Sam Tellig enthused about the Musical Fidelity A324 D/A processor (footnote 1) in his April 2002 column (Vol.25 No.4): "At $1195, it's an astonishing bargain that belongs in Class A of 'Recommended Components,' " he gushed, concluding that he "wouldn't drop money on a more costly digital processor without first hearing this one." I thought it worthwhile, therefore, to submit this upsampling processor—not "oversampling," as we termed it on our April cover, Musical Fidelity politely tells us—to Stereophile's usual measurement regime. (You…
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Sidebar: Measurements from July 2002 (Vol.25 No.7)
Home Entertainment 2004 West in San Francisco might have been called off last November, but I wasn't about to let that stop me from taking a trip to visit the wine country—except that the wine country in question turned out to be the wine country of Southern New England.
Way back during the Climatic Optimum, the Vikings came to America. The Climatic Optimum was a period of warmer weather that lasted approximately from the eighth through the 14th centuries AD. Warmer temperatures caused the crop surpluses and population growth that led to the breakout of the Norse from their home region.…
Going by the logo on the tray card, this recording appears to be pure DSD (and is multichannel to boot). Engineering tasks were handled by the folks at Polyhymnia International, Everett Porter, chief engineer. At a time when quite a few SACD releases leave one scratching one's head and muttering "What were they thinking?" one listen to Hunt Lieberson's Handel SACD should leave you with the conviction that what the production team was thinking was "This is very special music, and this moment will not come by again, so let's just do the best job anyone possibly could." Brava and bravi. If you…
Letters
Editor: In the future Mr. Marks should write only about those things of which he has any knowledge. As demonstrated by his February, 2005 column, his realm of studies never included atmospheric science or climatology. Specifically, to call global warming "junk science" only illustrates his absolute ignorance on the subject.
Global warming has been around Earth since its very creation, and the very existence of it allows Mr. Marks to live and breath on this planet today. Moreover, the Climatic Optimum of which he writes in his article was partially triggered by, and is…
John Atkinson wrote about the Esoteric X-01 SACD player in May 2005 (Vol.28 No.5):
This Follow-Up concerns the X-01 Super Audio CD player ($13,000) from Teac subsidiary Esoteric (footnote 1), which John Marks wrote about in his February "The Fifth Element" column. Not only was JM impressed by this massive single-box player's prowess in playing SACDs, he also enthused about its CD performance: "This is the most musically satisfying CD playback I have ever heard," he wrote.
I spent a month auditioning the X-01. (Though this is a multichannel player, I used it only as a two-channel…
Mark Wilder, senior mastering engineer for Sony Music Studios, looked expectantly from John Atkinson to Bob Saglio to me and asked, "Are you ready?" As it had been my inquiry that had resulted in this mind-boggling, once-in-a-lifetime, peak-experience get-together, and as no one else was speaking up, I replied, "As ready as we'll ever be."
Weeks earlier, I had asked Sony whether I could ask a few questions of the mastering engineer who had made the DSD transfer of the master tapes of Miles Davis' Kind of Blue, from which the SACD editions were made.1 In due course, I received a…
In addition to an appendix of the complete Wynton Kelly solo from "Freddie Freeloader" (the score contains just the right-hand part), the book contains the score for the alternate take of "Flamenco Sketches" and an excellent introduction, by Bill Kirchner. Even if your music-reading skills are shaky, it's thrilling to follow along. It also shows how even the most accurate transcription can only suggest what the music really is: tone color, dynamics, inflection, fine points of phrasing. They all don't just jump off the page and play themselves.
There is only one taxing page-flipping…
Sidebar: Kind of Blue on (Mostly) Dead Trees
Miles Davis—Kind of Blue: Deluxe Edition
Solos and ensemble lines transcribed by R. DuBoff, et al.; Introduction by Bill Kirchner.
Hal Leonard Corporation (Milwaukee, 2001). Hardcover, 88 pages. 11.25" by 8.75". ISBN: 0634031562. $29.95.
Kind of Blue: The Making of the Miles Davis Masterpiece
By Ashley Kahn; Foreword by Jimmy Cobb.
Da Capo Press (New York, 2000). Hardcover, 224 pages. 9" by 7". ISBN: 0306810670. $23.00.
The Making of Kind of Blue : Miles Davis and His Masterpiece
By Eric Nisenson.
St.…
I had an epiphany the other night. (Hope Rabbi Lichtenstein won't be too upset.) Kathleen and I were watching the Antiques Road Show on PBS, and, during a break, I started channel-surfing. I know, it's obnoxious—but I feel compelled to hop around and keep up the sense- and info-pounding barrage we've come to take for granted and, in fact, rely on. In a way, channel-surfing is a perfect symptom of our information-overload society: click Geraldo, click Robin Byrd, click Jazz Channel, click Weather Channel. We're bombarded, we're inundated, we're . . . let's face it, we're overwhelmed. The…
Paul Hales has been a busy guy lately. In little over a year, he has designed and brought to production four new speakers in his Revelation series (footnote 1); his cost-no-object flagship, the Alexandra, which had been seen but not heard at a number of shows, was finally demonstrated at the 1999 CES; and he has introduced the new Transcendence series, which replaces the Concept series. (He's also produced a brand-new baby girl during this period, although I believe his wife made a significant contribution to that project.)
In creating the Revelation series, Hales admits to having been…