The pressure to tour has led some musicians to give full reign to the entertainer side of their personality, as I witnessed this week at B.B. Kings in NYC when I caught a set by…
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The combination of piracy, streaming, and the accompanying devaluation of music these days has forced musicians back to the stage to make their daily bread. If you can’t tour today, you don’t have a career. Even more interesting are the musicians who cannot possibly reproduce live the studio trickery heard on their recordings, and so are trapped in a way by their records, but that’s a subject for another time.
I guess I'm going to have to start listening to Stacey Kent. At her early set at Birdland in midtown Manhattan Wednesday night, I sat down a skeptic and came away charmed.
Until recently, I'd heard Kent only a few times, on NPR's Sunday standards show, and she didn't make much of an impression. When it comes to balladeers of the American songbook, my taste leans to Sarah Vaughn, mid-period Ella Fitzgerald, June Christy, Shirley Horn—chesty singers with a sultry, sensuous edge. In no way does that describe Stacey Kent. Her voice was soft, kittenish. Not my type.
Then two things…
I once told Larry Archibald it might be worth, say, a 10% loss in sound quality with CD not to have to jump up and turn over the damned record. Sometimes a CD saves you from popping up twice—Mahler's Fifth or Bruckner's Seventh on a single disc instead of three LP sides—or three times—Mozart's Magic Flute on three CDs instead of 6 LP sides. That might be worth a 15% sacrifice.
I don't know that you will need to lose even 10%. Unless, of course, you have a turntable like a Versa Dynamics 2.0 or a Goldmund Reference.
Now, if only the cost of CDs would come down.
That may…
Peter W. Mitchell wrote about the Adcom in June 1989 (Vol.12 No.6):
To begin at the conclusion: the Adcom GCD-575 is a breakthrough. It's a CD player that offers high-end qualities at a mass-market price. A $5000 product that advances the state of the art is nice, but when a $600 product outperforms last year's multi-thousand-dollar player—that, friends, is news worth repeating.
In the past I have not paid much attention to the sonic differences among CD players. The differences in sound quality among recordings (due to miking, EQ, and mixing practices) were so great that player…
Sidebar 1: Measurements
We have started to include in Stereophile's reviews of digital products the 1/3-octave analyzed spectrum of a player's output while it reproduces the dithered –90.31dB tone from the CBS CD-1 test CD. With an undithered signal, a tone at this level only crosses three quantizing levels and therefore is not sufficiently described for it to be reproduced as a sinewave. However, as the code representing this tone on track 19 on the CBS disc has had an appropriate amount of dither noise added when the CD was cut, it should reproduce as a pure, if noisy, sinewave. Any…
Sidebar 2: Specifications
Description: Solid-state CD player with remote control, TDA1541A D/A converter, KSS212B CD mechanism, and coaxial digital output. Frequency range: 5Hz–20kHz. Dynamic range: 98dB. Signal/Noise Ratio: 105dB. Channel separation: 95dB. Total harmonic distortion: 0.0025%. Line output: 2.5V.
Dimensions: 17" (430mm) W by 3" (76mm) H by 10.25" (260mm) D. Weight: 12 lbs (5.5kg).
Price: $599 (1989); no longer available (2014). Approximate number of dealers: 320 (1989).
Manufacturer: Adcom, East Brunswick, NJ 08816 (1989); Adcom, LLC, PO Box 2668, Sedona, AZ…
"Why does John Atkinson devote so much of his time to loudspeakers selling for under a [sic] $1000?" wrote a correspondent to The Audiophile Network bulletin board in August, there being a clear implication in this question that "more expensive" always equates with "better" when it comes to loudspeakers. While it is true that the best-sounding, most neutral loudspeakers possessing the most extended low-frequency responses are always expensive, in my experience this most definitely does not mean that there is an automatic correlation between price and performance. I have heard many, many…
Sidebar 1: Review context
With small speakers, the first and most important consideration is what stands to use. Often treated as an afterthought, a good pair of stands is fundamental to getting optimum performance from even inexpensive loudspeakers. With my listening chairs placing my ears 36" from the ground, 24"-high stands were appropriate to use with the Celestions, so I used a $300 pair of Celestion SLSi models which were handy (footnote 1). These are single-pillar designs, with steel top and bottom plates. I filled the extruded-aluminum pillar of each with 25 lbs of lead shot,…
Sidebar 2: Measurements
The Celestion 3's impedance phase (dotted line) and magnitude (solid line) are shown in fig.1. [Note that the phase scale is the opposite way around from what the magazine adopted in 1991, with negative (capacitive) angles at the top.—Ed.] The peak in the bass due to the woofer's sealed-box loading reaches a maximum of 46 ohms at 72Hz. Overall, putting its low sensitivity to one side, the 3 will be easy to drive, the impedance only dropping below 8 ohms in the upper bass and mid-treble. The slight wrinkle seen at 250Hz is probably a cabinet effect, the cabinet…
Sidebar 3: Specifications
Description: Two-way, shelf- or stand-mounted loudspeaker. Drive-units: 1" titanium-dome tweeter, 5" pulp-cone woofer. Low-frequency alignment: sealed-box. Crossover frequency: 5kHz. Crossover: high-pass slope, second-order, 12dB/octave; low-pass slope, first-order, 6dB/octave. Frequency response: 75Hz–20kHz –3dB. Sensitivity: 86dB/W/m. Nominal impedance: 8 ohms. Amplifier requirements: 10–60W continuous. Maximum power handling: 60W program.
Dimensions: 13" (310mm) H by 7.3" (185mm) W by 8.5" (215mm) D. Recommended stand height: 24". Internal volume: 8…