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In her wild ride of a memoir, A Woman Like Me (2012), eclectic soul and R&B singer Bettye LaVette spoke of being hung over a 20th-floor balcony of a Manhattan skyscraper by her pimp boyfriend. She revealed that she'd slept with Ben E. King and Otis Redding, and had even spent a minute dabbling in prostitution. She had dropped acid with George Clinton. Finally, she had her moment of satisfaction when she delivered a knockout performance of the Who's "Love, Reign O'er Me" at the 2008 Kennedy Center Honors. In the audience, all agog, were Beyoncé, Barbra Streisand, and Aretha Franklin, all…
O'Donnell told me that LaVette sang in an isolation booth, and that he captured her voice with a pair of microphones, a Neumann U67 and an RCA 44. The entire recording was done digitally, on computers, in 24-bit/96kHz resolution. "I don't compress a lot unnecessarily," O'Donnell said. "The modern thing of squashing things to bits is no good. It takes the dynamics out of it.
The arrangements on Things Have Changed are all very different from the original versions, and it's clear that LaVette, who doesn't write music, has found a unique way to dig in and be emotionally committed to Dylan's…
Richard Matthews has sold upwards of 30,000 tubes in the last ten years and he still has 100,000 tubes to go! Working out of his Leeds Radio warehouse in the Bronx, Matthews has every tube imaginable in stock, as well as a vast variety of tube testers, classic radios, capacitors, beautiful vintage tube boxes and many, many collector's pieces.
Selling to audiophiles and non-audiophiles alike, to all four corners of the globe, Richard is a great storyteller, masterful photographer, enterprising drummer and of course, expert in all things tube-related ("tubes were never cheap," Richard notes…
Why cable again?
Well, the obvious reason is that it has been a while since my last foray into Cableland (July 1988). Many new products have been introduced in the interim, so it appeared appropriate to once again open Pandora's Box. Those of you who still remember my speaker cable article of 2½ years ago will recollect the considerable controversy that evolved from that project.
Some of the response was quite predictable, though the venom with which it was laced was not. The manufacturers of those outrageously priced "garden-hose"–type cables that I failed to rave about were…
How can this be accomplished? The skin depth is inversely proportional to the square root of the product of electrical conductivity, relative magnetic permeability, and frequency. The relative magnetic permeability, or mu for short, is defined as 1 for air, copper, or any other nonmagnetic material. Thus, the way to reduce the skin depth at a given frequency involves increasing the product of permeability times conductivity. Even if mu remains at 1, one way to turn the trick is by greatly increasing the conductivity—which, practically speaking, means developing a room-temperature…
Sidebar 1: Measurements, from June 1991 (Vol.14 No.6)
Back in the February issue (Vol.14 No.2, p.158), young Dick Olsher, Stereophile's resident physicist, gave a rave review to interconnect from a new California company, Lindsay-Geyer. Their model 4-40 is different from every other interconnect in that it is constructed from a magnetically permeable material, namely "Mu-metal." (Four individually insulated 40-mil strands are used.) Normally such a material is avoided for conducting signals, due to its low conductivity. (The fact that it is permeable means that the current is squeezed…
Sidebar 2: Specifications
Description: Interconnect and speaker cable using high magnetic-permeability wire. DC loop resistance: 1.0 ohm per 1m of model 4-40 interconnect. Capacitance: 210pF/1m of interconnect.
Prices: Model 4-40 interconnect: $95/1/2m pair, $130/1m pair, $195/2m pair; Model 10-35 speaker cable: $185/5' pair, $370/10' pair, $550/15' pair.
Manufacturer: Lindsay-Geyer, Sunnyvale, CA 94087 (1991). Company no longer in existence (2018).
Sony's first CD player, the much-maligned CDP-1 (reviewed in Vol.5 No.10), did all the things we'd been promised from CD except deliver perfect sound. It met CD's incredible claims for frequency range and linearity, harmonic and intermodulation distortion, and signal/noise ratio, yet—despite my own initial enthusiasm for it—it proved ultimately to be a disappointing-sounding player (footnote 1). Its sound was rather hard and grainy, and quite spectacularly uninvolving to listen to. But considering that it was the first of its kind, it was a good start despite its many sonic shortcomings (…
Fidelity starts with frequency response. If a CD player has built-in response errors, it can never reproduce the original signal properly no matter how good it is in other respects. Don't laugh; this has long been one of the major differences between competing players, even high-priced ones. I'm not talking about measured response, although (as our published curves show) there are often small differences there, too. No, I'm talking about subjective response—how the thing sounds.
Listening
A/B comparisons are scorned by the high-end community because they don't reveal most of the…
A Trip to Gordon's House, from February 1994 (Vol. 17 No.2)
After living with the SOTA Vanguard CD player for nearly six months, I figured I'd better trundle off to Gordon's listening room, where I could compare the SOTA mano a mano to the Sony CDP-X779ES CD player that JGH reviewed in Vol.16 No.6 (p.154). It was, as are most of my evenings with Gordon, very educational.
First we listened to a brand-new CD I had just received from BBC Music Magazine: Berlioz's Symphonie Fantastique, performed by the BBC Symphony directed by Andrew Davis, and recorded live in Tokyo's Hitomi Kinen…