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Editor's Note from 1992: This seminal J. Gordon Holt essay on how the art of recording natural sound became compromised in favor of unmusical artificiality for good commercial reasons was originally published in August 1964, in Vol.1 No.8. Though most people these days listen to classical music from CDs, not LPs, in the intervening decades, recording technology has not changed for the better as much as one might have hoped. Nevertheless, the days of wretched multimiking excess described by Gordon are past, and it's rare to find the music treated with the lack of respect typical of a mid-'60s…
This is a case where the techniques of recording are being used to create, almost from the ground up, something whose resemblance to the real thing is, frankly, a fabrication; the real thing does not exist to begin with. The "hall" is not a concert stage, the placement of the performers is not like that at an actual performance, and the balances and timbres of the instrumental sounds are almost entirely under the control of the recording engineers, who may or may not have the same ideas about such matters as the conductor or the composer. If the recording director knows his stuff, and really…
This "systems" concept reached its culmination with RCA Victor's "Dynagroove" system, which considered everything—from the musical score to the ambient noise in the listener's home—in terms of its effect on the ultimate musical "projection." This vast amount of data was poured into the hopper, as it were, and out came a formula for producing the optimum "projection of the musical ideas" under all these varied and conflicting conditions. The recording director consults with the conductor, to see whether they agree about the meaning of the music, but he is, in effect, the ultimate artistic…
GONZALO RUBALCABA: Discovery
Gonzalo Rubalcaba, piano; Charlie Haden, bass; Paul Motian, drums
Blue Note CDP 7 95478 2 (CD only). Charlie Haden, prod.; David Richards, eng. DDD? TT: 54:06
Gonzalo Rubalcaba, piano; Charlie Haden, bass; Paul Motian, drums
Blue Note CDP 7 95478 2 (CD only). Charlie Haden, prod.; David Richards, eng. DDD? TT: 54:06
Couldn't figure out what jazz release to review this month. Nothing, as Elvis said, moved me; I wanted to get real, real gone this time. I stopped into Nick Potter's Books & Used Records. Nick was waiting for me.
"Ever heard of Gonzalo Rubalcaba?"
"Who?"
"Gonzalo Rubalcaba—28-year-old Cuban pianist. This's his first recording outside Cuba. Lissen to what he does with '…
Loudspeaker designers are dreamers. Something takes hold of a man—the fact that loudspeaker designers are all men must be significant—and he wrestles with recalcitrant wood, arcane drive-units, and sundry coils, capacitors, and cables, to produce something which will be individual in its sound quality yet inherently more true to the original sound. An impossible task. Yet if there were to be an aristocratic subset of those dreamers, it would be those who have taken upon themselves the burden of producing electrostatic loudspeakers. For these farsighted engineers, there is no standing on the…
First impressions, gained with the CAL Tempest/Mod Squad Line Drive/Krell KSA-50 combination, were mixed. Imaging was stunningly precise, the speakers throwing a deep, if narrower than usual, soundstage. The mids and highs were clean but without the exaggerated feeling I had experienced with the original CLS. There was a threadbare quality to the lower midrange, however, that was quite disturbing. Nowhere in the instruction booklet or lavishly produced brochure does it say anything about breaking in the Sequels, but I did remember that the CLS required a good deal of playing-in time before…
Looking at the treble, by which I mean (with the exception of percussion instruments) the region occupied by the harmonics of instrumental and vocal sound, spanning from 3kHz to visible light!: I am sure the Sequel does roll off somewhere before the centimetric radar wavelengths, but up to the limit of my hearing (just over 16kHz in the mornings), the speaker pretty much did nothing to attract attention to itself. Maybe there was a hair too much on-axis air, but this certainly wasn't enough to bother me. Cymbals, which on lesser speakers acquire a "white," anonymous character instead of what…
Sidebar 1: Specifications
Description: Two-way, floor-standing loudspeaker with sealed-box bass and electrostatic midrange/tweeter unit. Drive-units: 48" by 10" curvilinear electrostatic panel, 10" plastic-cone woofer. Crossover frequency: 250Hz. Crossover slopes: second-order, 12dB/octave. Frequency response: 28Hz–2kHz –2dB. Bass control switch: shelves response between 28Hz and 250Hz down by 3dB. Dispersion: 30° horizontal (no frequency limits), 48" line source vertical. Sensitivity: 89dB/2.83V/m. Nominal impedance: 6 ohms, with a minimum of 2 ohms. Impedance phase angle: less than 45…
Sidebar 2: JA's System
The preamplifier initially used for CD and open-reel tape replay was the Mod Squad Line Drive Deluxe AGT. As my usual Vendetta Research SCP2 phono preamp was away for updating to SCP2A status, I made use of the sample of the Conrad-Johnson Premier Seven tube preamplifier reviewed by J. Gordon Holt last November to play "real" records. Source components consisted of a 1975-vintage Revox A77 to play my own and others' 15ips master tapes, a Linn Sondek/Ekos/Troika setup sitting on a Sound Organisation table to play LPs, and the CAL Tempest SE two-box CD player. For…
Sidebar 3: Measurements
Electrostatic loudspeakers have gained a reputation for being hard to drive, so it was with my bump of curiosity piqued that I measured the load represented by the Sequel II. Fig.1 shows the result. A well-damped peak at 33Hz reveals the woofer tuning, while the overall graph suggests a rating of 4 ohms rather than 6. The speaker drops to 3 ohms at 440Hz and to a hair over 2 at 24kHz, from which I infer that puny amplifiers, current-wise, should best be avoided. (Music has considerable energy at 440Hz, though only the occasional high-level cymbal crash will cause…