Shane MacGowan (Photo: Creative Commons-Share Alike 2.0.)
There was a time in London, in the mid-'80s, when a party would invariably close with a couple of Pogues songs. It didn't matter what music had preceded them—it could be reggae or soul or whatever—but the Pogues would be played, to enthusiastic sing-a-longs by the party guests. Even I was known to join in occasionally.
As often as not, one of the songs would be the Pogues's cover of Ewan MacColl's "Dirty Old Town." It didn't matter that the song had been written about Salford (a city in Greater Manchester): Everyone would…
In Jan Swafford's excellent 2020 Mozart biography The Reign of Love, he intimately weaves the composer's life story with the music he created. Along the way, he confirms a legendary scene. Played to the hilt in Amadeus, Milos Forman's 1984 film adaptation of Peter Shaffer's play, the then-reigning Hapsburg monarch, Joseph II, rushes backstage after the premiere of Mozart's first operatic blockbuster, The Abduction from the Seraglio, and opines, "Too beautiful for our [Viennese] ears, my dear Mozart, and monstrous many notes." Sassy by nature or perhaps just stung by the implied criticism,…
Do you remember your first really decent hi-fi system? It opened up your music, teased your brain with the possibilities of thrilling aural excitement, of dives to the bottom of the musical ocean. Perhaps it was all you needed, but more likely it was the beginning of a quest for your own ultimate sound-induced bliss.
That quest may be ongoing and never-ending, because our tastes and preferences evolve over time, money comes and goes, and we're simply never satisfied. And even if we are, eventually, we're audiophiles, and the industry always offers something interesting and new, or…
I decided to test the low-frequency performance of The Nines. It pleased and amused me to learn that John Atkinson uses a Taylor Swift tune, "All Too Well (Taylor's Version)," from her remade Red (24/96 FLAC, Big Machine Records/Qobuz), to test low bass. It's a good tune for that purpose, with a prominent bassline dropping an octave at 2:25, when she sings, "'Cause there we are again in the middle of the night." The Nines clearly reproduced the descending low-frequency energy, but pushing the SPLs pushed the fuzziness. These little boxes are great at reasonable volumes, but they simply…
Sidebar 1: Specifications
Description: Two-way bass-reflex, standmount digital loudspeaker system with integrated D/A conversion, class-D amplification, and on-board DSP. Drive units: 1" Titanium LTS vented tweeter with Tractrix silicone-composite horn; 8" high-excursion fiber-composite–cone woofer in a rear-ported enclosure made of MDF and finished in wood veneer. Crossover frequency: 1.6kHz. Frequency response: 34Hz–25kHz, –3dB. Dynamic bass extension: 22Hz at 35% volume. Maximum output: 115dB at 1m (stereo pair). System power: 100W (low frequencies), 20W (high frequencies); 240W total…
Sidebar 2: Associated Equipment
Analog sources: Technics SL-1200MK5 turntable with KAB modifications (fluid tonearm damping, tonearm rewiring, 78rpm speed added); Ortofon 2M Blue moving magnet cartridge; Sony KD-34XBR960 digital CRT TV/display.
Digital sources: Lenovo ThinkPad L530 laptop PC running Windows 10, Qobuz desktop app, and Foobar2000 music player; Oppo DV-970HD DVD/CD/SACD player; iPhone 7S (wireless Bluetooth connection).—Tom Fine
Sidebar 3: Measurements
I performed the measurements with the Klipsch The Nines Primary speaker (serial number 107128623160250). Before I started the testing, I installed the Klipsch Connect app on my iPad mini and paired it with the speaker with Bluetooth. I used the app to set the equalizer controls to Flat, the low-frequency equalization to Other, which is used for a free-space placement away from the room boundaries, and to turn off the Dynamic Bass function, which adjusts the low-frequency extension up or down as the output level changes.
The app identified the speaker's…
Anthony H. (Tony) Cordesman, who wrote high-end equipment reviews for Audio, Stereophile, and The Absolute Sound (TAS), died suddenly last week. Cordesman also wrote articles and offered commentary about national security; scan the interwebs and you will learn of his deep and wide impact on that field. (The Washington Post obituary is here, and here's an appreciation by a fellow national security expert.)
Readers of a certain age may remember Cordesman's dead-serious delivery of crucial perspective and insights alongside Peter Jennings during ABC News's coverage of the first Gulf…
I said to Hank Williams, how lonely does it get?
Hank Williams hasn't answered yet
But I hear him coughing all night long
Oh, a hundred floors above me in the tower of song
—Leonard Cohen, "Tower of Song"
When I was a child growing up in Moscow in the 1970s, our pop-musical landscape was dominated by the so-called bards. They were Soviet counterparts to singer-songwriters from the West, and they sang literate, knowing lyrics while accompanying themselves on acoustic guitars. Even the word used to describe them—…
The IRS Tapes: Who'll Buy My Memories (1991)
In 1990, while Nelson was golfing in Hawaii, IRS agents seized most of his assets, including several homes and a farm, and presented him with a $16.7 million bill for years of unpaid taxes. During the ordeal, Nelson's daughter and his lawyer took turns hiding his guitar, Trigger, from the eagle-eyed feds. "We try to work with taxpayers," an IRS spokeswoman told The New York Times the following year, "and if we have to come up with some creative payment plan, that's what we're going to do." The creative payment plan included this double…
