Miscellaneous

They say that with age comes wisdom, and judging by some of my younger self's misguided choices, that adage could be true, at least for me. In 1984, after graduating from college with a degree in audio production, I moved back to England, where I had spent most of my teen years as a boarding school inmate. I had friends and connections there, and despite being a US citizen, I had some kind of sketchy work authorization that allowed me to work legally in the UK for up to six months. I connected with my old school friend Morris Gould, and we found a flat in South London to share as I looked for work.

Morris had been the de facto leader of my high school punk band, The Ripchords. Six years later, he was getting started with a career as ambient chill-out deejay Mixmaster Morris, releasing records as The Irresistible Force. Our apartment became a kind of hub in the South London music scene, with musicians and industry people circling through. Eventually, I found a job working at Music and Video Exchange, the gear-focused branch of the popular Record and Tape Exchange chain of secondhand record shops. At M&VE, the staff had first dibs on any cool gear that came in, and I remember being intensely envious when colleague Andy snagged a rare EMS VCS 3 synthesizer for almost nothing.

Renowned British turntable manufacturer Rega once defined a turntable as a vibration-measuring machine; that definition became the title of a coffee table book tracing the company's history and design philosophy.

Synergistic's PHT ($199/set of two) is a very tiny, tweezer-ready HFT designed to placed atop a phono cartridge, and is marketed with a nod and wink: "grown in California, legal in all 50 states" (PHT is pronounced pot). Analog vets might remember Apature's line of moving-coil cartridges from the 1980s, which included the models Panama Red, Maui Blue, and Koce (which was white). Think I'm handing you a line? I've got a Koce here.

Lars recently received a device that looks and works like a $25 digital alarm clock and is said to subtly improve the overall sound of one's system. It's the ElectroTec EP-C, from a company called Coherence Industries.

Erick Lichte mentioned Totem Acoustic's Beak, which costs $125/pair, in his follow-up review of the Totem Forest loudspeaker in January 2010. The Beak is a bullet-shaped device, about 2" high by 1.5" in diameter, that's intended to be placed atop a speaker to control "parasitic resonances." I was given a pair of these more than 10 years ago, and have tried them with various speakers. While Erick didn't find the Beaks to make any difference to the sound of the Forests or any of the other speakers he had to hand, my experience was different.