Zappa's real legacy is as a composer. He is one of those historic figures who takes on a new life after death, when the details of his personality are sublimated by the resonating impact of what he has…
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Frank Zappa was well known for a lot of things—his sharp satiric wit, his virtuoso guitar improvisations, his excellence as a bandleader, his fearlessness in combating hostile political forces and crooked record-industry executives. But Zappa is all too rarely given credit for his status as one of the most creative musical imaginations of the 20th century, regardless of genre.
Joe Travers carefully catalogs the recordings, listens to their content, and submits suitable material to Gail for potential release. "I started documenting the tapes and listening to them and putting it all in a database, just getting myself familiar with the contents of the vault," he explains. "After doing it for close to 15 years, I'm probably only halfway through what's there. But I have found a lot, and I'm accumulating a lot of information as I go. A lot of the stuff that's coming out is due to the preparation work I've done all those years before. There was a period when there was…
Sidebar: Wazoo
FRANK ZAPPA: Wazoo
Frank Zappa, conductor, guitar; Mike Altshul, piccolo, bass clarinet, winds; Jay Migliori, flute, tenor saxophone, winds; Earl Dumler, oboe, contrabass sarrusophone, winds; Ray Reed, clarinet, tenor saxophone, winds; Charles Owens, soprano & alto saxophone, winds; Joann McNab, bassoon; Malcolm McNab, Sal Marquez, trumpet; Tom Malone, trumpet, tuba; Glen Ferris, trombone, euphonium; Kenny Shroyer, trombone, baritone horn; Bruce Fowler, trombone; Jerry Kessler, electric cello; Tony Duran, slide guitar; Ian Underwood, piano, synthesizer; Dave…
Welcome to the wonderful world of firmware and software updates. With almost every audio device now microprocessor-controlled, and the tasks to be performed increasingly complex, it's not surprising that "finished" products leave the factory only to be stymied by reasonable but unpredicted user practices. It's not that we're all becoming beta testers, but we are contributing to the intelligent evolution of product capabilities.
I first came across this with Denon's AVR-4806 A/V receiver and DV-3910 universal player. Way back then, in 2005, the procedure was still clumsy,…
PARC Place
With all that rah-rah about digital room EQ, it's too easy to forget that not every music listener has a digital processor, whether or not he or she listens in two or more channels. After all, you can get immense satisfaction from analog sources, or from a superb digital player such as the Esoteric DV-60 or Bel Canto PL-1A feeding an outstanding analog preamp such as the Bel Canto Pre6 or the Audio Research MP1. Even so, the room and its modes are still present, and analog solutions aren't so easily found. Sure, you can get an Audyssey Sound Equalizer, but if your system is…
With all that rah-rah about digital room EQ, it's too easy to forget that not every music listener has a digital processor, whether or not he or she listens in two or more channels. After all, you can get immense satisfaction from analog sources, or from a superb digital player such as the Esoteric DV-60 or Bel Canto PL-1A feeding an outstanding analog preamp such as the Bel Canto Pre6 or the Audio Research MP1. Even so, the room and its modes are still present, and analog solutions aren't so easily found. Sure, you can get an Audyssey Sound Equalizer, but if your system is…
Sidebar 1: Contacts
Anthem, Sonic Frontiers International, 205 Annagem Boulevard, Mississauga, Ontario L5T 2V1, Canada. Tel: (905) 362-0958. Web: www.anthemav.com.
Audyssey Laboratories, Inc., 350 S. Figueroa St., Suite 233, Los Angeles, CA 90071. Tel: (213) 625-4300. Fax: (213) 625-4383. Web: www.audyssey.com.
Rives Audio, Inc., PO Box 5548, Coralville, IA 52241. Tel: (800) 959-6553, (319) 351-9008. Fax: (888) 557-6459. Web: www.rivesaudio.com.
XTZ. Web: www.xtz.se.
Sidebar 2: Recordings In The Round
BIBER: Rosenkranz Sonatas
Riccardo Minasi, violin; Bizzarrie Armoniche
Arts Music 47735-8 (2 SACDs)
This glorious, ecstatic music is brilliantly performed and beautifully recorded. I have always been a fan of Biber's rich, spicy, chromatic flavorings, but this is the most colorful realization I have yet heard of these works, aka the Mystery Sonatas. Violinist Riccardo Minasi, recorded fairly close-up, exudes power and brilliance, recalling Jascha Heifetz's treatment of the Vitali Chaconne, but without overpowering the acoustic or the…
In my February 2000 review of Meridian's multi-talented, multichannel, multi-kilobuck Digital Theatre system, I fumed about the lack of a medium for discrete multichannel music. Even more loudly, I railed against the irresponsible mastering of many Dolby Digital and DTS discs, which place the listener in the middle of an ensemble and swirl the voices around his or her head with little concern for musical or artistic coherence.
Now we are seeing the first offerings of SACD and DVD-Audio in discrete multichannel, as well as a growing awareness of the need for realistic acoustic…
Next, you adjust the output level of each channel in the speaker array (Level Setup) by means of a pink-noise–like test signal that is switched among the available channels.
Finally, using Delay Setup, you calculate and set the time delays for the center and surround channels to compensate for each speaker's distance from the listener. Only a tape measure is required for this. These speaker settings affect only those signals that pass through the digital processing of the MDP 500, not the signals from the "7.1" inputs. As you'll see when I talk about multichannel SACD and DVD-A, below,…
I also sampled the MDP's capabilities for Dolby Pro Logic and other surround synthesis modes. In addition to stereo and mono, these include Natural, Concert, Club, and Party. The best I can say about the last four choices is that it was clear why they were so named. Having had that epiphany, I found no reason to invoke them again.
With good stereo sources, center fill was usually better with the MDP in plain stereo than in any of the music modes that actually produce sound in the center channel! Pro Logic, on the other hand, worked as it should. With appropriate sources—mostly movies,…