Emaciated, with a caved-in face, he already looked near death. He played like an angel. I remember something that happened to me toward the end of the night. Sometimes last sets in jazz clubs, when the crowd has thinned, seem to exist outside of time. There came a moment when, almost alone with Baker's…
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I remember the only time i ever saw Chet Baker. It was at Parnell's, a jazz club in Pioneer Square in Seattle, long since defunct. It was a few years before Baker died under mysterious circumstances, in Amsterdam in 1988, after a life of creativity, notorious dissipation, and addiction.
McDiarmid's largest group of live recordings was made at Smalls, a funky little basement dive in Greenwich Village. In the early years of the 2010s, the smallsLIVE label was a highly effective way for people outside New York to get to the city —in their minds. Most smallsLIVE albums were recorded either by McDiarmid/Countryman or by Jimmy Katz (whose engineering brilliance was the subject of my article in the August 2019 issue of Stereophile, Vol.42 No.8). Albums in the Live at Smalls series, like Jimmy Greene's, recorded by Katz, and Joel Frahm's, recorded by McDiarmid/Countryman, put you…
More Recordings
In addition to the recordings mentioned in the article, the following are recommended:
Ambrose Akinmusire: A Rift in Decorum, Live at the Village Vanguard
(Blue Note) Tyler McDiarmid, Geoffrey Countryman, engs.
Sonny Rollins: Way Out West
(Contemporary, also JVC XRCD and Analogue Productions SACD reissues) Roy DuNann, eng.
Bennie Wallace: The Old Songs
(AudioQuest, also JVC XRCD reissue) Roger Rhodes, eng.
Tomasz Stanko Quartet: Matka Joanna
(ECM) Jan Eric Kongshaug, eng.
…
Landmarks in speaker design have been few and far between. There are a few certain contenders: in the UK, the original Quad Electrostatic and the ESL-63 qualify, while the Celestion SL600 scored a big point for all small monitors; the Spendor BC1 changed forever the notion that cone speakers were always colored and that big boxes were essential for good sound. In the States, Apogee has taught us much with their surprising mid-treble ribbon-based designs. Other technologies have shown promise but have not achieved real commercial success.
On the basis of reputation and personal experience…
Crossing over at approximately 2kHz, the HF driver is a well-established 1" dome from the French Focal company. Two points are of interest here: This cloth dome has a hard-cured impregnation and performs as a piston to quite high frequencies, in contrast to the early breakup behavior of the soft-dome tweeters almost universally used by other manufacturers. (Generally speaking, these are operating in well-damped resonant modes from 4kHz upward.) A hard-cloth dome resonance, however, may lie in the 15–25kHz range, though potentially it could still be audible (see the test results for the…
Sidebar 1: Measurements
Given the 1 ohm value for the impedance indicated by the specification, I first looked at the impedance characteristic to see whether it was really as difficult as indicated. On the normal chart my bottom line is 1 ohm; on the first run, the pen fell way below the line at 2kHz, impacting the limit stop. I then up-ranged by 10dB to set the base line at 0.32 ohms, and the WATT loading just kissed the 0.33 ohm level at 2kHz (fig.1). In some disbelief I felt the need to recalibrate the system and go for a manual static measurement; however, the same result was…
Sidebar 2: Specifications
Description: Two-way, reflex-loaded (quasi third-order Butterworth tuning) loudspeaker system. Recommended placement: free space, on 24" stands. Drive-units: 1" inverted-dome tweeter, 6.5" doped pulp-cone woofer. Crossover frequency: around 2kHz. Frequency response: 58Hz–16kHz ±3dB. Nominal impedance: 4 ohms (but with a minimum of 1 ohm at 2kHz). Sensitivity: 89dB/W/m. Minimum amplifier power required: 50W.
Dimensions: 14" H by 12" W by 16.5" D. Internal volume: around 9 liters. Weight: 120lb/pair.
Standard finishes: white or black lacquer, black…
Singer/actress Nancy Priddy's sole commercial recording, a 1968 album titled You've Come This Way Before—originally issued on Dot Records and now reissued by Sundazed Music/Modern Harmonic (Dot/Modern Harmonic MH-8044)—is a period piece. The arrangements, in which strings, flutes, Herb Alpert–esque trumpets, a harpsichord, a Vox Continental organ, and New Christy Minstrel–style backing singers all appear, are somewhat dated. (Indeed, the opening bars of the title song sound like the sort of cheesy electric pop that the producers of This American Life use as incidental music, apparently to…
In his review of the three-way, active Dutch & Dutch 8c loudspeaker in the August 2019 issue of Stereophile, Kalman Rubinson concluded that "The D&D 8c demonstrates that active, DSP-empowered speakers are the future." I was equally impressed by the 8c's measured performance—a superbly flat on-axis response and an unmatched control of dispersion over the entire audioband—and asked to borrow a pair so I could experience the speakers in my own listening room.
My follow-up review was published in the magazine's April 2020 issue, where I agreed with Kal's praise for the 8c's sound…
Atkinson: The Stereophile review's measurements showed that the 8c has a time-coincident step response, which again is extremely unusual. While there are passive dynamic speakers that achieve this on the listening axis with sloped-back front baffles and first-order crossover filters, there are very often compromises as you move away from that axis.
Mensink: Yes. You need a DSP to do that properly . . . As the tweeter and the midrange driver are on the front baffle, the woofers on the back, this introduces a problem. Normally the tweeter and midrange signals would arrive at your ears…