I first met Bob Cordell at clinics he gave at the last audio show Stereophile organized, Home Entertainment 2007, in Manhattan. At those clinics, Bob shared his views on why amplifier measurements are not always good at predicting differences in sound quality. So when I was scheduled to host a seminar—"Amplifiers: Do Measurements Matter?"—at this year's now-canceled AXPONA, Cordell was on the short list of designers I felt would offer valuable…
search
Designing Audio Power Amplifiers, Second Edition, by Bob Cordell, Routledge/Focal Press, 2019. 776pp. $160.00, hard cover; $97.95, paperback.
"What happens in college stays in college" might be the best policy for most undergrad-formed bands, but Snarky Puppy is an exception to that rule (and a number of others). Bassist/composer Michael League found fertile musical ground in the jazz studies program at the University of North Texas when he formed Snarky Puppy in 2003. The band thought big from its inception as a 10-piece group and has continued to morph and shapeshift to the present, living out of vans, paying dues, relentlessly gigging, and garnering three Grammys along the way. In 2017, the group was tagged jazz group of the…
Matson: Let's get to musical influences and sources. What about Frank (Zappa)?
League: My dad was a huge Zappa-head. It was in the house. On Christmas day, instead of listening to Christmas carols, we listened to Apostrophe (Zappa Records ZR 3851C LP 2018). I heard Zappa so much as a kid that I never really went down the hole with him as an adult, though I love him. He's less of an influence on Snarky Puppy than some people think.
Matson: The whole jazz-fusion thing?
League: People bring up Mahavishnu or Return to Forever as influences. But they're actually not…
Sidebar: A Snarky Six-Pack
Tell Your Friends (GroundUP/Ropeadope Records no catalog number CD 2010)
All-instrumental album, with a 17-piece group. Six songs of seven minutes each or longer, recorded at Dockside Studio in Louisiana, "free of any overdubbing." Writing is split between Michael League and keyboardist Bill Laurance. This album is an example of the Snarky Puppy "live in the studio with audience" approach. Musically, extended melodic lines are punctuated with horns over jazz-funk rhythms. Solos alternate with plenty of guitars.
Sylva (Impulse!/…
Adam Wexler posing with a chorus line of (mostly) FM tuners.
During the years I lived in New York City and environs, I never learned my way around Brooklyn—something I now regret, given that borough's emergence as a hotbed of audio creativity: our industry's Laurel Canyon, so to speak. Such gone-but-not-forgotten brands as Futterman and Fi were manufactured there, and today Brooklyn is home to DeVore Fidelity, Lamm Industries, Mytek Digital, Grado Labs, Ohm Acoustics, and Oswalds Mill Audio. The list of audio luminaries who call Brooklyn home includes Herb Reichert, John Atkinson, Steve…
My most cherished intangibles—love, beauty, glimpses of higher realms—enter my awareness only after I prepare my psyche to receive them. Extended bathing, lighting candles, making tea, and preparing food are ritual work forms that prepare my senses to accept both pleasure and illumination. In like manner, collecting LPs and storing them properly, setting up turntables, aligning cartridges, and cleaning styli are ritual actions that prepare me for the high moments of focused musical pleasure only a black disc can provide.
The black-disc high moments I am about to describe were inspired by…
This Grado/J.Sikora/Parasound combo sounded conspicuously unmechanical, unnervingly dark, superquiet, noticeably dynamic, and unbelievably microdetailed. But it also—strangely—sounded like nothing I'd heard before. For more than a week, I could not decide on the something-right-or-something-wrongness of the Aeon3 + Initial's sound.
I invited friends over to make cartridge comparisons, and they also struggled to define the Aeon's "unusual" sound. To ground my auditions and focus more on the sound of the J.Sikora turntable, I exchanged the Aeon3 for the Koetsu Rosewood Signature Platinum…
Dick Olsher returned to the Lindsay-Geyer interconnects in August 1991 (Vol.14 No.8):
The Lindsay-Geyer Highly Magnetic Interconnects (Vol.14 No.2) continue to occupy center stage in my reference system. My opinion of the sound of these cables has not changed. They continue to impress me mightily in the areas of textural purity, treble smoothness, and image definition (footnote 1). The purpose of this short note is to relate some further thoughts concerning David Lindsay's cable hypothesis.
Lindsay correctly describes the skin effect in terms of the propagation of two signal…
Letters from August 1991, (Vol.14 No.8)
DO did not exaggerate
Editor: Dick Olsher's February 1991 review of the Lindsay-Geyer magnetic cable interconnect was technically beyond my comprehension. His conclusions about this cable were so dramatically in its favor as to generate disbelief; was this another example of the kind of literary excess not uncommon with Stereophile writers? Yet one could not dismiss a man of his credentials.
My Adcom preamp and amplifier are connected with a very well-known brand of cable. I bought a Lindsay-Geyer interconnect and performed comparisons…
How can two meticulously built, high-technology, high-performance, premium-quality moving-magnet cartridges that measure so well (according to their manufacturer-supplied specs) sound so different?
That was the question I asked myself after auditioning the high-compliance, moving-magnet Audio-Technica AT-ML 150/OCC and Shure V15-VMR phono cartridges in two different settings. Why two? Well, the sound I got from each was so different in the Rega 9 'table—review to appear next month—I figured I'd better give them both another shot someplace else. So I mounted them in a couple of Graham…