search

Ray Dolby, 19332013

Photo: Dolby Laboratories

We are saddened to learn of the passing of inventor and audio entrepreneur Ray Dolby. Other sites have published full obituaries; I'd like simply to offer my memory of interviewing Ray back in the spring of 1977 for the English magazine Hi-Fi News, when Dolby Laboratories were trying to get the BBC interested in using Dolby noise reduction in FM broadcasting. Despite my being a neophyte audio writer, I was treated with courtesy and respect by a man who had forgotten more about audio engineering than I knew.

It was Ray Dolby's invention of Dolby-A noise…

Video: Juliana Barwick's "The Harbinger"

Julianna Barwick has released a live video for “The Harbinger,” from her new album, Nepenthe.

Curiously, the album version always&#151always&#151reminds me of the opening chorus to The Rolling Stones’ 1969 hit, “You Can’t Always Get What You Want.” Here, though, whatever hint of triumphant rock’n’roll that may exist in “The Harbinger” is replaced by the impressionistic strokes of cold, windblown colors and sheer textures. We hear the crunch of gravel beneath footsteps, the lapping of waves, sniffles, the chimes of an iPhone&#151all of these elements are captured, looped, and…

Recording of June 1983: <I>Magnum Opus</I>

JAMES WELCH: Magnum Opus
James Welch, Organist, and D.A. Flentrop, Organ-builder.
Wilson Audio W8111 (LP). David Wilson, eng.

Hearing this organ gives one delusions of grandeur! How wonderful to be rich as Croesus and be able to commission an organ like this for one's (baronial) home. At any rate, those of us who don't live in Seattle can hear it at home, thanks to this superb recording.

True to its title, this is as much a recording of the organ as it is of the organist. Full specifications are given on the back, and although it is not Flentrop's largest organ in terms…

Listening #129

Volti Audio's Vittora, a borrowed pair of which now sit at the far end of my listening room, is a great loudspeaker and, at $17,500/pair, a seriously great value. After a few weeks with the Vittora, I find myself convinced by the naturalness, momentum, and force that it found in every record I played: This is surely one of the finest horn-loaded speakers made in the US.

The Vittora is designed and built by Greg Roberts (footnote 1), a longtime audio enthusiast who bought his first pair of Klipsch La Scala loudspeakers when he was 14. (He has owned a number of pairs of Klipschorns in the…

Listening #129 Page 2

Thus it was with slight skepticism that I assented to hooking up the Vittora subwoofer, whose downfiring 18" driver is installed in an uncommonly solid enclosure measuring 27" tall by 24" wide at the front and 6" at the rear, and driven by an outboard Marchand MB42 300W amplifier ($1500). The Marchand, which works off a line-level signal (my Shindo Masseto has only one pair of outputs, so we used a pair of Y-connectors), includes adjustments for crossover, damping, and phase. The subwoofer is also available in a front-firing version.

Once it was dialed in, the Vittora sub did, in fact…

Listening #129 List of the Month

Sidebar: List of the Month

13 Harrowing Selections
There are listeners with a taste for melancholy music—and then there are those for whom the merely mournful isn't quite enough. For them I offer a selection of the depressing, the upsetting, the seriously disturbing, and the downright harrowing. Wait for the next stormy day, play all 13 in a row, then go have a nice pill and a glass of absinthe.

Lhasa de Sela: "I'm Going In"
Bob Dylan: "Ballad of Hollis Brown"
John Adams: On the Transmigration of Souls
The Replacements: "Unsatisfied"
Leonard Cohen: "Seems So…

The Entry Level #33

Two of the five loudspeakers reviewed in our July issue were designed by Andrew Jones: the $29,800/pair TAD Evolution One and the $129.99/pair Pioneer SP-BS22-LR (footnote 1). I did the math. You can buy 229 pairs of the Pioneer for the price of a single pair of the TAD. Which is the better deal? Which would result in more happiness? Imagine keeping one pair of the Pioneers, and delivering the other 228 pairs to friends and family. Or donating them to schools. The possibilities are great. How much fun can you have with just a single pair of speakers, anyway?

It's true that the TAD bears…

The Entry Level #33 Page 2

Pioneer's biggest dealer is Best Buy. There's probably one in your neighborhood. "With such a large retailer," Andrew Jones explained, "we had a very clear idea of potential sales quantities with month-by-month projections. This allowed for very strong negotiations on price."

When Jones began work on the prototype for the SP-BS22-LR's predecessor, the blah-blah-blah-21-LR, he ignored general cost considerations and simply built the speaker he wanted to build. Imagine that. For a talented and ambitious engineer or artist, such freedom must be fantastic—until it becomes overwhelming. Yet…

Music in the Round #62

Recently, my wife and I made a trip to Europe, where we heard some great music in some great halls. Those concerts reinforced my already strongly held opinion that the acoustic of the venue is a major determinant of the sound of music heard in that venue, and that each space has its own sound. One evening in Amsterdam, we heard Iván Fischer conduct the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra in their own hall, the Concertgebouw, in a concert that underscored this interaction of performance and place.

The concert seemed to me to be badly programmed, and I predicted that the three Beethoven…

Music in the Round #62 Page 2

Third, the Optimizer will compute a digital filter set to correct for the frequency response, distance, and level of each speaker. This is, on the face of it, comparable to what's done by other room-equalization systems, such as Audyssey, Anthem's ARC, Pioneer's MCACC, Yamaha's YPAO, etc. Unlike those automatic procedures, Trinnov's Optimizer permits the user to design target EQ curves for each and every speaker, and to store multiple target corrections for different applications; eg, two-channel music, multichannel music, and home-theater surround. In addition, it can store corrections…