Saturday, December 5, 11am5pm: Talk of the Town will host an “Audio, Video, & Home Theater Demo Day.” Show highlights will include demonstrations of SIM2’s C3X Lumis Host projector; Marantz’s 9004 Reference Blu-ray player; Totem Acoustics’s Wind Design loudspeakers; Classe’s SSP-800 preamplifier-processor with Dolby TrueHD and DTS-MA surround decoding; McIntosh’s MA7000 integrated amplifier; and Meridian’s DSP 5200 digital active speakers and Sooloos Music Server System.
The Vivid G1Giya, designed by Laurence Dickie, incorporates the “tapered tube loading” concept originally developed for the B&W Nautilus. Inside the tapered transmission line are several strands of damping fiber.
The TEAC W-600R double auto-reverse cassette deck plays tapes(!), offers all sorts of unnecessary conveniences (like Fast-Forward and Reverse), costs $149, and is available NOW.
Other than the fact that they’re a bunch of cute girls with a suitably high level of cute-girl energy, Teen isn’t the sort of band I typically get into. They’re not rapping about sex and money; they’re not just turning knobs on analog synths or chopping up bits of field recordings; they’re not sampling obscure 78s; they’re not playing 24 saxophones at once; they’re not making their guitars sound like vacuum cleaners; they’re not really lo-fi, but they’re certainly not hi-fi; they’re neither terribly weird nor completely normal. They’re somewhere in between. And, if you know me, you know that I tend to run screaming from that sort of thing. But there’s something about Teen’s sound, despite the fairly straightforward instrumentation (guitars, drums, keys, voices, percussion) that keeps me coming back.
That, by itself, is probably reason enough to buy the record, but I remain conflicted.
I received a voicemail from Eileen on Friday night, which said something like: "You missed my phone call again, and I’m here with Sean and Omar and Allison and Justin and Lauren and Scott and Cheryn, and we’re all waiting for you, and you’re lame."
The Stereophileforum has been hot. I don't even know what's happeningI'm only the Administratorbut two members are really going at it. It's been going on for days. One dude sees things one way, and the other dude sees things in a very different way, and neither wants to meet anywhere near the middle.
The 2008 Vacuum State of the Art Conference & Show will take place on May 24-26 at the Hilton in lovely Vancouver, Washington. VSAC was started in 1997 by Dan and Eileen Schmalle of the Bottlehead Corporation, designers of some sexy vacuum tube kit amps and preamps. While the Schmalles are no longer involved in managing the conference, they will be on hand as exhibitors, along with many others offering some similarly sexy, tubey goodness (like Experience Music's The Chase amplifier in the pic above).