LATEST ADDITIONS

One of the great divides in high-end audio concerns the question of how much bass is <I>enough</I> bass? The decision facing a speaker designer about how much low-frequency extension is appropriate is a fundamental one, so to speak: every extra 5Hz of bass will dramatically increase the retail price, as the speaker must be correspondingly bigger. Furthermore, the larger the speaker, the larger its problems, which in turn requires throwing more money at the design to solve those problems.

In last week's responses, many of you wished for ubiquitous high-resolution downloads. If this were to happen, what is the <I>most</I> you are willing to pay for, say, a 96kHz/24-bit download of a full album?

It's a <I>guy</I> thing, dating from those sandbox days when such declarations were not only socially acceptable but expected of us: Mickey Mantle could run the bases faster than Whitey Ford, the Chevrolet Corvette was cooler than the Ford Mustang, Jimmy Page played faster than Jeff Beck, Superman was stronger than Batman. (Women, those devious serpent-hearkeners of Old Testament fame, are for once blameless: They <I>never</I> argue that Charlotte Bronte wrote better tea-drinking scenes than Jane Austen, or that Hugh Grant looks better in a powdered wig than Daniel Day Lewis.)

Even better than the STAX museum in Memphis however, is the Country Music Hall of Fame in Nashville. I had friends in Nashville give me the whole rap about… “You don’t have to even know the music to love the museum”…to which I rolled my eyes, but it’s actually true. The CMH integrates music so beautifully in the museum. It could be an utter disaster in there musically, with listening stations bleeding into each other until it’s just a cacophony of noise. But through the intelligent uses of curled Nautilus shell shaped listening booths that control the sound yet still allow the listener to hear what they’ve chosen, the CMH is a model of keeping the music nearby yet allowing folks to look at cases of artifacts and talk among themselves without being blown out by music playing.

Look at this and wonder: "Why doesn't Brother Stephen own this beautiful piece of art? It obviously has his name written all over it. What gives?"

Hey. If you like Cold Cave, I think you'll like Bal Pare. It's pretty safe to judge a 7" by its cover, which is what I did when I saw this one winking at me from the racks at Other Music. How could it not be good, all masked and silvery and naked like that?

Effi Briest sort of reminds me of Gang Gang Dance. And I like that. Check out this dizzying video for "Mirror Rim."