On creaks and coughs and candy wrappers
The advantage of a highly resolving music system is that you can hear deeper into recordings. The disadvantage is that you can hear deeper into recordings.
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Forget about the sound of the recording
Hello, and Happy New Year! I'm greeting you in October 2021just before Halloween, in anticipation of Stereophile's publication deadlinebut by the time this magazine arrives in your mailbox, it'll be after the holidays.
Ray's Scream
Back in the mid-1960s, I was the unusual white, suburban preteen who, for reasons I've long pondered and never fully understood, was drawn much less powerfully to the Beatles than to blues and R&B. I was a bit of a jazz snob, too. Given these leanings, it's no surprise that one of the half-dozen or so albums that fried my impressionable young brain was that seamless blend of blues, R&B, and jazz, Ray Charles at Newport.
A Wolf Howled in Chicago
In the early 1970s, my hometownChicagowas a hotbed of blues. I discovered the blues in high school via the Rolling Stones, and I began to frequent the city's blues clubs as a college student, at first while still underage. From Theresa's, the South Side tavern where Junior Wells performed, I progressed to the West Side, where on weekends I would head down Madison Street to see Howlin' Wolf at Big Duke's Blue Flame Lounge.
Listening Deeply
Take a walk at night. Walk so silently that the bottoms of your feet become ears.Pauline Oliveros, Sonic Meditations
The one activity that distinguishes audiophiles from other music lovers is our practice of sitting in solitude and listening closely to music reproduced on a finely tuned playback system.
Lou Reed's Dirty Boulevard of Dreams
New York City is a dream you can't haveglitz, glamor, grime, too much to take in from within, too much to understand from afar. It's a metropolitan manifestation of the Heisenberg principle, its nature changing with how you look at it. No matter how you try, you can't see the forest for the skyscrapers.
My journey to hi-fi
Step 1. When I was in my mid-20s, an older editor at the Dutch current-affairs magazine I worked for told me he wanted to write a piece about audiophiles: He had been bitten by the audio bug himself. Because I often wrote about rock and pop music, he asked if I had a quality hi-fi system, and if so, would I be willing to be interviewed for his article
Alive at the Cafe Au Go Go
I grew up in a household that didn't have a record player and was pretty much devoid of music. In high school, I got a little stereo and began collecting records. By the time I entered Brooklyn College, in 1963, my "main man" was Trini Lopez; I also had a couple of Jack Jones albums. In New York, I discovered the Cafe Au Go Go.
The Beatles: Liverpool Fantasy
Last week, I had a puzzling dream. When I woke, the vision remaining from the dreamscape was of a single thread of conversation, almost oracular, with no context. Ringo was telling me, "That was actually John singing on that one, mate."
I searched for a hidden message. Maybe it was one of those naked-in-public dreams, the Beatles drummer chastising me for misidentifying the singer in some review I wrote. I soon forgot about it.
Fun with Moose and Squirrel
'Cause it's hard to say what's real / When you know the way you feelFlaming Lips, "One More Robot/Sympathy 3000-21," from Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots
In a recent Zoom meeting, some friends got into a dust-up about how "real"-sounding high-performance audio systems can be. The consensus was that there was no chance at all of real, live sound. A label owner waved it off as impossible: "Fuhgeddaboudit," he said. He's from New York, like me.