Herb Reichert

Last night, I sat on a bright yellow velveteen sofa eating red beans and rice while listening for three hours to blues and jazz from rare 78rpm records. I walked out feeling gospel-level raised up, with a head full of dreams and cultural memories.

My DACs are taking naps. I have not played music from a digital source in at least 12 weeks. I'm having too much fun playing records from the '50s and '60s with period-correct phono cartridges and listening to 100-year-old 78s at the Hot Club of New York.

Last week, a black sedan pulled up by the curb in front of my building. I recognized the driver, Richard Cirulnick, because an old audio-world buddy named Al Rhodes introduced me to him at the New York Audio Show in 2017. Since then, we've hung out a lot, especially at audio shows . . .

The new MC X-series moving coil cartridges appear to have jumped the fence and broken free of what I long perceived as Ortofon's traditional Scandinavian style. This month, I'm auditioning the top of the X series, the MC X40, which costs $1150 and sounds almost Japanese.

Walking through any big art museum, even at a brisk pace, it's impossible not to notice how boldly each object wears the unique stamp of its time and place of manufacture. It doesn't matter whether the artist worked in Paris or Polynesia, in the 15th or 20th century. The force of the creator's persona, united with the constraints of the cultural system that supported the making of that type of art, determines the vibe the object emits. That vibe is what I'm hoping to grasp.

On the first page of the Radiant Acoustics Clarity 4.2 Welcome Guide, Radiant Acoustics founder Peter Lyngdorf states, "The first thing you'll notice when listening to these speakers is the absence of distortion."

My Russian neighbor Alex forges ax heads and smokes pig chests 5' from my bedroom window. At 2:00am, shirtless, in February. One especially cold night, I woke up to the sounds of hammering and loud music. When I looked out, Alex was blacksmithing a glowing red meat cleaver blade, with Rachmaninoff plays Rachmaninoff blaring from a cassette in his boom box.