If you were sending a shout out to an alien species, what would you say? Here's what Cosmic Call sent via a 70m telescope in the Ukraine. Let's hope our fellow sapient species are brighter than I am—I had to click through to the translation.
Genesis, Yes, Gentle Giant, Happy the Man . . . . Progressive rock from the 1970s has taken abuse from all sides, but it is still dear to many audiophiles. Were you ever or are you now a big fan, and why do you/don't you like it?
I've been kicking myself for years for not saving the copy of <I>The New York Times</I> in which Hans Fantel wrote about hearing Bruno Walter's 1938 performance of Mahler's Ninth Symphony.
<I>American Heritage</I> takes a comprehensive look at firefighters.
Douglas Hofstadter reconsiders some of his notions about music and artifical intelligence.
Two scientists from McGill University—Daniel Levitin, a cognitive neuroscientist, and Stephen McAdams, a cognitive psychologist—and a professor from the College of New Jersey joined forces with the conductor and five members from the Boston Symphony Orchestra, not to mention 50 audience members, this past weekend to attempt to measure how people process music.
<I>Totally new Heads:</I> HeadRoom has released new versions of its <A HREF="http://www.stereophile.com/headphones/1204headroom/">Total BitHead</A> and Total AirHead headphone amplifiers. Both models feature new, quieter volume potentiometers and improved audio chips for superior sound.
How to integrate a computer into a high-end audio system is a hot topic these days. I'm getting more and more e-mails from readers asking for advice, Wes Phillips wrote about transferring his LPs to audio files in his <A HREF="http://www.stereophile.com/images/newsletter/1005Astph.html">October</A…; and <A HREF="http://www.stereophile.com/images/newsletter/1105Astph.html">November</…; newsletters, and a lively thread on this topic ran on the <A HREF="http://forum.stereophile.com/forum/showflat.php?Cat=&Number=2067&page=0… at www.stereophile.com</A>.
Audiophiles have long had a love-hate relationship with dipolar loudspeakers. These devices are nearly always a pain to position properly, they tend to dominate a room, and more often than not they're fussy about amplification. But when it all comes together, the best of them can make magic.
As much as I'm tempted by the impressive sweep and scale with which some of the large, full-range loudspeakers endow music, for some reason I find myself more at home with more compact examples of the breed. This is not through lack of familiarity with large speakers, a pair of <A HREF="http://www.stereophile.com/floorloudspeakers/506">B&W 801</A>s occupying pride of place in our living room (which also serves as my wife's listening room). Yet I find myself hankering after that ultimate soundstage precision that only minimonitors seem capable of producing: the loudspeakers totally disappearing, vocal and instrumental images hanging in space, truly solid—the prefix "stereo-" is derived from the Greek word <I>stereos</I>, which means solid—so that a rectangular, totally transparent window into the concert hall opens at the rear of your room. In addition, the necessarily limited low-frequency extension offered by small speakers makes it much easier to get the optimum integration with the room acoustics below 100Hz.