In the vertical plane (fig.7), the Matrix 801's use of high-order crossover filters makes it fairly insensitive to listener position, the response hardly changing over quite a wide ±10 degrees window…
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Note, however, the very even spacing of the contour lines in these graphs, which correlates with the superbly stable and well-defined stereo imaging. Also note the overall well-controlled manner in which the tweeter gets more directional above 8kHz. In conjunction with the slight lack of top-octave on-axis energy, this will make the speaker sound slightly mellow in all but very small rooms.
Modern hi-fi is little more than a way of getting electricity to pretend that it's music. Of course, good source components remain all-important, and even if loudspeakers are imperfect, most of us can find one or two that suit our tastes, if not our rooms and the rest of our gear.
But in between is where the challenge lies, if only because amplifiers really aren't amplifiers at all: They're re-creators. Electricity isn't just their fuel, it's their raw material as well, and rather than make the music on our records louder—which is how the first record players did it—modern amps merely…
Blues movies, movies about the blues, continue to be a treacherous swamp for filmmakers; For some bizarre reason, they just can’t get it right.
It’s not that here aren’t stories to tell either. Let’s take the most famous example: Robert Johnson. The current theory about his death is that he died because the husband of a woman he was hustling got angry and served him whiskey laced with strychnine. Supposedly, it took him three days of wailing agony before he finally died. Now if that ain’t fertile dramatic material I don’t know what is.
There have been good documentaries…
I think it was the only album my parents owned on both cassette and vinyl. So they could listen at home, and in the car. I remember looking at it and thinking I don't know what. This young black man in a gleaming white suit with a look on his face that says what. Looking all confident and comfortable and strange.
I remember listening to it. The cassette version because I wasn't allowed to play with the vinyl. I was five. I think I fell in love with "Pretty Young Thing" after listening only once. I wondered why such a great song was buried so deep into the album. But they…
I was listening to Radiohead’s new album, In Rainbows. It’s really as great as all the rock critics say. More than that (from this blog’s angle), it’s as harmonically and rhythmically sophisticated as just about any work of modern jazz. (I’m not saying it’s like jazz; rather, that on any musical level, the purest jazz purist has no grounds for looking down on it.) The album sent me to my music closet to take another listen to Brad Mehldau’s cover of Radiohead’s “Knives Out,” from his trio’s 2005 CD on the Nonesuch label, Day Is Done. I listened through all 10 tracks—which include, besides two…
Lawrence Lanaham goes to Baltimore, Maryland, as well as Bodymore, Murdaland to discover if David Simon's dyspeptic portrait of newspapers in crisis in this season's The Wire is realistic.
Guess what?
The Wire is fiction—and even though Simon was a journalist in Baltimore, his version of what happened then is just one story among many. Not precisely a Stop the presses! moment.
In fact, the biggest reason good fiction like The Wire works so well is that it is selective, sorting through all the facts to give one part of the story its narrative pop.
Good…
Who knows? This might be good.
I suspect that, on a given night, the Stones could still be the greatest rock band in the world. Oh, who am I kidding? Most nights these days, they might not even be the best rock band in town.
But a man can dream, can't he?
Hat tip to George Weber.
John Atkinson sent along this Jay Rosen article about why "the media" gets stuff like primaries so wrong.
Basically, Rosen argues, it's because "the gang of 500" chooses to do things "the way they've been done." Thus, you get the same tropes over and over again—and, if they happen to be spectacularly wrong, it's because the people didn't act logically.
Hmmm. Maybe pundits, like baseball players, should post their stats.
What I find so perplexing about herd journalism is how much it means that every contest has a single, easy-to-follow story line. With 500 people covering…
In bed the night before last, images of large and heavy loudspeakers carefully maneuvered into their old shipping cartons and up the narrow flight of stairs from JA's listening room, around a tight bend made tighter by piles of shoes and other things, and up another flight into a hall separating dining room from living room. One heavy step at a time, carefully.
"One two three up, one two three up, one two three up."
"Good work."
I remembered restless nights after long days at Suntan Lake, somewhere in childhood New Jersey, days spent struggling through the waves…