But let's forget about the musicians for a moment and think about the music.
Every symphonic musician knows that he plays best on those special occasions when the orchestra and the audience are hyping each other—those rare times when the tension between them is almost electric. When this happens, the excitement and inspiration of that performance can transcend any shortcomings in the orchestra's execution. It hardly needs to be said that this almost never happens at a recording session.
Typically, a commercial recording is made up of bits and snatches of different "takes," often…
February is traditionally the month for music features, so I start this column with some recordings you really should hear. This year I had a greater-than-usual number of worthy candidates for "Records To Die For." Which discs got named as R2D4s and which got column coverage was, to quote the Iron Duke, a near-run thing.
Alexander Tikhonovich Gretchaninov (1864–1956), fascinating in his own right, is as well a prime subject for a game of historical "what might have been." A late bloomer as far as composers go, he claimed not to have set eyes on a piano before he was 14. He had started…
After you've given the Gretchaninov and Janácek discs a few spins, and if you're up for even more fantastic choral singing fantastically recorded, the same forces heard in the Gretchaninov have released Sacred Choral Works (SACD/CD, Chandos CHSA 5055), a disc of music by Josef Rheinberger, about whose Abendlied "Bleib bei uns," as sung by the Cambridge Singers under John Rutter (Collegium COLCD 131), I have raved in these pages. The most important difference I think you'll want to know about is that, for most Westerners, the Gretchaninov really seems to come from an alternate universe—New…
The DU-50 has front-panel pushbuttons to disable its video functions and to change from the standard digital filter to Luxman's proprietary FE or Fluency DAC, a minimum-phase algorithm that eliminates pre-ringing. After quite a bit of listening, I decided that the Fluency did something I liked but couldn't really define. So JA has agreed to give the DU-50 a listen and a measure. One point is that the Fluency DAC is not optimal for SACD playback; when playing SACDs, you must manually deselect it.
As I said, I think the L505u is a screaming bargain. The situation with the more expensive…
Sidebar: Contacts
Audio-Technica US, 1221 Commerce Drive, Stow, OH 44224. Tel: (330) 686-2600. Fax: (330) 688-3752. Web: www.audio-technica.com.
Luxman Overseas Sales: Level Three, Three Pacific Place, 1 Queen's Road East, Hong Kong. Tel: (852) 2584-6218. Fax: (852) 3585-1213. Web: www.luxman.co.jp. US distributor: On a Higher Note, PO Box 698, San Juan Capistrano, CA 92693. Tel: (949) 488-3004. Fax: (949) 488-3284. Web: www.onahighernote.com.
On two occasions I've caught myself wondering how to afford a pair of Wilson Audio loudspeakers. Interestingly, both happened within the past year. The first was in April 2009, at the Son et Image show in Montreal, during a demonstration of the MAXX Series 3. The experience was notable for its blend of genuinely great sound with genuine musicality: Each performance unfolded of its own natural accord, with human randomness and nuance, and without the fussy, mechanical, shallow artifice that attracts some audiophiles in the way a carnivorous plant attracts flies—and, if they're lucky, kills…
Truth told, the latter wasn't a worry: As with any set of Wilson speakers sold by an authorized dealer, my review pair was installed by a factory-trained setup technician—in this case, the estimable Peter McGrath himself. I observed and assisted (mostly observed), and you may rest assured that the process is every bit as systematic, painstaking, and successful as you might have heard: Moving the cabinet as little as half an inch really did have an impact on the sound.
But for now, file that away . . .
House guests
Peter McGrath was our guest near the end of summer, but I…
Other designers would make the same claim, of course. But to my way of thinking there remains a distinction: The whole dead-cabinet thing, like the whole nonresonant-tonearm thing, must be done intelligently, thoroughly, and to the nth degree—or not at all. As with very-high-quality record players, if just one element within the whole is allowed to resonate in a manner that sets it apart from the others, not only is the sound distorted, but it's distorted in a manner significantly less tolerable than if the designer hadn't bothered at all with anti-resonance techniques. If what you have in…
Now that Sony has bought CBS's records division, and the infamous Copycode bill seems to be dying in Congress, the way may be clearing at last for the US introduction of the new Digital Audio Tape system. This has sparked renewed speculation in the industry about the impact DAT will have on existing formats, particularly the fledgling CD. Some are convinced DAT will kill CD, because of its ability to record as well as play digital recordings. Others believe DAT won't even gain a foothold in the market, for the same reason quadraphonic sound laid an egg back in the '70s: The public can't…
Beware of DAT, says Peter W. Mitchell
Beware of DAT. If, despite the limited availability and high cost of digital cassette machines (and their companion tapes), you still feel irresistibly tempted to be the first on your street to invest in the new medium, buy with caution. The analog-to-digital converters in some of the first-generation DAT machines have a linearity defect at moderately low recording levels.
Their performance is fine at high levels (near 0dBFS) and at very low levels (below –70dB). But from –30 to –60dB, the encoding defect in some machines produces distortion…
