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Toronto is turning into a happening place for audiophiles. The Toronto Audio Visual Entertainment Show being held October31–November 2, 2014, promises to be bigger and better in their new venue at the Sheraton Centre Hotel downtown. The Update TV & Stereo Elevated store, with a strong high-performance audio orientation, opened last spring in the Toronto suburb of Unionville. And now, Angie's Audio Corner, devoted to high end celebrated its second anniversary with the opening of the Annex Clearance Center in the coach house next to the main building, acting as a clearing house for used…
Debussy: Three Nocturnes; Jeux
Concertgebouw Orchestra of Amsterdam, Bernard Haitink conducting.
Philips ACD 400-023-2 (CD).
Concertgebouw Orchestra of Amsterdam, Bernard Haitink conducting.
Philips ACD 400-023-2 (CD).
This is the first classical CD I have heard that was originally mastered on analog tape, and the sound is quite different from what I'm accustomed to hearing from the silver discs.
I had read so many critics' complaints about excessive background (tape) hiss from analog-mastered CDs that I was fully prepared to be appalled. I wasn't. Perhaps my speakers (Watkins WE-1s as of now) are smoother than what some other critics listen to, perhaps I prefer a…
He was a victim of his own success. From 1925 to 1929, when he was in his mid-20s, Louis Armstrong changed the world of jazz music forever with his Hot Five and Hot Seven recordings, and his solos in tunes like "Cornet Chop Suey," "Potato Head Blues," and "West End Blues." Almost immediately, however, he was faced with a question: Now what?
Like all great artists, Armstrong was immediately and forever asked to outdo his own masterpieces, to top himself creatively. No artist in any medium, including the Beatles, can stay on the cutting edge forever. For Pops, who moved the needle early,…
In large measure, that's where the fun in this set is to be found: in comparing different versions of the same song. As his critics at the time never let him forget, Armstrong worked from a fairly predictable set list during the All Stars years. As quoted in Riccardi's notes, some of the criticism was offensive and downright racist, observing that the All Stars sets seldom rose "above the plane of a coon carnival" and that Pops was "lowering himself as a human being." These recordings will never be mistaken for the Hot Five and Hot Seven sessions, but the fabulously vital and energetic…
Rotel RMB-1585 five-channel power amplifier
Power amplifiers are unglamorous but essential. In theory, they have only one task. But, according to audio sage Yogi Berra, "in theory, theory and practice are the same. In practice, they are not." Amplifiers must take a voltage input signal and provide an output of somewhat higher voltage but of substantially higher current, the product of which is power. The task is complex in that this output must be applied to electrical interfaces whose characteristics vary widely from speaker to speaker—across the audioband and, for some, even at…
Power amplifiers are unglamorous but essential. In theory, they have only one task. But, according to audio sage Yogi Berra, "in theory, theory and practice are the same. In practice, they are not." Amplifiers must take a voltage input signal and provide an output of somewhat higher voltage but of substantially higher current, the product of which is power. The task is complex in that this output must be applied to electrical interfaces whose characteristics vary widely from speaker to speaker—across the audioband and, for some, even at…
To get past this, I began climbing the steep learning curve necessary to assemble, configure, and use a more comprehensive solution. It consists of four parts: 1) remote networked storage to keep large, noisy drives far away; 2) updatable software with wide format support and a flexible GUI; 3) a silent networked computer with suitable digital outputs to run the software; and 4) multichannel or multiple DACs. I found this kind of DIY effort somewhat intimidating—it required real work and an education before I could assume the responsibility for getting all the disparate pieces to work…
Record business freebies are almost a thing of the past, but every once in a while, the formerly titanic enterprise still throws a fandango for music fans, none more exciting lately than the announcement that Universal Music is gonna throw a listening party, open the public, to preview the 14 LP The Beatles in Mono boxed set, at Electric Lady Studios in NY (Sept. 8) and the GRAMMY Museum in LA (Sept. 10). To get in you have to register using these links.
http://smarturl.it/BeatlesMonoLA and http://smarturl.it/BeatlesMonoNYC
Here’s an excerpt from the official press release:…
". . . seizing and incorporating . . . There is nothing about us which is more strongly primitive."—Elias Canetti, Crowds and Power
I am a collector. Books, records, art, music, knickknacks, old blurry anonymous photos, and more—hanging, sitting, standing, and shelved, they surround me where I sit and follow me around our home. In collecting, less is certainly not more, and I believe that part of its appeal is that our collections help define not only who we are but who we'd like to become—or, perhaps, how things are and how we'd like them to be.
I love my collection of LPs. I…
Other options include Crossfade Duration (within a range of 2–15 seconds, set with a sliding scale), Gapless Playback, Cache folder path, Cache max size (automatic 10% of free space, or set with a sliding scale from 1GB to a maximum value that will vary based on the amount of storage available on your computer), Playing buffer size, and Music Downloads Import Quality (320kbps or CD quality). I found that I had to adjust the buffer size when playing from my iMac, which connects to my network via WiFi. Once this was set, I experienced no dropouts or interrupts. (The rest of my desktop system…
And then there was Pono! Or not. Despite prompt denials by the folks at Pono, it now seems likely that the still mythical, high resolution music player will not be delivered to customers, who to date have kicked in $13 million via Crowdfunder and Kickstarter, until early 2015.
To those trusting souls, those Neil Young fans with more cash than sense, I say, go look up caveat emptor. You should have at least waited until the bugs were worked out. Or not.
Meanwhile, Young continues to stay musically relevant and cut his own completely unique path through the world. He and wife Pegi…