Music and Recording Reviews

If you go to Tokyo, there's a good chance you'll develop a new appreciation for shopping malls. The Japanese know malls. They know just what to do with them. Inside a Tokyo mall, you can peruse the usual handbags and shoes in their unending variety. But you can also stare at Fuji apples as large as a baby's head swaddled in tissue paper, flip through the world's most exquisite stationery, stock up on fabric from the 1920s, and taste things that will haunt you well into retirement.

"You should come to CAF," Ken Micallef said. He has been saying this for what seems like decades. "It's cool, smaller and more manageable than AXPONA. You'll like it."

To misquote Morrissey, some knobs are better than others. The Manley Neo-Classic 300B amplifiers that I've been listening to, for example, have a knob marked "feedback" that goes from 0 to 10. I've learned so much from using it that I've come to believe that if your amp doesn't have such a knob, it should. You see, the higher you set this control, the better the amp will measure. Applying more global negative feedback to these amps lowers their nonlinear distortion and noisefloor, increases their bandwidth, renders them less sensitive to the speaker's impedance variations and otherwise makes them more stable and efficient. In fact, by applying lots of feedback to an amplifier, it's possible to reduce distortion to barely measurable levels.

So what's the problem? Well, a few turns of the knob suggest that negative feedback isn't as useful as it appears on paper.

Dave Pietro: Hypersphere, Thumbscrew: The Anthony Braxton Project, Bobby Hutcherson: The Kicker and Raphael Pannier: Faune.

Saunder Jurriaans: Beasts, Tricky: Fall to Pieces and Doves: The Universal Want.

The Cookers: Look Out!, David Sanford Big Band: A Prayer for Lester Bowie, Orrin Evans: The Magic of Now and Marcin Wasilewski Trio: En Attendant.

Steely Dan Live: Northeast Corridor, Saint Etienne: I've Been Trying to Tell You and Adia Victoria: A Southern Gothic.