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I had made room for LPs on my tall bookshelf, carefully placing vinyl records along the cheap chipboard until the shelf bowed in the center and threatened to collapse. I didn't like this very much at all. I spent days away from home fearing that the shelf would give way. I'd come home from a long day in the office to find The Byrds and Henry Fiol, Herbie Hancock and Sam Beam, all in a jumbled mess of vinyl and plastic and wood and carpet. Yet, more LPs would soon arrive.
When my LP collection grew larger than space allowed for them on the couch, I started stacking records up against my short stools. A stack of a dozen or so LPs soon became a stack of three or four dozen LPs; soon became impossible to move and stretched from the left side of one stool all the way to the right side of the opposite stool. I had the Pulaski Skyway of vinyl LPs arcing through my small apartment.
Just to be clear: I never felt imprisoned, or controlled, by my television. We had enjoyed a harmless, casual relationship. My television never told me what to do, never told me who to associate with; my television never judged me, never questioned my motives; my television gave me my space when I needed it. It had been a good television, for the most part. Sure, sometimes it could be obtuse or aloof with its poor reception; sometimes it seemed like it didn't want me to watch the Mets game on Saturday afternoons. But, all in all, I liked television. I still do. It's just that I…
As an audiophile, one of my core beliefs has always been that, once they have heard better sounding music, everybody would want it. That's how it worked with me: My friend Bill sat me down in front of his Quad '57s and cued David Bowie's Heroes on the turntable and once I heard all of those new sounds coming out of my beloved old LP, I was a changed man.
Of course, it didn't hurt that my wife, sitting next to me, said, "We're going to own a pair of these speakers, aren't we?" That's simply proof that I'm a very lucky man.
But I digress, I was saying that I believed that choosing…
The music begins before he arrives. There are horns and hollers and hand claps. Then comes the MC: "Right now, ladies and gentlemen, we'd like to introduce the star of our show, the young man you've all been waiting for, Mister Soul! So, what d'you say? Let's all get together and welcome him to the stage with a great, big hand! How 'bout it?! How 'bout it?!"
And then he comes on and the crowd goes mad and he gives some instruction: "Don't fight it, we're gonna feel it. Don't fight it, we're gonna feel it. Alright?"
"How you doin' out there?"
Sam Cooke,…
Your sweet shadow still hangs on my cold walls, rests on my dusty shelves, smiles at me from old photos. She and I danced all night long to Marvin Gaye's Let's Get It On.
Have you ever read the liner notes? The Mobile Fidelity reissue preserves them well. You open the gate and you smile and you read:
I can't see anything wrong with sex between consenting anybodies. I think we make far too much of it. After all, one's genitals are just one important part of the magnificent human body. I have no argument with the essential part they play in the reproduction of the…
The Phiaton PS 200 sound-isolating earphones cost $249 and are designed to resemble jet engines! John Atkinson is working on a review.
The Phiaton PS 300 NC headphones ($299) use Valves of the Heart Sound Technology (VHST) to control airflow into and out of the headphone speakers.
Clad in red leather and light as a feather, the frigging luscious Phiaton Moderna MS 400 headphones have a way of caressing your silly skull.
I'd been curious about Phiaton's headphones ever since Wes Phillips's positive review of the radical-looking, leather-clad Moderna MS 400 appeared in our pages earlier this year, so when I learned that a couple of Phiaton's executives would be in New York City to introduce their new noise-cancelling 'phones, I was eager to check them out.
It's a gray and windy day in Manhattan, and the sky is threatening to fall. I get off the train at Herald Square and decide to walk the twenty or so blocks to the HWH PR offices where our 10am meeting is scheduled. I've got the time and I could…