.18 Nos.1 & 2), you're wrong. If you think I ought to burn out and give it a rest, you'll be disappointed. If you think analog doesn't matter anymore, you have my semi-sincere condolences. But if you think, as I do, that analog is enjoying a resurgence of epic proportions (twilight or no), and that LP playback has reached a new zenith of musical wonder, then hang on—here I go again!
As mentioned in the Survey wrap-up, my high-rez, high-…
There's a certain synergy you're looking for when setting up a cartridge. After initial adjustment, place an LP on the spinning platter, lower the cartridge slowly into the groove, squint madly, and try to see how the diamond sets-in to the groove. A light magnifying tube can help here. You want the diamond fairly vertical and "straight in" under its VTF loading. Generally with the van den Huls, the stylus should emerge from the center of the hole in the pole piece and appear from a side view as if the stylus emerges more or less "straight" out of the generator—or a bit more deflected than…
The UK re-release of Island Records' Limited Edition Resurrection Series on 160gm virgin vinyl of Marianne Faithfull's Broken English (M1) finally brings the recording quality this favored artist of ours deserves. We own all her albums, including a desirable Quiex II of Strange Weather, but they all suffer from a blistering, grainy presence region, murky soundstage, and woolly bass. The re-release was extremely well-mastered, Marianne's voice breaking free of the recording to take shape before me. (Watch for other Island re-releases of the B-52's, Free, Cat Stevens, and Tom Waits—if they…
