search

JORDI SAVALL & ANDREW LAWRENCE-KING: The Celtic Viol
Irish & Scottish Airs & Dances, traditional & by Fraser, Gow, Macpherson, Marshal, O'Carolan
Jordi Savall, treble viols; Andrew Lawrence-King, Irish harp, psalterium AliaVox AVSA 9865 (SACD/CD)

I am not knowledgeable about this music, but I have great respect for Jordi Savall and so can recommend this recording simply for its sound. One need not know much about the lovely, melodious tunes that emerge from the instruments to find them infectious. Moreover, the warm…

Can't tell you how many singer/songwriters I've heard live before they ever got signed up, before they could even afford a band, just them and a guitar up there making us feel like that (as Joni Mitchell used to sing). Finally the first album comes out, and wha-a-a-a? The sleeve lists three producers, eight engineers, thirty session musicians (including two synthesizer players, but not counting the strings), a Brazilian percussionist, and none of the songs I've heard the…

De Paravicini: I was born in 1945 in Nigeria, of all places, of British parents. My father was in Nigeria at the time as a geologist. I was taken back to England at the age of 7 for education, and there I went on to what we call Technical College and did Electrical Engineering…

Stereophile: So they recognized, themselves, the superiority of the German tubes.

De Paravicini: Right. And Lux has made some conventional power…

De Paravicini: It sounded tolerably acceptable; it had a pleasing quality. It was smooth and easy to listen to, but it measured horribly. Any reviewer that measured it would have shot it down in flames. It needed to be polished up. And so, within the confines of the mechanical layout that they had chosen I decided to overhaul the whole thing, while keeping the overall sound quality similar to what they wanted. I wasn't going to try and sell them my viewpoint on the sound quality.

Stereophile: Which was what?

De Paravicini: Well, my…

De Paravicini: Yes, well, it may only appear to have a damping factor of 20 but that needs to be clarified. People have latched on to the idea that damping factor is the only important criterion for tight bass.

Now a conventional dynamic speaker is essentially an electric motor in series with an 8 ohm resistor inside that motor—if you measure the voice-coil terminal it measures 8 ohms DC [(footnote 1)]. Now if you put a screwdriver across those two terminals, you have put an infinite damping factor on that…

De Paravicini: That's right. Even in Japan the pace in audio design has slowed down dramatically in the last four or five years. There is a stagnation because of the lack of incentive. There's not enough marketplace demand. I blame a lot of this on the audio magazines. The mighty word is Gospel, and people believe what's in print much more readily than they believe what is verbal. But the words they print have caused more confusion than enlightenment. And they mislead.

…

The Japanese Yamaha firm, better known for its successes in motorcycle design than in audio design, has managed to score a First in audio by devising a way of producing speaker domes of beryllium, by depositing the metal on a suitably…

Description: Three-way loudspeaker system consisting of beryllium-dome mid- and upper-range drivers and a cone-type woofer. Nominal impedance: 8 ohms. Power capacity (signal): 100 watts.
Dimensions: 14.75" W by 26.5" H by 12.75" deep. Weight: 68 lbs each.
Serial numbers of review samples: 10492.
Price: $950/pair.
Manufacturer: Yamaha Electronics Corp., 6660 Orangethorpe Avenue, Buena Park, CA 90620. Tel: (714) 522-9105. Fax: (714) 670-0108. Web: www.yamaha.com.

Building such ambitious loudspeakers as the Genesis products is a risky proposition. Big loudspeakers often fail miserably—any flaw seems to be magnified by the loudspeaker's lofty aspirations—the bigger they are, the harder they fall. Moreover, the criteria for what…