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Travel Advisory

I'm leaving for China in about 10 minutes, so blogging will be even more erratic than usual—I foolishly almost said "normal," but it has never been that.

I will be posting here every day and, yes, cats will be blogged on Fridays, but you should also check out China Hi-Fi Tour 2006 for daily updates on the GuangZhou Hi-Fi Show and other amazing audio activities in the Celestial Kingdom.

As you can see above, I'm really psyched about going to China.

The Ultimates and the Slims

If you were to do a Google image search on my work at Stereophile, you'd see that, basically, my days are simply filled with reading, writing, coordinating, and planning. No two consecutive days, however, are the same.

Yesterday was not like
today will not be like
tomorrow.

On the other hand, if you were to zoom out a little bit, you'd see that, from month to month, there are incredible similarities. From month to month, it's really all the same, in fact. It's inevitable, I suppose, with a monthly magazine. Zoom out a little further, and you'll see even…

The Secret Vault

Lots of goodies here worth investigating.

Thanks, Adam.

Move Along, Chum

Nothing to look at here, says Huckleberry.

Don't Touch Me!

Mistress Bagheera don't want no human cooties, oh no.

How Can You Know Beautiful?

Kelli shared with me an interesting article from yesterday's New York Times. It's called "String Theory: New Approaches to Instrument Design." The article lets us know that there are a bunch of scientists and instrument makers out there trying to uncover the mysteries of acoustics. They're going absolutely bananas — tapping on wood, messing around with f-holes, playing with graphite... Some of these guys seem to think that the magic of violin making came to an end with Stradivari because of our reluctance to embrace new technologies and experiment with new materials.

…

Road Song

Somehow the gods of travel, who usually enjoy watching me suffer, had one of their rare bouts of whimsey and decided to ruin future journeys by upgrading me to first class.

As in waiting in the President's Suite,with free copies of The Economist and a tawny port. As in fully reclinable seats bigger than my comfy chair at home. Hard not to love it—and I love those cloth napkins with the button hole in them.

My iPod's charge lasted the whole flight (yay G5!) and my seat-mate was charming, although the seats were so big, we had to shout a bit to conversate.

So the 16…

The Pearl River

The view outside my window. "What river is that?" I asked Ping Gong.

"The Pearl River."

"Like on the audiophile classic, The Pearl River Concerto?"

The stuff only record collectors know.

Ping Gong

This is Ping Gong, one of my hosts and my fellow traveler. At breakfast this morning, he explained to me how he became an audiophile. "It was the Cultural Revolution," he said. "We weren't allowed to study, so we played music and talked. I had a big Russian turntable—mono! And one speaker, of course.

"When things loosened up in the '70s, I got a mid-fi Japanese hi-fi, but it was stereo! And I began to build stuff to listen to."

Yup—not studying and listening to records, sounds like how I got into hi-fi. Except for that whole repressive government closing down the schools…

Just Your Everyday Daoist Christmas Display

China really likes Christmas. It makes for some odd bedfellows.