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In the mid-1960s, I went to high school in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, which back then was a bleak, On the Waterfront landscape of dock workers and drifters hanging out in the pool halls along Bedford Avenue. We were warned to watch out on our way to track practice at nearby McCarren Park, because the pool halls were violent and confrontations often spilled out onto the street.

Around the corner from school was a small soda fountain, where I would hang out and play the Wurlitzer jukebox. It was my first audiophile-level…

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…

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…

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!/…

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…

The black-disc high moments I am about to describe were inspired by…

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…

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…

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…