RMAF 2016: Friday Afternoon with Herb
The inside of the Brinkmann Nyquist is beautiful, like a jet fighter
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Herb Reichert
RMAF 2016: Herb's Friday Morning
My brain began to spin, wondering how the thing actually works. What keeps the record on the platter? What keeps the tonearm on the record?
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RMAF 2016: Herb's Wild West Preview
I flew to Denver in a tin can
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Gramophone Dreams #12
When you get old and gray and all them shoot-'em-up dudes doe wanna ride wit you no mo, don't fretyou can still have fun. Once you're a geezer, you'll have more time to work in the garden, drink tea, buy LPs, and fiddle with your unipivot.
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When I was José Cuervo young, I mocked belt-drive turntables, unipivot tonearms, and teetotalers. "You can't drink, dance, shoot up the bar, and play hot records wit no persnickety belt-drive or wobbly unipivot. You need a masculine, pro-fessional-quality direct-drive or rim-drive turntable with a sturdy a gimbal-bearing tonearm!"
First Watt J2 power amplifier
Every time a new audio technology enters the marketplace, a debate begins about its relative merit. That debate never ceases, even decades after the technology first came (and sometimes went). Turntable platters driven by belts vs rims vs idlers vs directly by their motors. Analog vs digital. Tubes vs solid-state. Triodes vs pentodes, Single-ended vs push-pull. Objectivism vs subjectivism. The power and seriousness of each of these debates has splintered our global hobby into diverse tribes, cults, and subcultsand therein lies one of the chief joys of being an audiophile: participating in cult rivalries.
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Moon by Simaudio Neo 230HAD D/A headphone amplifier
I am a lucky person. Who gets to be an artist, an aspiring griot, and a Stereophile reporter? Who gets to stay at home in paint-smeared pajamas, draw pictures of teapots and barn owls . . . and then, on top of everything, gets paid to listen to music made by Henryk Szeryng, Eugene Hütz, and Winston Reedy? C'est moi!
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I have groovy friends, too: other eccentric artists, scruffy musicians, recording and mastering engineers, beekeepers, authors and editors, art and junk collectors, tube wizards, turntable savants, DJs, Mensa-type amp designers, bat-shit-crazy poet-philosophers, and unrepentant hoarders.
Rogue Audio RP-1 preamplifier
Pulitzer Prizewinning poet Mary Oliver famously remarked, "attention without feeling . . . is only a report."
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After nearly two years of prattling for Stereophile, I am finally grasping the full veracity of that statement. When I read reviews that jabber on about highs, mediums, and lows, and that rely exclusively on nonmusical vocabulary, I come away with feelings of acute cognitive dissonance. Not to mention: if a review has a lot of initialismsADD, S/PDIF, DXD, HDMI, etc.my ADHD kicks in and I stop reading by the third paragraph.
Gramophone Dreams #11
Which record player has achieved international acclaim as a musical instrument in its own right?
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Which turntable is revered for its near-indestructible build quality?
Which disc spinner has played more recordsand made more people drink, drug, dance, and make outthan any other?
Which turntable has sold over three million units?
Hint: It is not made in the US, the UK, China, or Switzerland.
CAF2016: Herb's Wrap-Up
The second best hug I received at CAF came from the towering and lovable Klaus Bunge of Odyssey Audio
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CAF2016: Saturday at the Hilton with Herb
Before I visited the Bob's Devices booth in the Plaza ballroom, I was having a hotel breakfast with my runnin' buddy (and Stereophile's Deputy Editor) Art Dudley. We were speaking in whispersplotting the overthrow of all governmentswhen a happy guy with facial hair, who I later found out was Bob Sattin of Bob's Devices, comes to our table and says he wants to show us a photo of a "modified record player"
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