It's hard to leave. I love this job, and I adore the people I've been working with. I'll miss 'em. But most of all, I'm going to miss being exposed to Stereophile's vocal, frequently cantankerous, but always passionate readership.
One thing I loved about my job was that I always knew exactly who I was writing for: people just…
So began last month's "As We See It," written in response to letters of complaint that appeared in the same issue. Somewhat to my surprise, the negative letters are still coming in (see p.11). I conjectured last month that the real objection to our featuring the Denon in Stereophile was not that it was, per se, a home-theater component—we paid no editorial attention to how the receiver functioned in a home-theater environment—but because it was a component intended…
I was assembling a performance of Mozart's Piano Quartet in G Minor, K.478, from the recordings I'd made at the 1998 Santa Fe Chamber Music Festival. From my musician days, I'm well aware that while the notes of a Mozart score can look simple on the page, there is nowhere in this music for a musician to hide. I remember being made to feel as if my fingers were made of concrete by two measures of repeated eighth notes in a Mozart trio. Sixteen notes, every one the same, yet all I was aware of were my tiny inexactitudes of attack on each note, the tiny tremblings in the…
This encoding system elegantly solves a variety of data-retrieval functions. In EFM encoding, pit and land do not…
The second prevalent misconception about the CD is that if the ones and zeros are the same, the sound must be identical. This tenet is widely held, especially among engineers and computer users. A cornerstone of digital audio theory is that sound quality is independent of the recording or transmission medium. The collective attitude among many…
This project was made possible by the loan of two pieces of sophisticated test equipment. The first is a CD quality analyzer called the Design Science CD Analyzer, developed by Gordon Rudd in conjunction with Disctronics. It consists of a board that fits in the expansion slot of an IBM-compatible PC, software, and a specially modified Philips CD player. The board takes the HF signal from the player and performs all decoding functions, just like a CD player. Software then analyzes the error types and presents the data in graphic form on the computer display. In…
After the above article had been set in type, I saw a fax that Robert Harley had received from AudioPrism. It concerned measurements they had made that seemed to indicate that painting the edge of the CD green with CD Stoplight reduced the amount of noise in the final analog signal. Along with the idea that I gleaned from the Montreux AES Convention—that jitter noise appears as sidebands in the analog signal recovered from CD—this prompted a simple measurement that I thought might reveal such a difference. Using DRA Lab's MLSSA system, I would analyze the…
Hi Wes!
I guess it all started when I was a kid—I'd go to bed and tune my radio to faraway stations. That's where I first heard real R&B, Chicago-style blues, and hard-core honky-tonk. It was comforting listening alone in the dark and, well, sometimes I'd get really excited.
Such as the first time I heard Howlin' Wolf. Nothing in my white-bread upbringing had prepared me for that, let me tell you. I didn't know what to make of it, but somehow I just knew there had to be more where that came from—and I knew I…