I get mail. Boy do I get mail! But I love hearing about and sharing some of the tips'n'tweaks from all you Victims of the Musical Quest. I can't help myself. Neither can you, I understand. Come to me. [sob] Here's an erudite, well-written pensée from Dale Kleve (klevefinearts@msn.com) on two interesting audio points. I'll have to look into the first one, but the second describes almost perfectly our own near-rear-wall listening position and its sweet spot:
"First, I would like to thank you for all the sage advice in helping me tweak my setup. I get so much pleasure and musical…
JOHN HIATT: The Tiki Bar is Open
Vanguard 79593 (CD). 2001. Jay Joyce, prod.; Nico Bolas, eng. Greg Parker, asst. eng. ADD? TT: 44:55
Performance ****
Sonics **** Four years ago, I was ready to write John Hiatt off. After his triumphant late-'80s comeback, which began with a label switch from Geffen to A&M, newfound sobriety, and his ne plus ultra album, Bring the Family, the singer-songwriter began a downward artistic arc. The success of 1988's Slow Turning and 1993's Perfectly Good Guitar were offset by such lesser efforts as 1990's Stolen Moments and 1995's Walk On.…
The Pennsylvania Gazette documented an early connection between music and an American named Winey when, in 1759, it listed for sale as part of an estate "a middle sized organ, having eight stops." Interested parties were directed to one Jacob Winey, a Philadelphia merchant.
It's not known whether there's a familial link between the aforementioned Jacob, who appears to have been childless, and James Melton Winey, who, two centuries later, invented the Magneplanar speaker. (Family research indicates that Jim Winey's roots lead directly back to another Pennsylvania Jacob Winey, born in 1764…
Lander: You might have had it manufactured by 3M—the company was interested in it.
Winey: Two or three of the big wheels came out to our little old home in White Bear Lake, with our old broken-down furniture, to hear these things. One of the prototypes, after it had gotten along quite a ways, ended up going into their fancy anechoic chamber and being analyzed by their physicists. There was this one who was their speaker expert who said, "It can't work."
Lander: But once they determined how well it did work, they wanted it.
Winey: They wanted it, and I was willing to let…
As I write these words, it is exactly 15 years to the day since I left the English magazine Hi-Fi News (then Hi-Fi News & Record Review) to take the editorial helm of Stereophile. What has driven my editing of both magazines (and, Carol Baugh, p.10, I certainly do "edit" them) has been the view that the traditional model of a magazine—that it dispense and the readers receive wisdom—is fundamentally wrong. Instead, I strongly believe that a magazine's editors, writers, and readers are involved in an ongoing dialog about their shared enthusiasms. Stereophile's involvement in Shows stems…
The Wingertsman Correspondence, from May & July 2001 No bodily functions, please
Editor: I am and have been for quite some time now a subscriber to Stereophile. I have a question for you. Would you please provide me with the justification that you have for permitting your publishing of foul language in your magazine?
Given the subject matter of Stereophile, I am at a loss to understand such poor choices when it comes to the selection of certain words and phrases on the part of your writers to describe reactions, facts, or fiction in their articles. In the past, the…
Perhaps SACD has yet to reach critical mass in terms of consumer and industry acceptance, but halfway through 2002, it appears to be getting closer to that goal. Along with Sony and Philips (Universal Music), EMI is on board, as are many smaller, sound-conscious independent labels such as Chesky, Analogue Productions, Telarc, DMP, Rounder, Opus 3, Songlines, and the resurrected Mobile Fidelity Sound Lab. For now, DVD-Audio, with its screen-driven menus, doesn't appear to be an attractive option for audiophiles not interested in merging audio with video. Perhaps the future will bring…
Power up the DP-85, hit the Open/Close button, and the disc tray slides out silently, slowly (but not too slowly), and oh, so smoothly. You deserve that for $16.5k. Unlike most players—especially first-generation ones—when toggling between SACD and CD layers, the DP-85 worked fast, thanks to its single-lens, twin-pickup mechanism. It's able to scan a disc's table of contents in a few seconds, as opposed to the forever that early SACD players took. You deserve that, too, for bleeding your savings account. The transport also includes a digital servo with dedicated DSP for "highly accurate…
When I switched to the Musical Fidelity 3D, I heard what the Frankfurt folks were complaining about. It was almost as if the DP-85 was so interested in keeping my foot tapping that it was more concerned with musical flow than with letting the harmonics ripen and develop. That's not necessarily a bad thing—compared to the CD performance of the first Sony and Marantz SACD players, the DP-85 injected a welcome shot of adrenaline into the music's veins. But it also seemed to skim the harmonic surfaces of instruments, suggesting rather than delivering their full timbral expression. The pace…
Too Much Information?
Recently, I reviewed two projectors for Stereophile Guide to Home Theater. Both of these fixed-pixel displays used the same DLP "engine" from Texas Instruments. One had a glass lens supplied by Minolta, the other a less sophisticated plastic lens. The one with the better lens seemed to produce more unwanted artifacts ("jaggies"), but it was only doing a better job of passing on the information supplied to the light-processing chipset. The plastic lens's softer focus created a smoother picture, but at the expense of detail. Which image a viewer might prefer is a…
