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"Turntable Wars" was the phrase used by Anthony H. Cordesman to head his review of the Oracle, SOTA, and VPI turntables in Vol.9 No.4. To judge from the reaction of the manufacturers at CES to this innocent phraseology, you would have thought that Stereophile had been warmongering, rather than publishing what were actually pretty positive opinions of the products concerned. So enraged was Jacques Riendeau of Oracle, and concerned that the record be put straight, that he insisted on a "right to reply" to AHC's review; as it happened, Ivor Tiefenbrun and Charlie Brennan of Linn (right in…
John Atkinson: But that's why people buy magazines with reviews—they want to purchase the "best," absolute, not just the best for them
Ivor Tiefenbrun: We live in an age when everyone is saying "Tell me who to marry!," "Tell me what to buy!," "Tell me what to do!" To me it doesn't matter what the person buys; what matters is that they chose whatever it is. That's what the component audio business is all about. And what I've always tried to do is get the retailer to demonstrate the product so that the customer can exercise his own judgment, and know why he's bought whatever he's bought…
Riendau: And you will then hear people say "I think you should use a clamp, as the inside of the record really sounds bad!"
Brennan: The problem with many reviews is that they don't tell me what I'm going to get in terms of extra satisfaction from my music. The description should make people interested in learning more about that product. People will buy a magazine that has articles that express confidence in good products and say that it's really a good idea to have a good hi-fi system. I remember when it was first discovered that turntables affected sound quality—the fact that a…
I listened to one of our sales guys talking about product to a guy who came in the room, and he did the same thing we accuse the magazines of doing. Before he's told the guy what it is, or what we built it for, or what we think people could possibly use this thing for, he's into talking about the material, the platter and the bearing, things that I feel we should get away from. Now we've never published specifications on our products, but that doesn't mean we don't have any. I think that the whole industry can get into this loop, when you've got the customer saying "Should I buy this or not…
Ivor's mention of audible differences brought the conversation back to AHC's review, specifically his statement that "While the sonic differences between the best turntables are important, they are not as important as the differences between cartridges and speakers." Not surprisingly, this had raised eyebrows amongst this group of rotary evangelists:
Tiefenbrun: If this guy doesn't know that a turntable makes a bigger difference than anything downstream can, then someone should demonstrate it to him. It sounds cuckoo so he doesn't believe it—there's a whole industry out there saying…
We often create that contention ourselves. SOTA called me a "crude mechanic," the nicest thing that's ever been said about me. But we contribute to that as well, because we do things in isolation. We also tend to compete internally instead of going out there and telling the rest of the marketplace that have never heard about Linn or SOTA or Oracle or whatever. My favorite story is about a guy in my company who went to a hi-fi shop where he used to work, and a customer came in with a prototype Syrinx tonearm. "Who sold you that piece of fucking crap?" my employee asked the guy. The guy said…
"Check it out." Music editor Robert Baird handed me a CD. "He's 70 years old, it's his 13th album, he got Don Was to produce it, and it's his best yet."
RB was talking about Delbert McClinton's new CD, Acquired Taste (New West NWA3044).
"Is it good enough for this month's 'Recording of the Month?'"
"Musically, yes indeed, but the sound is a bit funky, especially the first track. Give it a listen."
So I did.
The sound was indeed . . . funky. The overall sound was in-your-face, with rather a buzzy quality that was emphasized on that first track, "Mama's…
Jim O'Rourke: The Visitor
Drag City DC375CD (CD). 2009. Jim O'Rourke, prod., eng. AAD? TT: 38:03
Performance ****
Sonics ****
Drag City DC375CD (CD). 2009. Jim O'Rourke, prod., eng. AAD? TT: 38:03
Performance ****
Sonics ****
Musicians all say they detest labels. "I'm not a singer-songwriter! My blonde cornrows look nothing like Axl Rose's! My guitar playing does not sound like a man strangling a pony!"
But in the strange case of Jim O'Rourke, the many labels he's acquired have made him quite the man of mystery. Early in his career, this musical jack-of-all-trades (as an instrumentalist, he gravitates toward guitar and keyboards) made a cottage industry out of being…
Every now and then an affordable product comes along that's so good, even wealthy shoppers want it. Past examples in domestic audio include the Rega RB300 tonearm, the original Quicksilver Mono amplifier, the Grace F9E phono cartridge—even Sony's unwitting CD player, the original PlayStation. Based on word of mouth alone, one might add the HRT Music Streamer+ to that lauded list.
Designed by Kevin Halverson and manufactured in the US by High Resolution Technologies, the Music Streamer+ is a $299 outboard device that enables the use of a personal computer as a digital music…
The MS+ combined solid musical basics—very good timing, momentum, and drama—with a sound that softened rather than spotlit the flaws in weaker recordings. It also had less openness and air than either the Wavelength Cosecant or my Sony SCD-777ES disc player, and its sense of spatial depth was modest rather than abundant.
That said, the Music Streamer+ was consistently satisfying in its own right. On "Queen Jane Approximately," from Bob Dylan's Highway 61 Revisited (CD, Columbia CH 90324), the HRT converter played the song with good musical flow—the rhythm section retained a sense of…