At this moment in time, there’s honestly no way I can justify spending more money on sweet, wonderful, soul-stirring vinyl records. I just can’t do it. I have bills to pay. I have records at home that I haven’t listened to yet. I have laundry to do and groceries to buy. But, damn, am I tempted to go to the First Annual Collect-i-Bowl Record Show at <a href="http://www.brooklynbowl.com/">Brooklyn Bowl</a> this Sunday.
"Reviewed in the box!" is what <I>Stereophile</I>'s founder, the late <A HREF="http://www.stereophile.com/news/j_gordon_holt">J. Gordon Holt</A>, used to call it. You might think you're reading a review, but the realization slowly dawns that there's nothing in the text that could not have been gleaned from the manufacturer's brochure, nothing to indicate that the writer had even opened the box the product came in. When I read a review in another publication or online, I judge it by doing what I recommend <I>Stereophile</I>'s readers do when they read <I>this</I> magazine: I look for the nugget I <I>didn't</I> already know, the facet I <I>wasn't</I> expecting, the concluding jewel I <I>couldn't</I> have predicted without ever having tried the component myself. Sadly, all too often too many of what are promoted as "reviews" on the Web are merely descriptions.
<B>Jeff Beck: <I>Emotion & Commotion</I></B><BR>
Atco R2 523695 (CD), R1 523695 (LP). 2010. Steve Lipson, prod., eng., mix; Trevor Horn, exec. prod. DDD. TT: 40:26<BR>
Performance *****<BR>
Sonics ***½
I did not find what I was looking for at <a href="http://blog.stereophile.com/stephenmejias/jersey_city_record_riot/">the Jersey City Record Riot</a>, but I did find two reasonably priced Tom Waits albums (<i>Blue Valentine</i> and <i>Rain Dogs</i>) and Peter Lang’s debut, <i>The Thing at the Nursery Room Window</i>, on John Fahey’s Takoma label. I had forced myself to be extremely selective, and, though the many kind and interesting vendors were making it difficult for me to hold back from buying more, I did in fact hold back.
As I’ve mused before (though only twice), what’s the point of having a blog if you can’t indulge in a little self-promotion?
“What does it mean to love your father?” the therapist asked.
While brushing my teeth this morning, it occurred to me that there are significant similarities between a toothbrush and a tonearm/cartridge. The bristles would be analogous to the cartridge and the brush handle to the tonearm. In either case it is the business end of the device that does all the work. The bristles track the contours of your ivories in search of hazardous waste deposits, while the cartridge tracks the record groove transducing wall modulations into an electrical signal. I think that this is where the old adage came from: "A used cartridge is like a used toothbrush—nobody wants one!"
It is a widely held belief that musicians do not assess hi-fi equipment in the same way as "audiophiles." I remember the British conductor Norman Del Mar—an underrated conductor if ever there was one—still being perfectly satisfied in 1981 with his 78 player, never having felt the need to go to LP, let alone to stereo. And some musicians do seem oblivious to the worst that modern technology can do. I was present at the infamous Salzburg CD conference in 1982, for example, where Herbert von Karajan, following one of the most unpleasant sound demonstrations in recorded history, announced that "All else is gaslight!" compared with what we had just heard. J. Gordon Holt proposed a couple of years back ("<A HREF="http://www.stereophile.com/asweseeit/348">As We See It</A>," Vol.8 No.1) that sound is not one of the things in <I>reproduced</I> music to which musicians listen. I have also heard it said that even the highest fidelity is so far removed from live music that a musician, immersed in the real thing, regards the difference between the best and the worst reproduced sound as irrelevant to the musical message: both are off the scale of his or her personal quality meter.
Many loudspeakers come with five-way binding posts, allowing a choice of connectors. Others are specific to one type of connector. How do you terminate your speaker cables on the speaker end?