Issue 211

What’s not to love about guitar music? Especially when it’s as well-recorded and soulfully played as the selections on The Art of Hi-Fi Volume 06: Guitars, the latest release from Octave Records. The album features a wide range of artists, styles, and instruments, from the solo acoustic 12-string guitar of Bill Kopper on “Hungry Heart” to Americana, jazz, pop, well-loved covers, and Connor Terrones tearing it up on Jimi Hendrix’s “Manic Depression.” It’s all here, captured in Octave Records’ stunning Pure DSD high-resolution recording quality.

Paul McGowan, Octave Records’ CEO pointed out: “Guitars are part of the soundtrack of our lives, from sweet acoustic and warm jazz tones to the powerful electric guitar sounds that have galvanized generations of listeners. Yet it’s extremely challenging to capture these many and varied musical and sonic flavors on a recording. We are thrilled with the sound and performances of our Octave artists on The Art of Hi-Fi Volume 06: Guitars, who did a fantastic job of showcasing the almost limitless potential of the instrument.”

The Art of Hi-Fi Volume 06: Guitars was recorded with Octave’s Pyramix-based Pure DSD 256 recording system, using a variety of microphones to capture the wide variety of guitars on the album: steel-string and nylon-string, 12-string guitar, electric, pedal steel, resonator, and even baritone guitar. Everything from the crystalline overtones of a steel-string guitar to the roar of a guitar amp speaker pushed beyond its limit is here to enjoy. The album was recorded, mixed and produced by Paul McGowan, with Terri McGowan and Jessica Carson assisting in the recording and production duties. It was mastered by Gus Skinas.

The album begins with Julian Peterson’s soulful Americana-tinged “Am I Wrong” by Keb’ Mo’, singing and playing a resonator guitar using a slide, a deep, elemental sound. The bossa-nova-tinged “Amor Prohibido” features Bill Kopper on nylon-string, accompanied by bass and percussion. It’s a lively musical dialogue, beautifully recorded. Kopper and the trio also contribute “Sweet Lorraine,” played gypsy jazz style with a snappy, cutting guitar tone, and he goes solo with the gorgeous 12-string sound and complex fingerpicked voicings of “Hungry Heart.”

The wailing sound of the pedal steel guitar is featured on Greg Schochet’s country original, “Broken Down Chair,” with Schochet’s plaintive singing and sparse acoustic guitar playing carrying a wry tune about likening his life to the well-worn piece of furniture. Khabu Young contributes a dazzling instrumental version of the Beatles’ “Come Together” on solo baritone guitar, and the amount of sound he gets out of just the one instrument is remarkable.

Greg Schochet. Courtesy of the artist.

The Seth Lewis Trio offers intimate versions of the Bacharach/David classics, “The Look of Love” and “Close to You,” featuring the warm, rich tones of Lewis’ acoustic and electric basses, along with piano, organ, and drums. Wyn Walke digs into the 1930s American classic “Deep Elem Blues,” made popular by the Grateful Dead in the 1960s, performed here in a stately version with vocals, lap steel guitar, bass, percussion, and piano. The Art of Hi-Fi Volume 06: Guitars closes with a dramatic musical shift: Connor Terrones’ incendiary instrumental version of “Manic Depression,” with multiple guitars, bass, and drums blasting away to bring the album to a roaring no-holds-barred conclusion. Turn it up!

Connor Terrones. Courtesy of the artist.

The Art of Hi-Fi Volume 06: Guitars features Octave’s premium gold disc formulation, and the disc is playable on any SACD, CD, DVD, or Blu-ray player. It also has a high-resolution DSD layer that is accessible by using any SACD player or a PS Audio SACD transport. In addition, the master DSD and PCM files are available for purchase and download, including DSD 512, DSD 256, DSD 128, DSD 64, and DSDDirect Mastered 352.8 kHz/24-bit, 176.2 kHz/24-bit, 88.2 kHz/24-bit, and 44.1 kHz/24-bit PCM. (SRP: $29.)

Happy 90th Birthday, Leonard!

The ease and comfort which Perla Batalla brings to Leonard Cohen songs on A Letter to Leonard Cohen: To a Friend sounds so intimate and personal that it had to be an inside job.

In many ways, it was. The album was released to streaming services in time to celebrate Cohen's 90th birthday on Sept. 21. He mentored her, and encouraged her solo career.

Batalla has been singing Cohen's songs since 1988, when she got a call from Roscoe Beck, Cohen's bass player and a key member of his touring group. Batalla's friend Julie Christensen recommended her to be the other part of the duo that would add richness and range, color and cream, to Cohen's craggy but hypnotic concert vocals. They were more like sidemen, or rather, side-women, collaborators rather than "backup singers" in the band, which was going to leave for Europe in two weeks.

Photo: Nancy Santullo, courtesy of Perla Batalla

In a Zoom interview from her California home, Batalla said she agreed to Beck's request to just come meet with Cohen. Then reality struck. "I got off the phone, and my first thought honestly was, 'Who is Leonard Cohen?'"

"I ran to Tower Records and I got all the cassette tapes I could find on Leonard Cohen. I started listening and I was blown away by the poetry of it. I've always been a fan of great lyric writing...I was raised in a Spanish-speaking family (in Los Angeles) and my father was a singer, and I really appreciated a beautiful lyric."

Batalla half-jokingly said that while preparing to meet Cohen, the most important question was, what to wear? “Leonard was wearing black from head to toe, and I was wearing all white, down to the boots. Leonard comes towards me and we’re sort of looking at each other. He starts to sort of giggle, and takes my hand and says, "Darling, look at us, we’re a match made in heaven."

Batalla spent the next five years on the road with Cohen and his band on the I'm Your Man tour, which evolved into The Future tour. Though her voice is capable of extravagant range and power, she learned how to phrase Leonard's songs by working closely with the master, who also eventually encouraged her to step out on her own.

There's some irony in that Roscoe Beck had produced Jennifer Warnes' influential album of Leonard Cohen songs, Famous Blue Raincoat in 1986. Now Batalla is Cohen’s most prolific, dedicated interpreter.

"I have a mission when it comes to Cohen, to any song, really. As a singer I could take out my fancy chops, and do whatever I have to do to impress somebody. But as an artist and singer, my only responsibility is to be of service to the song. And when you have great material like this, it sings itself."

Batalla has recorded a variety of albums in a number of styles and languages: her dark Mexican father and lighter-skinned Argentine mother had an L.A. record store, Discoteca Batalla, which was the name of her 2002 Spanish-language album. She did a bilingual album of mixed-race pride, Mestiza, and its follow up, Heaven and Earth: The Mestiza Voyage. She also sang "Hey Look Me Over" in a 2009 tribute album to the great Broadway tunesmith Cy Coleman, so you can see she's got range.

Batalla's first Cohen album The Songs of Leonard Cohen (2004) featured many of the crowd-pleasers from his songbook: "Suzanne" and "Bird on a Wire," "Dance Me to the End of Love" and "So Long Marianne." On A Letter to Leonard Cohen, there are also a few "household name" songs, such as "Everybody Knows," "Ain't No Cure for Love," and "Sisters of Mercy." But there are also riskier tunes including the mesmerizing "You Want It Darker," and "Democracy" (from 1992's The Future) whose refrain "Democracy is coming, to the U.S.A." could not have been more prophetic if it came from the Book of Jeremiah.

"You Want It Darker" was the title song of Cohen's final studio album, released weeks before his death in 2016.

She also has the confidence now to include two of her own compositions as part of the Letter: "Awakened," and "The L of Your First Name," and a song of the French Resistance during World War II, "The Partisan." The latter song, written in 1943 by Ann Marly and Emmanuel d’Astier de La Vigerie, was recorded by Cohen in French and English in his 1969 album Songs From a Room.

Here are some selected excerpts from a wide-ranging interview about her work with Cohen, and as a brilliant singer who won't be confined to one style in an increasingly niche music industry. It starts with my attempt at a joke at the expense of the one song that somehow became Leonard Cohen's own "Stairway to Heaven" or "Kumbaya."

Wayne Robins: Thank you for not including "Hallelujah" on either of your Cohen albums. Why did you choose to avoid the obvious?

Perla Batalla: Well, for that reason, it's obvious. I mean, love singing this song because people love it so. You know, Leonard was a little bit confused as to why "Hallelujah" took off the way it did. And he said, "it's not my favorite; you know my songs, I've written better songs." But even knowing that, I sing "Hallleujah"at concerts because I would get shot if I didn't! (laughs).

But there is also a respect for how much the audience loves it. And of course, you know, that they know it so well, so it's a beautiful moment for everyone to get together and sing together. It's beautiful, when everyone gathers with a common goal.

WR: You also do new versions of "Democracy" and "You Want it Darker," which are not easy or obvious covers. Did you look deeper into the catalog for this album?

PB: Not at all. I've been touring Leonard's song book for close to 20 years now, in my tours going through Europe, working wherever. I work with a lot of Spanish musicians [much of the recording was in Barcelona], and we discussed, during rehearsals and breaks, "Oh, what about this song." And frankly, I didn't think I could sing "You Want It Darker," much like I thought I would never sing "Bird on the Wire." I didn't think I would sing a lot of Leonard's songs, because frankly, in the early days, I didn't think that anyone but Leonard could sing Leonard. I realized other people did it, and that was all fine and good. But after working with him and seeing how magical he was onstage, I just felt, yeah, I'm not gonna touch that material with a ten-foot pole.

WR: So how and when did that change?

PB: Leonard asked me to sing a song for a special party [likely in the early 1990s] he was giving for his Zen teacher, and he asked me to sing "Bird on a Wire." And I said, "no!" And he said, "why don't you live with the idea a little bit and see, because I would love for you to do that." But I was used to only singing backup vocals for him, so it felt very strange to take charge of one of his songs. So I worked on it quite a bit with a friend of mine, it started to feel part of me, and I started enjoying it, and I said, "I think I own this song now." And my friend said to me, "don't kid yourself. This song owns you."

WR: It seems to have been Cohen's way of pushing you into a solo career again. Since then, it would seem, that you own, or are owned by, a great many Leonard Cohen songs.

PB: I was absolutely taken over, because it's like Shakespeare for an actor. I just choose which ones for right for me, which ones sort of come to me. And I've extensively toured Europe singing the Cohen song book.

I was doing a wonderful event in Frankfurt at a Jewish temple and they asked me to do "You Want It Darker." And I thought, I don't want to touch that. It's like Leonard's last song, and it's pretty intense, because I also hadn't gotten over my grief over Leonard's passing...when I got the news of Leonard's death I was in Barcelona with a bass-playing friend and I said, "I don't know if I'll ever be able to sing another Leonard Cohen song again, without bursting into tears, and he said, 'so sing and cry at the same time, like we Spaniards do." That kind of gave me permission to let it all out, to process my grief while I was performing. So I sang "You Want It Darker" and I understood it, not like the brain understanding something, but with every fiber of my being in a very odd, cosmic way. But you know, stuff like that happens all the time, and I guess you know what I'm saying, is that as an artist, I let things find me.

WR: You said you produced most of the album with [mixing and mastering expert] Bernie Becker, but for "Democracy," you brought in Mike Elizondo, best known for working with Dr. Dre, Eminem, 50 Cent, and many of the great rappers.

PB: Mike was one of my first bass players out of high school in my first touring band, we were good friends. "Democracy," I hadn't really thought about since I did it with Leonard on tour in 1993. And I thought, it's so timely, even though the song has to be 30 years old.

But I saw it as more of a beats track, something of a rap, not something I could do in the studio live. Luckily, when I called Mike Elizondo, he said, "yeah, I'll do it," and he had a track for me in a couple of days. That was fabulous.

Perla Batalla, A Letter to Leonard Cohen: Tribute to a Friend, album cover.

WR: You also have Patrick Page, the Broadway actor, most recently renowned for Hadestown, doing some deep vocal parts on "Democracy."

PB: We had first connected during COVID, through the internet. I told him I was really interested in doing this song, but I think I needed a voice like yours, this grave basso profundo to carry the gravity of this tune, and we'll just sing it together as sort of a rap, talky kind of thing. And he agreed to do it.

And you know, the shocking thing is, I'm not someone that has a lot of money. I produce records with my own money, or I try to raise some money through Go Fund Me, which I did with this one. During COVID, all the files, the hard drive, whatever, to this album, were lost in Spain...the album was done, all I had to do was put vocals on it. So we realized we were going to have to raise some money, and I'm going to tell the truth that I blew it, you know. The response was amazing, and people were so generous.

WR: Where did you get the courage, even audacity, to include two of your own songs amid these Cohen classics?

PB: I don't know that I thought that because Leonard was always so encouraging to me. He'd say, "we're all just different, you just do it, darling." Or, there's no "somebody’s better than anybody else." Or, "you are you, so you go for it." I had written "Awakened" with the thought that artists are the bravest people, especially those of us who came from nothing. So it's very important to say, in my own words, what Leonard brought me, and it was that courage to say "yes, do it. A life in art, that's all we're here for."

WR: And "The L of Your First Name" seems to be more directly personal.

PB: I just wanted to tell the story of my love for Leonard. People don't understand my relationship with Leonard because we were close. We adored one another, and a lot of people think that has to involve a sexual relationship, you know, that you can't get intimacy other than that. I like to think my relationship was deeper than that, that it was spiritual. That we were bonded by something so deep. We could laugh hysterically about things. He was a very, very funny man.

So all of that is in there. I felt like I needed to say how I felt on this record. I don't know if I'll have another opportunity; once you finish a record, you don't know whether you will ever do another one ever again. So I needed to say those things. So this was my opportunity, whether or not it fits in with Leonard Cohen. You know he's a frickin' genius, so there it is. My meager offering, as Leonard would say.

Header image of Perla Batalla courtesy of Diego Cabrera.

This article originally appeared in Wayne Robins’ Substack and is used here by permission. Wayne’s Words columnist Wayne Robins teaches at St. John’s University in Queens, and writes the Critical Conditions Substack, https://waynerobins.substack.com/.

Imagine your ship is sinking, your fate is sealed, your life is doomed, and yet you remain calm and of service to others – not over the course of seconds like during a flight disaster, but over the course of hours.

As you watch the last lifeboat being lowered into the water, you don’t force your way onboard or scramble for some floatation device. Instead, you resign yourself to martyrdom because you know your music is mitigating the terror of the remaining passengers.

That’s the selfless courage of the eight young men who formed the band on the Titanic. I always thought these heroes deserved their own movie.

While watching the 1953 version of the film on our 21-inch black and white TV with my family, I was sure I’d panic like most of the passengers. I could easily visualize climbing over people on the stairways to get onto the deck, scrambling around for the next available lifeboat, and fighting for a spot on board to the exclusion of others.

This was in direct conflict with my religious indoctrination, which taught that we must do the right thing at all times or face terrible consequences. The movie convinced me I wasn’t the child I should be. I felt ashamed and unworthy of heaven.

The musicians in the Titanic's band. Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons/public domain.

I had recurring nightmares of St. Peter at the Pearly Gates chronicling my cowardice to a gallery of white-robed angels. At some point, they extended their arms towards me, thumbs down, and I was marched off to the pyrotechnic basement of mother rapers, father stabbers, and child molesters.

Two decades later on a hot summer evening, I shared this nightmare with fellow kibbutz volunteers at a disco in Tiberias, Israel. That started a lively philosophical discussion at our table. Varying opinions were expressed – mostly castigating the pomposity of the angels.

Someone suggested, “Well, Montana, we’re on the shore of the Sea of Galilee. Why don’t you try to walk across? If you succeed, you’ll have evidence of God’s favor. It’s been done before, you know!"

For some reason, that seemed rational. As I wandered down the pier, half the disco patrons followed to watch the spectacle. I descended the steel ladder fully dressed and full of hope, stepped onto the surface of the water, and sank like a sinner.

Somebody shouted, “Get thee behind me Newton!" The whole crowd broke out laughing. Many of them jumped into the water with me in a show of solidarity – or maybe because they were overheated from the dancing.

Courtesy of Pexels.com/Anselme Courau.

Dripping wet, we all sat on the pier afterwards listening to “Hotel California” from the disco and consuming whatever substances were being passed around.

At some point that evening, I experienced a mind-blowing hallucination. It dawned on me that I'm made of the same stuff as the Sea of Galilee. Even if my body was crushed like a beer can, my essence would always find its way back to the sea. I was reminded of the words of Kahlil Gibran: “...life and death are one, even as the river and the sea are one.”

I scrutinized my childhood teachings. If God admits only saints into heaven, it'll be a sparse reception. Surely less than 0.1 percent of the earth’s population would qualify; the other 99.9 percent is bound to end up in the pyrotechnic basement.

Why would any loving father doom 99.9 percent of his children to eternal damnation? What equitable judge expects people to act like saints – any more than he’d expect cats to act like dogs? Who deserves such excessive punishment for sins committed in ignorance? I determined that a just God would never do that.

Maybe His goal is to send everyone to the appropriate place; heaven for pious people and the pyrotechnic disco for party people? He probably knows that mixing them in the same afterlife would be hell for both.

So, after He blesses the wine upstairs and conducts Mass, He changes out of his white robes into his cutoffs to join us downstairs. When He arrives, He grabs a beer and snatches the mike to announce, “Hey party people, all that stuff about hell was only a myth to impel you to treat each other right! Some of you seemed to need that.”

Just before He fires up the pyrotechnics and the music he proclaims, “All right now, drinks are on the house, so everybody wang chung tonight!” Isn’t that what a loving father would do?

Or is this whole concept of a Heavenly Father just a reflection of humanity’s desire to anthropomorphize anything it doesn't understand? The Buddha wrote, “Our theories of the eternal are as valuable as those a chick still in the egg might form of the outside world.”

That’s the last thought I remember from that night. The next day, I woke up in an unfamiliar place.

“How are you feeling today?” the guy who walked into the room asked with a smile. I recognized his face from the day before, but couldn’t place him.

“Ronen!” he re-introduced himself, "I'm the disc jockey, remember?”

“Ah yes, you sat at our table for a while.”

“Right, when they fished you out of the water, they brought you to my cabin because it’s closest. The others said it looked like you tried to drown yourself?”

“No no, well, I don’t know,” I mumbled; "I just wanted to swim to the other side.”

“Let me get you some breakfast man.”

Now I was confused. Had the thought of dying actually seemed attractive last night? At the time, I was convinced that death is just a transition, like stepping from the Jacuzzi into the pool. Was that a revelation from a greater intelligence, or was it the drugs talking?

A quote from the Coptic Gospel of Thomas came to mind: “Have you discovered the beginning so that you can look for the end, because the end will be where the beginning is.” This finally made sense to me – death is nothing more than going back from whence we came?

Ronen set down a plate of eggs, lox, toast, and coffee. “So if you wanted to die, why are you still here?” he asked.

I paused while munching…“If I was dead, I wouldn't be able to enjoy this delicious lox.” He laughed heartily.

“Perhaps the purpose of life is simply to experience it,” he proposed, “like a vacation.”

“How can anyone enjoy a vacation if they’re worried about what happens afterwards?” I asked. “Doesn’t that take all the joy out of it?”

“Good point; perhaps religion is a barrier, rather than a route, to enlightenment.”

“Perhaps enlightenment can’t be taught, it must be experienced?” I added, “Christ said, ‘Except ye become as little children, ye shall not enter into the kingdom of heaven.’”

“Children are always on vacation,” he agreed. “They don’t worry about an afterlife, they experience life moment by moment. Maybe that’s the lesson.”

You’re right. Ronen, Christ said as much: “Take therefore no thought for the morrow, for the morrow shall take thought for the things of itself.”

Ronen pointed to a poster on his wall with a picture of the Buddha which read, “The secret of health for both mind and body is not to mourn for the past, nor to worry about the future, but to live the present moment wisely and earnestly.”

“Ever heard of the Titanic?,” I asked. “Of course,” he responded.

“Why do you think the musicians kept playing as the ship went down instead of scrambling for their lives?”

He thought for a moment. “It’s better to perish playing than panicking.”

“Exactly,” I enthused, “We’re all sentenced to die from the day we're born. Life isn’t a journey; we shouldn’t focus on a destination. It’s a concert, we should enjoy every note before the ship sinks.”

“Maybe the Titanic’s musicians knew that,” he responded. “My uncle worked all his life to get rich, but died before he had time to play.” 

“It’s no better being a slave to one’s cravings than it is to one’s dogma,” I postulated; “They both detach us from the present moment.”

He quoted Einstein: “Yesterday is relative, tomorrow is speculative, today is electric; that’s why they call it current.”

I added, “Perhaps the Biblical reference to ‘wailing and gnashing of teeth' in the afterlife is frustration over failing to live life in the current moment while we had the chance. Once it’s gone, it’s gone forever.”

We sat over the kitchen table all morning exploring such concepts.

Two weeks later, Ronen was killed by a bomb while traveling near the Lebanese border. I was devastated. The month prior, I’d ridden that same bus to ski the Golan Heights.

After I adjusted to the shock, I got to thinking: the notion of security is an illusion – we have none. Ronen could as easily have died from an illness, a natural disaster, or a needless accident. Regardless of the planning, work, and sacrifice we invest in controlling our future, we are always at the mercy of fate.

Shortly afterwards, I was on a plane out of Tel Aviv.

The experiences in Tiberias changed my life. I never again sacrificed the present for the future.

When I got back home, I quit being a professional achiever, sold everything I had, rode my motorcycle to Southern California, and focused on wine, women, and song. When that got old, I found a woman who shared my passions for cocktails, camping, and camaraderie, and we spent decades riding the Sierras and the Rockies together – but that’s another story.

Some relatives didn’t understand my new lifestyle and wrote that I was “wasting my life on frivolity.” They reminded me of a quote from Friedrich Nietzsche: “…the dancers were thought to be insane by those who could not hear the music.”

I wrote back, “If I don’t dance to the beat of my own drummer, I’ll lose the desire to dance at all.” At the time, they objected, but 40 years later, most of them agree.

One of them sent me this quote from the Greek philosopher, Epictetus: “All belief systems must be tolerated...for everyone must get to heaven in their own way.”

Titanic musicians' memorial, Southampton, England. Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons/Marek.69.

Header image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons/Francis Godolphin Osbourne Stuart/public domain.

The Hong Kong High-End Audio Visual show has been held every summer since the inaugural edition in 2003, except in 2020 due to the COVID 19 pandemic. This year, the show took up three floors of the Hong Kong Conventional and Exhibition Centre from August 9 – 11. It has become one of the largest shows in Asia, with 20 individual meeting rooms functioning as listening spaces, 27 specially constructed listening booths on the main exhibition floor, and 96,000 square feet of space for displays and shopping. There was a large section devoted to music vendors, with a vast selection of LPs, CDs, SACDs and even open-reel tapes. The show offered live music performances by local artists, as well as seminars given by international experts and industry veterans.

Given my experience at previous shows, I arrived early to pick up my badge in order to avoid the long lines of people. Even though I had received an invitation to apply for a press badge, somehow the system did not have my registration when I arrived. Fortunately, I was able to get this rectified quickly without having to line up at the regular ticket counters, and therefore was one of the first to get in when the doors officially opened at 10 a.m. I immediately headed to the most popular rooms, and was able to listen to the systems and take photographs before the hordes arrived. By lunchtime, the place got so crowded that it was impossible to do any serious auditioning, or even to get into some of the rooms.

The first room I got to was shared by the loudspeaker manufacturer Franco Serblin and acoustic isolation specialist IsoAcoustics. They had an interesting setup with two identical pairs of Ktêma speakers (only the color was different), one with the original spiked feet on the carpeted floor, the other with the GAIA isolation feet installed. The music was switched between the two pairs of speakers by remote control to demonstrate the effect of the isolation. The effect was not subtle, and I was quite surprised by the magnitude of the difference. On a female vocal track, the voice became more focused with improved image definition when switched to the isolated speakers. It also seemed louder. The overall effect was more lifelike and realistic, which I consider an improvement. On a string quartet, the isolation rendered the individual instruments more focused and distinct, but the spiked speakers seemed to give a better impression of space and airiness, which I preferred. I suspect the magnitude of the effect is speaker-dependent.

The Ktêma speakers in the Franco Serblin/IsoAcoustics room.

IsoAcoustics' GAIA isolation feet.

The late Franco Serblin was the founder of Sonus Faber, and the distinctiveness of his designs rests upon the musical instrument-like enclosures with tuned resonances to enhance tone color. I know some aficionados of string instruments who swear by these speakers, but it goes against the goal of most modern loudspeaker designs, which is to minimize colorations. I suspect the effect of these isolators would be far more subtle on speakers with well-damped enclosures.

I next visited the Avantgarde room. This audio distribution company has no relationship with the namesake loudspeakers, and it is not the current distributor of Avantgarde Acoustic products. Nevertheless, it represents a number of very high-end manufacturers with very interesting products. On show this year were three separate systems, of which I managed to audition two. The first system comprised of the AMG Giro II turntable and arm, with the DS Audio Master3 optical cartridge, and YS Sound 782/998 amplification combo driving the Zellaton Reference Ultra (7066).

The Avantgarde room. 

The DS Audio optical cartridge is all the rage now, with its superiority in terms of low distortion, neutrality and lightning-fast transients. Instead of coils and magnets, the cartridge has a light source and a receiver sandwiching a shade plate attached to the cantilever. Movement of the cantilever alters the amount of light transmitted to the receiver, and this light signal is transformed into an electrical signal by an-all analog process inside a special phono preamplifier. Since the mass of the shade plate is far lower than that of the coils or magnets of a conventional cartridge, this results in superior transient response. It also avoids the back EMF and hysteresis loss inherent in an electromagnetic system. Preamplifiers from other manufacturers such as Soulution and EMM Labs are starting to incorporate this proprietary system, which DS Audio is licensing to manufacturers without demanding royalty payment.

Another view of the Avantgarde room.

Despite the modest size of the Zellatons, the speakers gave a very credible performance, energizing the large space with sound of impressive scale and dynamics. The imaging is tactile and three dimensional. At $250,000 US dollars, these speakers are anything but modest, but the cost is dwarfed by that of the amplification, priced at more than three times as much.

The next system comprised the massive Acoustical Systems Astellar turntable with Taitan GC arm, Palladian XO cartridge, Evocator Ultimate Reference phono preamp, and Ocean Way Audio HRA horn speakers bi-amped with two Halcro Eclipse stereo amplifiers. At less than half the price of the Zellatons, the Ocean Ways nevertheless proved superior in terms of scale and dynamics. They presented the music in a relaxed, completely natural manner, without any sign of strain, even though the imaging might be less pinpoint-precise. If there is no space constraint, I know which pair I would go for (if I ever win the lottery).

Another interesting setup was found in the Esoteric/Tannoy room. This was the first time I listened to the new Esoteric Grandioso T1 turntable. This turntable is full of innovations. The platter is floated by a magnetic field, isolating it from the environment and greatly reducing bearing loading. It is driven magnetically, which means there is no physical link of any kind between the platter and the motor. The drive is servo controlled by a 10 MHz clock. The speakers were the Tannoy Prestige Gold Reference, driven by Esoteric amplification.

I often find the Esoteric electronics rather cold and un-involving, and modern 15-inch Tannoy speakers tend to sound rather slow and lacking transparency (unlike their ancestors, equipped with the vintage Tannoy Black and Silver drivers). I found last year's demonstration, featuring the Westminster Royal speakers, rather disastrous. However, their system sounded good this year. At the risk of sounding clichéd, LPs played on this turntable got close to the sound of master tape. It had a low noise floor, and sounded extremely stable and solid. The speakers were lively and dynamic, and the sound of the system was musical, in contrast to the over-analytical sound of many high-end systems.

The Esoteric/Tannoy exhibit.

Esoteric's Grandioso T1 turntable.

A touch of class: the badge on the Tannoy Prestige Gold Reference loudspeakers.

It seemed to me that the majority of exhibitors had set up at least one turntable system, and LPs were featured in many demonstrations. I estimate a good 20 percent of the stalls were taken up by record dealers. The Japanese manufacturer Yukiseimitsu Audio displayed their quirky AP-01 turntable. It has a magnetic bearing, which means the platter is floated on a magnetic field to minimize bearing noise. Power is transmitted to the platter via a thread, driven symmetrically by two shafts on either side of the platter. This avoids the unbalanced horizontal force applied to the platter in a conventional single-belt drive design. Notice that the integrated tonearm is straight, without the usual S or J-shaped arm tube or an offset angle between the headshell and the arm tube. This means the angle between the cartridge cantilever and the tangent of the record groove is constantly changing as the record is played, and the distortion due to the horizontal tracking error varies across the record surface. On the other hand, there is no need for anti-skating, since the force from stylus drag is always in line with the arm tube.

Record dealers where everywhere at the Hong Kong Audio Visual Show.

Yukiseimitsu Audio's AP-01 turntable has a completely distinctive design.

I have not used this type of tonearm to tell you how the distortion affects the sound, but I favor the use of 12-inch arms precisely to minimize this distortion. The arm bearing is a dual-pivot type, with a magnetic brake to minimize tilt during play.

Another new player in the analog game is the Canadian company Zavfino. They started by manufacturing cables, and their tonearm wires are used by many well-known manufacturers. They also do contract manufacturing of tonearms and turntables for other brands, and recently started to manufacture their own designs under their name. These are standard belt drive designs without a suspension, which seems to be a rather crowded field.

Here's another unique turntable, from Zavfino.

A turntable that garnered a lot of attention is the Kronos Audio Perpetual, which costs 40 percent less than their flagship Discovery. This massive sculpture-like device seems to offer better value for money, even though the price is still pretty hefty.

The latest generation of the Thorens Reference turntable was on static display. Its selling point is the integrated active isolation platform designed by the German firm Seismion, which is two orders of magnitude more effective than the more common air suspension systems. It uses belt drive, but the rotational speed of the platter is servo controlled using ultra-high-precision quartz oscillators. The turntable can be ordered with the Thiele TA01 pivoted tangential tonearm, which employs a clever cantilever design to achieve the zero tracking error of linear tracking arms, but avoids their inconveniences. Its design goal seems to be diametrically opposite to that of the Yukiseimitsu, but who is correct?

Turntables were in abundance at the show: here's Kronos Audio's Perpetual...

...and the mighty Thorens Reference.

Thorens chose to do their live demonstrates with their TD124DD direct drive record player, which is a homage to the classic TD124 idler wheel turntable from 1957. This was originally meant to be a limited edition, but demand for the product is such that the company has decided to make it a part of their regular lineup. In my opinion, this new direct drive turntable comes closest to being a bargain, if such a concept is even possible in high-end audio.

On the subject of classic products, I came across a loudspeaker in the Wilson Audio room that brought back memories. I thought it was an original WATT/Puppy repainted in bright orange color to make us old timers happy, but it was in fact a new updated version. The WATT/Puppy first appeared in 1986 and remained in production with regular updates until 2011. This new version uses the most up to date cabinet materials, drivers and crossover components, and is released this year to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the company.

A classic combination reborn: Wilson Audio's WATT/Puppy loudspeaker.

One of the products I find the most interesting comes from King's Audio, a manufacturer of electrostatic loudspeakers based in Hong Kong. They showcased a pair of speakers in the form of traditional Chinese calligraphy scrolls. The artwork on the speakers can be customized according to the buyers' wishes, but I guess copyright restrictions do apply. There are many important collectors of Chinese painting and calligraphy in Hong Kong, and they can now meld their love of art with their love of music.

Loudspeaker art from King's Audio.

Another local company that is on an upward trajectory is Westminster Lab. Founded by Hong Kong engineer Angus Leung, the company's innovation is their sliding Class A amplifier topology. Class A refers to the way the output devices (transistors or tubes) are biased. In single-ended circuits, as found in the most primitive tube amplifiers, the output device is always conducting current since it has to amplify both the positive and the negative phases of the signal. A push-pull circuit allows one half of the output devices to be switched off up to half of the time (Class B).

The analogy of lumberjacks cutting a tree with a two-person saw is useful. If only one lumberjack is working, he/she has to push and pull the saw in turn. If two lumberjacks are working, one on each end of the saw, only one lumberjack needs to be pulling the saw at any time. In Class A push-pull amplifiers, the current going through the device that is not doing the work is simply wasted. This is why Class A amplifiers tend to be big and run hot. The problem with Class B operation is that it takes a finite amount of time for the output devices to turn on and off, which means when the signal crosses over from positive to negative phase and vice versa, crossover distortion occurs.

In practice, most push-pull amplifiers operate in Class A/B, which means the devices are biased in such a way that for low-level signals, the amp stays in Class A, and only goes into Class B when high power is needed. Nevertheless, pure Class A amplifiers are still thought by many to be superior in terms of sound quality. With the sliding Class A topology, the bias of the output devices varies according to the required power output in that instant. Since music amplifiers only need to provide high power momentarily during music peaks, such a scheme greatly reduces power wastage and heat, and simplifies heat management.

Having learned about these monoblock amplifiers before ever setting eyes on them, I was nevertheless shocked how small they are when I saw them for the first time during the show. You can compare their size to the speakers right next to them to get an idea. An equivalent 400-watt Class A/B monoblock would normally be at least four times the size, and I hate to think how big (and wasteful) a conventional 400-watt Class A amplifier would be. The booth was not conducive to a proper audition, but the verdict from magazine reviewers and customers has been highly positive. It is no surprise that this design came from the mind of an engineer living in Hong Kong, where the cost of real estate is the highest in the world. Just the space savings alone would fully justify the cost of these amps in Hong Kong!

Having visited all the exhibits, I noticed that there were few dipole speakers, and only a handful of horn speakers. Tube electronics were also less well-represented compared to previous years. The majority of equipment on display came from well-established and heavily promoted brands. In contrast, the Munich High End Show features a far greater diversity, with many quirky products from little-known manufacturers. This might be due to the fact that most of the exhibitors in Hong Kong are local distributors, who are less willing to take risk by promoting little-known brands. While Hong Kong does have a fair number of well-heeled, trend-following audiophiles, there is also an active community of enthusiasts who are into, shall we say, experimental audio. Since the show only takes up a small fraction of the available space at the exhibition center, the organizers should consider expanding the show in the coming years and give a chance to smaller manufacturers to showcase their products.

All images courtesy of the author.

If you’re about to go on stage, whether a 1,000-seat theater or the corner of the restaurant that you can barely fit into, you need to be mentally prepared. While there are undoubtedly some musicians, especially pros, who can just calmly walk in front of an audience without a second thought, most us are going to get keyed up – which is normal, and adds to the passion of your performance.

You want to develop yourself to where you can get into a state of calm excitement, where you confidently know you’re going to deliver a great performance, yet still feel the rush that comes from playing your instrument in front of people and making great music.

The key to being confident is being prepared.

Before the gig – and don’t do this in a rush – make sure you have all your equipment packed and ready to go. If your guitar strings or drum heads need changing, do it before the gig, not right before you’re about to go on, unless you’re someone like James Taylor’s guitar tech. (New strings need to stretch, and you almost certainly won’t have time to change strings before a gig.) I like to make sure all my gear is ready to go the day before.

Many musicians have two sets of equipment: their gigging equipment which is always ready to go, and their “at-home” stuff. This way you won’t have to pick out the gear you’re going to bring before every gig, with the possibility of forgetting something, and worrying about the very real possibility of forgetting something.

Know your material. It can be fun to play songs on the fly at an open mic or jam session, or even on the gig if things are loose (like the after-midnight third set at a bar when most of the crowd is gone), but to be truly solid and confident in your playing, you have to either know the song down pat, or have an accurate cheat sheet or sheet music in front of you. I prefer memorizing the material. As the pros say, you don’t practice a song until you get it right, you practice a song until you can’t get it wrong.

Memorizing also gives you the freedom to move around on stage, and not have to be tied down to looking at a music stand, iPad or gawd forbid, your phone. Can you imagine a band like Kiss looking at music stands or iPads while playing? Yeah, kind of ruins the vibe. Exceptions: keyboard players and drummers, who have to sit in one place, and in the case of the former, laptops and tablets “look like” and often are part of the rig. And nothing, nothing, nothing looks more amateurish than holding a phone in your hand and reading lyrics off it. Just don’t.

I can tell you that if you don’t know a song down cold, whether with a paper or electronics cheat sheet or not, you won’t feel 100-percent confident when it’s time to play it. Take the time to get the song down. In the band I’m in, it usually takes 20 to 30 run-throughs before we feel it’s stage-ready, and even then it needs a few live performances before it really gels.

When playing, you’ll have two kinds of memory at work – memorization, and muscle memory, where even if you get distracted and momentarily watch the baseball game on the bar’s TV screen or someone smiling at you on the dance floor, your arms and hands “remember” how to play the song. All of that said, I should note that the use of onstage lyrics prompters ("Teleprompters" to us old-timers) has become acceptable, but most bands can't afford them or don't have the room onstage.

I cannot emphasize this enough – those cheat sheets you get on the internet are almost always wrong.

These are not “official” transcriptions of songs but rather the work of an individual who transcribed the words and chords according to what they thought was right. 95 percent of the time, some of the chords and/or lyrics are wrong. They can be a tremendous time saver compared to what we used to do in the old days, which was listen to the song over and over again and write out the words and chords. But these internet cheat sheets almost always have to be marked up and corrected.

Speaking of the internet, this isn’t exactly a news flash: a vast amount of stuff is clickbait garbage. Don’t be fooled that there’s some magic system or shortcut to learning how to play. There isn’t. However, there’s some wonderful educational material out there, like Sandra Sherman’s videos on beginning jazz guitar. Ignore the trash Facebook Reels and YouTube videos, which can usually be spotted by some guy making a goofy-looking face on his splash page, accompanied by a ridiculous clickbait headline. If you want to get better and better, which will make you feel more and more mentally prepared (and physically prepared with good “chops”), you have to put in the work. As a woodwinds teacher I knew once said, “I can show you how to do it, but I can’t blow for you.”

Get a good night’s sleep the night before the gig. This isn’t always possible, especially for musicians on tour or, like most of us, those who are working a full-time job. But try. If you can’t get a full nights’ sleep, try to squeeze in a nap the day of the gig or even at the gig. Don’t laugh – when I was playing in the Lines in the 1970s and 1980s and working a 50-hour-a-week job, if we had time before the gig I’d string a line of chairs together and crash on them before showtime. The more rested you are, the better you’ll feel.

You don’t want to play on an empty stomach. Imagine finally getting that big gig and all you can think about is the fact that you’re starving. If your blood sugar level gets too low you may feel physically ill and weak, aside from the fact that you’ll be distracted from playing because you’re hungry.

Don’t drink too much alcohol before the gig, or any at all. I will address this topic in much greater detail in a separate installment. Look, most of us like to have a beer or two before and during the set, and a little bit of drink can have a relaxing effect, but if you think it’s going to “loosen you up” as a musician or make you play better, you’re lying to yourself. Same with smoking pot. You may think you’re reaching the heights of Cosmic Connection to the Great All when you’re playing high, and in fact, you may hit some fantastic musical moments, but, reality check, listen to a tape or watch a video of your performance afterward and it may come as a shock to see how lousy you were. I know, the history or jazz and rock is filled with brilliant performances by those who were drinking and using, but, especially if you’re just starting out playing, don’t go on stage buzzed. You really want to be focused. And there’s the very real possibility that your bandmates will not tolerate your being drunk and stoned, especially if you put in sub-par performances, and will kick you out.

Don’t take the possibility of alcohol and drug addiction lightly. Sure, having a good time is part of the hang at gigs, and let’s face it, if you’re playing in a bar, well, people are there to drink and it’s easy to get sucked into the partying. But the path to addiction can be a very slippery slope. Some people can’t handle alcohol and drugs. It can and has destroyed peoples’ lives and made the lives of those around them miserable. In case you think I’m being sanctimonious; I learned this the hard way when I was younger. I partied way too much at times and it was stupid and reckless and I consider myself lucky to have gotten out of it without seriously harming myself and others. I’ve seen people very close to me ruin their lives.

Do you really want to be playing if your brain feels like this?

What about stage fright? As I’ve noted, getting worked up, or being more than a little nervous is pretty normal, especially if you’re about to play a big gig. In fact, it would be strange if you didn’t feel at least some degree of excitement before playing (unless it’s a regular bar or restaurant gig you’ve done a hundred times), and it can fuel your performance. But what if you feel anxious or even terrified? You’re in good company – people like Barbra Streisand, Cher, Adele, Brian Wilson, Pablo Casals, Arthur Rubenstein, Donny Osmond, and Ozzy Osbourne have spoken about their anxiety and even panic before taking the stage. And I'll admit, I still get somewhat nervous before a big gig. (I let it get to me recently when things went wrong, another story for another day.)

Some of the things mentioned previously, like knowing the material and feeling well-rested, can help. Other beneficial techniques include breathing exercises and relaxation techniques, visualization (picture yourself getting up on that stage and playing great; push that self-doubt aside and tell yourself that if you’ve gotten this far you know you have the talent), staying hydrated, and avoiding caffeine.

Some musicians have what I call “baseball superstition.” Just as some baseball players will perform certain actions, like not stepping on foul lines, or wearing rally caps or lucky underwear, some musicians have pre-show rituals, and if they’re comforting, why not? Keith Richards has to have shepherd’s pie before going on stage. Robert Plant irons his shirts. Lady Gaga dances topless and throws glitter. I wear green shoes.

Good luck charms for the author.

Everyone makes mistakes, including professionals, no matter how well-prepared you are. As I noted in my first installment, the difference between amateurs and pros is how they handle them. If you’re new to this and make a mistake while playing onstage, you’re going to get fazed and think it’s the end of the world. It’s not. Ninety-nine percent of the audience won’t notice and the other musicians will probably smile in a been-there-done-that way. Don’t freeze, or stumble. You can’t get the moment back. Shrug it off, get back on the horse, and play on.

Here’s a video of Herbie Hancock explaining how bad he felt after making a mistake at a Miles Davis gig, and how Miles turned it around to make it a good thing, and how Herbie was amazed by it.

The old jazz musician joke goes, “if you make a mistake, repeat it. Everyone will think you did it on purpose!”

I once saw Donald “Buck Dharma” Roeser of Blue Öyster Cult, one of the greatest guitarists to walk the Earth, forget the instrumental interlude of “(Don’t Fear) the Reaper.” After everyone in the band stared at him in bafflement waiting for him to start the opening riff, bassist Danny Miranda played the riff to cue Buck, who laughed and then hit it. Then during the song’s fadeout, proceeded to play one of the most astounding “I’ll show you!” guitar solos I have ever witnessed.

Don’t apologize to the audience! Not when you make a mistake, not for anything. If you’re having technical difficulties or have to tune up or need time, then talk, tell a joke, introduce the band. Apologizing makes you look inexperienced and not in control of the situation. Never let 'em see you sweat.

The more you play, the better you’ll get, and the more confidence you’ll have. In time, and you’ll have to work at it, you’ll get to the point where you know you’re going to impress and wow people.

You can do it!

Header image: my friend, the songwriter/performer Hank Stone, relaxing before a gig at the Chapin Rainbow Stage, Huntington, New York, July 2024.

All images courtesy of the author.

(Did I mention, don't trust internet cheat sheets?)

In our continuing story of the creation of the Digital Lens we're finally at the point where we have a roadmap of what we want to build. Now it is time to actually build it.

This is the point, as the old saying goes, where the rubber meets the road. And what's interesting about this juncture is the number of times developers arrive here only to discover that their beautiful idea wasn't worth the gamble – and the new circuit that doesn't live up to expectations. Throughout audio history, as in every field, there are more failures than successes (and you only hear about the successes). But, these are paths that must be taken if we are going to change the landscape.

This point in history was about 30 years ago and, back then, digital audio was somewhat like the Wild West. No one knew what was and wasn't going to be sonically important: green pens, degaussers, clamps, cables, and new technologies. What mattered is that we tried new directions and then auditioned the results.

Most of what was being tried were either tweaks or additions/modifications to existing products. I was venturing out into the wild with a new and never-tried-before category of product. A standalone digital in and out separate. Today, upsamplers, isolators, re-clockers, and interfaces are common. Back then, this was new and uncharted territory.

As an analog designer I understand how digital audio works but have zero experience building anything. I needed someone that not only understood digital audio but could grasp the technical challenges ahead and figure out how to mechanize the whole apparatus.

Enter, Bob Stadtherr. Bob, who has been PS Audio's chief engineer for the past 30 years, was then working as the head engineer at a theater lighting company in San Luis Obispo, California. I had hired him from afar because he was rumored to be a good engineer who could pretty easily design and program our front panel displays for the Genesis servo amplifiers. 

At the time, I had been relying upon another outside engineer who had been working on our front panel display for an agonizing six months and still he couldn't deliver a finished product to us. He was stuck on the programming of the display interface. Out of frustration, I fired that guy and took a shot with Bob, who took one look at the schematic of the display and asked, "what was this guy smoking?"

Oy. Bob wanted to scrap six months of work and start fresh. Reluctantly, I agreed. Two weeks later Bob delivered a fully-functioning front panel display. I was frankly stunned. When asked what programming language he used, I was told, none. He wrote the entire program in assembly (this is the actual bit-for-bit machine language used at the silicon level and is the most efficient but challenging way of programming).

Bob had my attention.

And he had done this in his spare time.

Just for your reference, 1993, when all of this was happening, saw the introduction of a new idea. It was called the World Wide Web. Yup. 1993 saw the launch of the world's first web browser and, for the few that had access through noisy telephone modems, a new world of WWW was about to open. There was no such thing in my world like e-mail or browsing for answers. 

We were on our own.

Past attempts at explaining my idea of a standalone separate that would connect to a CD player, take a gulp of its digital output, fill a "water tank" full of those digital bits, and then parse out the perfect results with a fixed low-jitter clock into an output wave shaper saw a lot of head scratching and requests for more detailed information which, as an analog designer, I could not provide.

One 15-minute phone conversation with Bob and he repeated the entire concept back to me with such clarity as to make me drop the phone. Not only did he grasp the concept but in the next 10 minutes he began explaining to me the pitfalls we would be facing.

I had the right guy.

My simplistic view of filling up a digital "water tank" and then, at some later time, outputting the tank's contents through a fixed output clock had what felt like a fatal flaw. Turns out the data and the clock coming out of a CD player is variable – unpredictable. The reason for this is simple: the laser mechanism that is reading the digital data might struggle reading some parts of the CD, while flying through other parts. Plus, the speed of the CD's rotation is variable too. Like a vinyl record, it takes less/more time to read depending on where in the disk you are – closer or farther from the center of the disc.

At this point in the story, it's instructive to remember the basic problem we're trying to solve. The CD player provides the master clock that is running your DAC. Because that clock is not only variable, but pays zero attention to jitter and noise, it's a horrible impediment to great sound. The Mark Levinson DAC I had mentioned in an earlier installment gave lip service to this problem by adding a small "water tank" memory buffer at the input of their product, but its output used a means of varying faster and slower the data rate at its output too. And now, once Bob explained why they did that, it became clear we had a major problem mechanizing my idea of the fixed low-jitter clock.

(The reason a fixed clock was needed was for the goal of eliminating jitter. A variable clock is always going to have high levels of jitter. Only a fixed-frequency clock can really provide the perfect low jitter output we wanted. Today, there are relatively low-jitter variable clocks available, but there the trick is to slow down the variability to a frequency below human hearing, like maybe 1 or 2 seconds. This is what our engineer Ted Smith does in our DirectStream technology, which came 30 years later. But, back then…)

Bob went away to think about the problem and, within a week, came back with the answer.

The intelligent buffer.

Bob had come up with a fascinating idea that would potentially solve our big hurdle. He called it the Intelligent Buffer.

The problems were the variable speed at which a CD or DVD player delivers data, and the system's master clock. Sometimes the data and clock came out quickly; other times they would slow down as the laser mechanism tried to read a scratched or dirty part of a CD.

Bob's idea for this buffer was relatively "simple." Because the CD player provided both the musical data and the master clock (this clock tells us how much data to expect and at what speed) Bob would read the master clock's frequency and then adjust the length of the buffer to accommodate the expected data. And here's the trick. We don't want this buffer (our water tank) to run out of data or to get so full it can't accept more. If we run out of data, then we get a pause in the music. If we overrun the data and it chokes, we get a tick or blip in the music.

Because we are using a fixed-frequency output clock, a simple on-the-fly math calculation can set the difference between the incoming master clock frequency and the output fixed frequency of our fancy low-jitter clock. Thus, the buffer's length changes on the fly (“intelligently”) to make sure we never run out of data, and never get too much to clog the system.

The only downside is a phenomena we call latency. The signal is delayed from real time playback, something that matters if you're watching a movie or trying to synch a person's lips with their speech, but hey! This was an audiophile device designed for music. Screw the video guys.

It took Bob two months to design, build, test, and deliver to us a working Digital Lens. 

And at this juncture, it is again instructive to recall that we didn't yet know if this whole exercise would be worth it. What if, after all this trouble and ingenuity we would put it in the system and get meh results? Honestly, given that we could hear differences in the CD/DAC systems of the day by coloring a CD's edge with a green pen, I wasn't too worried about hearing improvements.

My partner Arnie Nudell and I listened to the first Digital Lens and were absolutely stunned. Not only did it make an improvement, it took the digital audio experience to a place we had only dreamed about. The increased openness, depth, and spaciousness we heard on that day recalibrated everything we had ever imagined possible. Suddenly, our vinyl had been bested in ways we never dreamt about.

Over the years, the Digital Lens became a standard-bearer for standalone digital interfaces. Even today, if you find one on eBay, it is swooped up instantly.

Lastly, every digital product we have made at PS Audio in the ensuing 30 years and up until today has a version of this exact intelligent buffer/fixed output clock and wave shaper built into our digital products.

And its inventor, Bob Stadtherr, is still cranking out beautifully-designed innovative products to this day.

Go Bob!

In the days before digital music, the primary medium for sound reproduction was vinyl records. Sure, there were some who preferred reel-to-reel tapes, but they were in the minority. The turntable was king, and it had to be properly set up. Any audiophile worth his (or her) salt owned at least one or two test records specifically designed for that task.

Over the years, I’ve collected a disproportionate number of such discs (it helped that I worked in record stores for much of my adult life, so I could obtain the ones I wanted at reasonable prices).

In the first part of this series (Issue 205), the focus was on test records issued by record labels themselves. In Part Two (Issue 206), albums from phono cartridge manufacturers were featured. Part Three (Issue 207) looked at records created by speaker companies. Part Four (Issue 208) included LPs from publications. Part Five (Issue 209) showcased a variety of sources, including some albums that weren’t even meant to be played! In this, the last installment, Paul McGowan’s PS Audio setup disc is featured, along with a few more unusual demo LPs.

Audiophile’s Guide – The Stereo (2020)

All biases aside, this is one beautifully produced package. The cover of the informative and entertaining 210-page book and the gatefold cover of the accompanying 180-gram pressing share an understated, classy graphic design.

The album contains no test tones, but it has a number of tracks designed to check channel orientation, phasing, room bass response, etc. Some of the tracks use spoken explanations of what to listen for. Most of the others feature musical performances intended to help the listener evaluate parameters such as image depth, detail, separation of instruments and dynamic range. There are cuts showcasing everything from solo voice to synthesizers, small ensembles, solo piano or acoustic guitar, and even a drum solo. All are, of course, beautifully recorded at the Octave Records studio. One set of tracks present a cappella voices recorded at distances of three, six, and nine feet from the microphone.

The book includes whimsical illustrations from Copper contributor James Whitworth and a number of photographs, but the real focus is the in-depth system set-up information. Paul McGowan is an entertaining writer (between his daily “Paul’s Posts,” monthly PS Audio newsletter, supervising the Octave recordings, and shepherding new PS Audio products, I have to wonder where he finds the time to eat and sleep). The introduction chronicles his journey from casual listener of average equipment through to the moment he heard his first high-end system.

A brief history of stereo sound precedes the real meat of the book: how to get your sound system to disappear and provide a level of musical realism not previously experienced. Entire chapters are devoted to concerns such as budget, equipment choices (without naming names), room setup and treatments, system tuning, cables, AC power, and more. The section on “How to Listen” helps to hone evaluation skills.

All in all, this is an impressive and worthwhile addition to my arsenal of test records and demo discs.

The Fisher Fidelity Standard (1972)

Pre-1980s Fisher components, especially tube models, are held in high regard among a lot of audiophiles. Before the ascent of McIntosh and Marantz to the upper echelons of the high end, amps, tuners, and receivers from Fisher and H. H. Scott (along with Harman-Kardon and Heathkit) were highly prized.

As humorously illustrated by the cover photo, the album features a 50/50 mix of popular and classical pieces, all of which were recorded specifically for this disc. The cuts on the popular side alternate between rock and jazz. The rock band includes keyboardist Mike Zager (of Zager & Evans – “In the Year 2525”), Jay Berliner on guitar, and Randy Brecker on trumpet. The jazz band lists Grady Tate on drums and a Mel Davis on trumpet, among others. The classical side has performances from a string orchestra and a small instrumental ensemble playing pieces from Vivaldi, Stravinsky, Chopin, Mozart, and Bach. The Stravinsky work (“L’Histoire du Soldat Suite”) is described thusly: “This astringent music, composed by Stravinsky in 1917 – 18 to accompany a rather unclassifiable chamber play-dance skit, is probably the most spectacular high-fidelity showpiece there is for a small instrumental group…”

The liner notes in the gatefold cover explain the purpose of the record, how it was recorded, how to play it in stereo or 4-channel sound (it was encoded with the SQ quadrophonic system), and how to use it to evaluate equipment.

The executive producer of the album was Peter Aczel, the notoriously polarizing reviewer who published the magazine The Audio Critic in the latter part of the last century, and who passed away in 2017. Aczel delighted in calling conventional box loudspeakers “monkey coffins.” He was a champion of the Siegfried Linkwitz open-baffle speaker designs, from the Orion through the LX521. As an example of his contentious style of journalism, here’s the 10th entry from his article, “What I have learned after six decades in audio (call it my journalistic legacy)”:

“10) My greatest disappointment after six decades as an audio journalist is about today’s teenagers and twentysomethings. Most of them have never had a musical experience! I mean of any kind, not just good music. Whether they are listening to trash or Bach, they have no idea what the music sounds like in real life. The iPods, iPads, iPhones, and earbuds they use are of such low audio quality that what they hear bears no relationship to live music. And if they think that going to an arena “concert” to hop around in one square foot of space with their arms raised is a live-music experience, they are sadly deluded. It’s the most egregiously canned music of all. (To think that I used to question the fidelity of those small dormitory-room stereos of the 1960s!) Please, kids, listen to unamplified live music just once!“

The entire article can be found, along with an LX521 review, at: https://www.reddit.com/r/audiophile/comments/dt4xin/peter_aczel_what_i_have_learned_after_six_decades/?rdt=43130

Bose salutes the sound of…Mercury Records (1970?)

Ah, yes, Bose – the brand that gets a lot of disparaging commentary from audiophiles. Though Bose is often tagged as a triumph of marketing over sound quality, I have to give them kudos for choosing excerpts from the Mercury Living Presence series of classical recordings to demonstrate their flagship offering, the Bose 901 speakers.

The direct/reflecting 901s were a radical design for the time, with one front-firing full-range 4.5-inch speaker and two identical sets of four back-firing units at outward angles. A necessary outboard active equalization unit was provided. The distinctive design resulted in a unique sound presentation, and the speakers were wildly successful.

The back cover of the album features extensive liner notes written by Bert Whyte, a major figure in the hi-fi world at the time. He was an AES fellow, audio critic, and associate editor for Audio magazine. Also shown is a letter from John Eargle, a Mercury engineer, that provides additional background on the selection and formatting of the excerpts. New two-channel transfers were done from the original three-channel master tapes. He cautions the listener to use only a high-quality, properly set-up cartridge.

The cover is clearly marked “Not for Sale,” so I would assume it was distributed to dealers for demo purposes without being offered to the general public.

How to Get the Most Out of Your Stereo (1960)

Well, there’s a cover photo that no major label would dare use these days! My only question is: Why a stethoscope and not headphones?

On the back cover, Director of Engineering for Warner Bros. Records, C. Lowell Frank, writes: “Each of these tracks has been recorded in stereo to demonstrate the advantages inherent in good stereo recording of many types of music. Basically, these advantages can be broken down into two qualities: spaciousness and depth. These combine to create the Third Dimension in sound reproduction: Stereo. On all of these test tracks, the listener using a properly balanced system and seated in a normal focal position will feel the illusion of a Center or Third Track.

The album (pressed in transparent orange vinyl) consists of musical selections from a range of sources, including Wurlitzer organ, a military band (conducted by Henry Mancini!), a jazz combo, and even one from the Spike Jones Orchestra. Most of the cuts might be considered “easy listening,” and all liner notes include identification of the instruments regarding their position in the stereo field (left, center, right).

The back cover also includes quotes from a number of audio critics writing for newspapers and magazines, all of whom were quite impressed with the sound quality of the recordings. High Fidelity Magazine raved in flowery terms, “From the stereo there issues forth a widespread cascade of sparkling notes from a golden background of sumptuous orchestral sound… so outstandingly transparent that these records positively shine with aural brilliance.”

And how does it sound on modern equipment after 64 years? Despite my copy having been purchased as a used record, the sound is pretty clean, with good instrumental separation, and a nice center channel effect, as opposed to so many stereo demo records from that era which focused on distinct left/right sounds with little in the middle (ping-pong stereo). I would not, however, rank it among my best “show-off” recordings.

One test record that I wish I had gotten is the Official National Lampoon Stereo Test and Demonstration Record. I’m ordering a used copy now and might write a review in the future.

Autumn is upon us, and it’s time for this season’s first Vinyl Beat. This month I’m featuring a comparison, some winners, a major disappointment, and a handful of other notable titles I’ve found.

War: Greatest Hits
Rhino Sounds of the Summer Series

When vinyl lovers heard that Kevin Gray cut a version of this popular War record on his all-tube mastering system (which he reserves for his Cohearent Records releases) for a Record Store Day release in 2020, the original pressing sold out quickly. It was re-pressed in 2021 and again, sold out. Rhino reissued it again in July, 2024 under the “Sounds of the Summer” series, on “sea blue” vinyl. So there is a limited window to get this title while it is still available.

But wait, didn’t I just feature this same album back in July, released by Analogue Productions at 45 RPM? Yes, yes I did. I typically never “chase” different masterings when buying records, but I watched a video by Mike Esposito (at The ‘In’ Groove record store in, Phoenix, Arizona) as he compared both titles, coming to the conclusion that he preferred the sound of the Kevin Gray one.

I was skeptical but, once I heard the beginning of “All Day Music” on the Rhino version, I could hear the differences. In my case, I heard more high-end detail – it doesn’t sound as “stuffy” to me as the Analogue Productions version. The muddy bass is also cleaned up on the 2024 Rhino release, not as woolly and “boomy” (as Esposito put it). Granted there is an improved cleanliness to the 45-RPM version due to its superior speed, and the vinyl is quieter, but once the music is playing you don’t hear the faint background noise. Kevin Gray just seems to pull more musicality out of the tapes than on this particular title, and it wasn’t evident until I had both versions on hand, played on my own system that I am familiar with.

Black Sabbath: Black Sabbath
Rhino High Fidelity

I am not a big Black Sabbath fan. I do enjoy their first two albums, and scattered tracks from the remaining albums with Ozzy Osbourne, but I’ve never been one to take a deep dive into their recordings. I do, however, appreciate how their first album has become a prototype and standard bearer for the heavy metal recordings that followed. I already own an earlier Rhino vinyl pressing from well over a dozen years ago, and it sounds quite good. This new pressing is a clear improvement.

It is such an improvement that Rhino High Fidelity, who reissued this recently in a numbered edition, sold out quickly. It recently had a second pressing run, albeit unnumbered. But serial numbers don’t make a record sound any better. Kevin Gray’s mastering does, and this is the best I’ve ever heard the album. The recording does have its own odd qualities, but the clarity and presence of this version (and the quiet vinyl) makes songs like the title track “pop,” especially in Bill Ward’s drums in the quieter phrases. This is a fantastic-sounding record.

John Lee Hooker: Burnin’
Craft Recordings / Vee-Jay Records

This is the classic Vee-Jay blues album with the lead-off track “Boom Boom,” which has been covered numerous times by other artists (including the Animals). I’m normally not a big fan of blues records, but this is one of those rare recordings that hits all the right buttons for me, both musically and lyrically. (“Drug Store Woman,” for one, is a hoot! “Let’s Make It” was a live performance staple of his.) This album was Hooker’s first with a full band in the studio, comprised of Detroit musicians who made up an early version of The Funk Brothers (known for their work on numerous Motown’s hit recordings). The excellent sound of this rather basic recording is nicely preserved through Kevin Gray’s remastering.

Vince Guaraldi: Jazz Impression of Black Orpheus
Craft Recordings/Small Batch (one-step process)

I’m normally not negative about records, but I can’t help but register a complaint about this release, as it hits a sore spot with me. The Small Batch series from Craft Recordings is a limited, numbered edition vinyl product that is allegedly manufactured with a “one-step” process where the stamper is made directly from the lacquer disc. The few Mobile Fidelity OneStep pressings I’ve heard so far were less than remarkable as well.

What I really take issue with is the mastering. This Black Orpheus record is dull and lifeless. It lacks detail, presence, a sense of “being there.” What really suffers is the brushwork on the drums and the cymbals, and the overtones of the upright bass. My reference version is the old DCC gold CD mastered by Steve Hoffman – this is how the release is supposed to sound (as I’m confident the Hoffman/Gray 45-RPM cut for Analogue Productions did as well – but I have yet to hear it).

As another point of contrast, Kevin Gray cut a 33-⅓-RPM version of Guaraldi’s A Charlie Brown Christmas for Analogue Productions about a decade ago, and its clarity rivals that of the DCC CD of Black Orpheus. It’s the best I’ve ever heard that album.

I certainly cannot recommend this Guaraldi release. Thankfully I only borrowed this copy, as I would want my money back. But I’ve paid far less for newly-remastered records that sound much, much better. And once again, I have to question why we are normalizing $100 records.

Idris Muhammad: Black Rhythm Revolution
Prestige/Jazz Dispensary Top Shelf series

Astute readers will remember when I praised Muhammad’s album Power of Soul as a favorite from last year. Prior to his recordings for Creed Taylor’s Kudu Records, he did a pair of records for Prestige. This was likely his first recording under his own name, having been a popular sideman on numerous projects including a number of Blue Note records under his birth name Leo Morris.

This is what I would call a typical “drummer’s record” in that the songs are sometimes like sketches in which he is free to feature his drum work. His style is a mix of jazz and soul, as you’d expect. The highlight for me leads off side two – a lengthy workout for Muhammad and his band. This record makes his case as one of the finest, and often overlooked, drummers in the soul jazz world. The mastering on this title is excellent as well, bringing a newfound clarity to the music. This record is in the Jazz Dispensary Top Shelf series and supplies are limited, as are the others in this series.

Monthly Vinyl Featurette

A small gallery of colored vinyl from my collection are part of this month’s Featurette.

Tomita: The Bermuda Triangle. This was pressed on coral-colored vinyl for RCA Red Seal, given the undersea theme of the album.

The Mavericks: En Español. An opaque splattered vinyl pressing, limited edition, autographed and sold only through their online store.

Fania All Stars: Latin – Soul – Rock. A splattered transparent-vinyl pressing.

Donald Byrd: Electric Byrd. A Blue Note album pressed at Third Man Records in Detroit as part of their 313 Series featuring Detroit artists. I purchased this directly from the Third Man store on Cass Avenue in Detroit. Black and yellow are Third Man’s official colors; also notice the label variations, and the Third Man logo inside the “O” in “Blue Note.”

I’ve been listening to singer/songwriter/guitarist/actor/all-around great guy James Lee Stanley since 1988, when his Freelance Human Being album knocked me out. I believe he’s one of the most talented songwriters around, have become friends with him, and neither he nor I don’t know why he isn’t recognized along with the all-time greats. We’re not the only ones who think so – just read the reviews he’s garnered over the course of six decades of performing, and listen to some of his more than 35 albums.

His latest, The Day Today, offers 17 songs that mix poignant observations about live, love, and living in, well, today’s world, laced with James’s wry sense of humor. James Lee Stanley played most of the instruments on the album, with the help of some very able friends, and

James wrote most of the songs (with co-writers on a few of them), and arranged, performed, produced, recorded, and engineered The Day Today. The production is lush at times, sparse in other spots, with gorgeously layered, masterfully-played acoustic and electric guitars, background vocals, and other instruments, and some very excellent electric bass playing.

I caught up with James on the eve of his embarking on a series of performances. At 78, he shows no signs of slowing down.

Frank Doris: I’ll ask the obvious rookie interviewer question: why is the CD called The Day Today?

James Lee Stanley: I like the three-word phrase, “the day today.” And then I've written so many songs that are addressing the current political situation that I figured it was actually the day today I was talking about.

FD: You played most of the instruments and did all the recording, but also had some great-sounding guest musicians.

JLS: I played all the acoustic guitars, except on the very first cut, “Wake the Flock Up,” where Lawrence Juber [a brilliant musician who played in Paul McCartney’s Wings and has had quite a solo career – Ed.] played some electric guitar, and then he said, “you want some acoustic guitar?” And I said, “sure!” I'm playing some of the bass. I did all the drum programming. I'm playing any keyboards that are on there. I think I did all the vocals. And I hired Chad Watson, who's my favorite bass player in the world. He played bass on 14 of the cuts.

James Lee Stanley, The Day Today, album cover.

FD: The bass playing really stands out on this record. I mean, from 10 seconds on, it’s like, “wow, listen to that bass. Who's playing that?”

JLS: Chad Watson. He's magnificent. He's played with Delaney and Bonnie, with Janis Ian, with everybody, man. And he’s one of my dear friends.

FD: Let’s talk about the songs.

JLS: I co-wrote “Hard Lesson to Learn” with a friend of mine who died before the record came out. But I did burn him a copy of the record and got it over to him in hospice, so he got to hear [it] before he died.

FD: Well, we're all getting older, and you certainly address that, and then there’s the political aspects of some of the songs, but you approach things artfully and not hit people over the head.

JLS: I'm glad you brought that up, because my feeling is that if you write a harsh protest song, the only people that are going to listen to it are people who already believe [what you’re saying]. So, what's the point? What I tried to do was to write songs that were provocative and not accusatory, [that express] what I think. What do you think I see happening [in the world]? Does this [situation] work for you? Like in the Ukraine?

FD: There's definitely an undercurrent of mortality and getting older and appreciating what you have in these songs. You survived throat cancer a few years ago, so this might be a ridiculous question, but has your songwriting outlook changed over the decades?

JLS: Yeah. You definitely can't get around that, particularly when friends of yours are dying all around you. I'm 78, Frank, so all of my friends are roughly my age, and many of them are younger and have passed, and some are older. So yeah, I'm constantly reminded of that. But in terms of my attitude, when I had the throat cancer, it never occurred to me that I wouldn't be back a hundred percent. I never believed anything else. And in the hospital, the nurses said I was the lowest-maintenance patient they'd ever had, because I thought nurses are magnificent. I tried to make as little work for them as possible, and I just planned to get well.

And then 18 months later, I fell off the roof and broke my back. Did you hear about that?

FD: No!

JLS: I broke nine ribs, two vertebrae, and had a concussion, and they had to fly me out in a helicopter. They put a 12-inch titanium rod in my back. And I did a concert two weeks later in a back brace.

FD: Oh my god.

JLS: When I had the cancer they said I wouldn't sing for a year. I did a concert less than two months later.

FD: Well, I have to say, your voice sounds terrific. You'd never know. Geek question: what kind of mic did you use to record your voice? On the album, you really sound so present and upfront and clear, and I had to remind myself that you had the surgery.

JLS: I've got a pretty good mic locker, but the two mics I mostly use mostly are the AKG 414 and the Dachman Audio [DA87 model]. It's supposed to be the closest thing to a [Neumann] U87 that isn't a U87. I just didn't want to spend five grand on a mic.

FD: Did you deliberately think, I want to make an album that has a really full production, as opposed to say just you and your guitar? Or did it kind of evolve that way?

JLS: I did whatever I thought would serve the song. But also, Frank, I started [working on the album] when I did a concert on a Thursday in March [2020]. I came home Friday and it was lockdown. And so I spent the next two years at home. So, I wrote and recorded all these songs. Some of them I recorded three different times and at different tempos and in different keys.

Do you know Gregory Corso’s work?

FD: No.

JLS: He was a beat poet from San Francisco in the Fifties and Sixties, and he liked to combine words that didn't normally combine and use them in his poems. An example of his poetry would be like “Christmas teeth,” where he just takes two words that shouldn't go together, and he puts ’em together. And so, I had been messing around with that, and I had a long list of about 30 things that were all just nonsensical combinations. I looked at them, and that's where I got that [line about] “carrot skirts waving in the breeze.” “There's a window in the clouds.” Those are all just little phrases are strung together.

FD: Some of the songs are, well, I don't want to just call them love songs, but the more personal songs…

JLS: They are love songs. I mean, yeah.

FD: Let’s talk about the opening song, “Wake the Flock Up.” You have that combination of humor, social commentary, and wordplay. You say that everyone's connected, but everyone's alone, and they take no blame and there aren't any rules. I mean, what a perfect description of seeing people glued to their phones…

JLS: Absolutely. Think about Paris at the turn of the 19th and 20th century. Everybody that was anybody in art was there, all the impressionist painters were there, all the musicians were there. Debussy. They were all there at the same time. So there was this incredible confluence of genius, and I think that we had that again in the Sixties with music where the West Coast became this mecca for all these incredible musicians I know. And the internet completely [changed that]. It's a cyber diaspora [now], you know what I mean? Instead of being connected in a confluence, everybody's by themselves somewhere.

FD: Good way to put it. Well, I'm 69, so I grew up during the Sixties, and I really feel like we lived through a great time, we were very lucky.

JLS: Are you kidding? [Said as emphatic agreement]

FD: “The Best We Can” is a quintessential “James Lee Stanley” song. Those beautiful chords that you play with voicings that don't sound like anybody else.

JLS: It's kind of a condemnation of our culture when I go, “we do the best we can,” implying that this sh*t storm we're living in is the best we can do.

But I also wanted to weave in [the idea]…I read a thing about honeybees doing this little flying dance in front of the hive to tell the other bees where the flowers are. And I thought that was beautiful. And I wake up every morning, I live on top of a mountain, to all the birds singing, greeting the day. And then I thought I would weave in a little bit of mythology with the idea that there's some golden spider in the sky. I wanted to go from the mundane to the sublime.

FD: “Cold Ukrainian Night”…I could almost see that becoming a classic.

JLS: It sure feels like an anthem.

FD: “Hearts in Amber.” That's one of my favorites.

JLS: I love that song. I love that song.

FD: The ambiguity of it. Is she chained or is she free? Is she trapped in her own feelings? And then you shift from saying she is trapped in amber to we are trapped in amber.

JLS: [It’s the] fact that we all hide our hearts. We try to look like, yeah, we're here and available, but in fact all of us have a protective shield around ourselves.

FD: “Time and the River,” when you say there's no slowing either one down…and the less time you have, the faster it seems to go.

JLS: It was eternity from June 12th when school was out until September after Labor Day. A canyon of eternity stretched in front of you all summer long. I know. And now summer goes by while you get up and go to the bathroom and take a shower.

I wrote that song as a gift to my in-laws for their 50^th wedding anniversary.

FD: The song “Mobius Trip.” It feels to me like it's about somebody in particular. They left Las Vegas and wound up coming back to the edge of the city.

JLS: Well, certainly could be anybody, but it was inspired by a friend of mine who just couldn't let go of the gambling thing. To me, gambling is not even the least bit alluring. Here’s my perception of gambling: okay, I have this money. I'm going to give it to you, and there's a slight chance you will give it back to me. Just look at those hotels, and decide what your odds of winning are.

FD: “Too Much to Dream” is a tragic song about substance abuse. I don't know if it's autobiographical.

JLS: Yeah, it's about an alcoholic friend of mine.

FD: I have someone close to me who lied to themselves about it and after a while you just get tired of the lies.

JLS: When I first wrote it, [the line was], “I had too much to drink,” and I thought, that's too clumsy. So that's when I changed “drink” to “dream.” What they're doing is they're hiding from reality in their own little fantasy thing there. When they're drinking, they're blocking out reality.

FD: “For the Last Time” sounds like it could have been a 1960s girl group hit for somebody like Dusty Springfield.

JLS: That's so funny. You know why I wrote it? That's an older song that I wrote for Peter Tork [formerly of the Monkees – Ed.] When Peter Tork was alive, the Monkees were going to do their last album. And he said, do you have any songs? I said, oh, yeah, absolutely. And then I carefully wrote a song! I wrote that one for the Monkees in the hopes that they would record it, but they didn't.

FD: Well, just a couple more questions. In the song, “How Many Days, How Many Hours,” you say the line, “how could you turn and go without even goodbye”…and then it ends on this unresolved chord and it's a little disquieting.

JLS: That was obviously on purpose because [the relationship ended and] it was unresolved.

FD: “Tumblin’ Down These Stairs.” Boy, you like major sevenths as much as I do. It's just such a beautiful chord.

JLS: Yeah, I like rich chords. I like sevenths. I like ninths. I like elevenths. You want to hear a funny little thing about major seventh chords? There was a guy named Jeffrey Comanor who [once] came to me and said, “what's that chord you're playing, man?” And I said, “oh, that's a major seventh, an F major seventh. You play an F [chord] and then just leave the high E open and you get this richer tone”  He said, “oh, man, that's so beautiful.” So, he literally went home and wrote, “We'll Never Have to Say Goodbye Again,” which is all major seventh chords, that John Ford Coley recorded and [which] made him a million bucks.

FD: Did you actually fall down the stairs?

JLS: it was after I fell off the roof. I was lying in bed, and I said “I should be rolling down the highway instead of tumbling down these stairs.” I think I said it out loud, and I thought, that's kind of a song you could do.

FD: The Day Today closes with a kind of bluesy song, “Brick at a Time.”

JLS: It’s just a simple song, and I thought I'd like to end the album with one of those things. So, I [recorded it], and then Corky Siegel, a harmonica player genius [who came to prominence in the 1960s with the Siegel-Schwall Band – Ed.] contacted me and said, “I put some harmonica on that Brooklyn Bridge tune,” which actually was a poem. I was walking across the Brooklyn Bridge back into Manhattan with my friend Patty. And I said to her, “look at that. It's incredible. This entire city was built one brick at a time.” And I thought, “ooh, that's a good phrase.”

FD: And it has the phrase, “we built this city,” which is the title of the Starship song that people put on their lists of the worst songs of all time. Now you have it in a good song! On the other hand, I can’t look down on people who manage to have success in the music business.

JLS: Anybody that makes it in this business deserves it, man.

FD: I agree.

JLS: Because it's not easy. You've got to bust your ass to make it, and you have to want it more than anything. And I think that actually is an insight into my particular place in the hierarchy, because I've always wanted to just get better at what I did. I still practice. I still take lessons. I'm always trying to get better, and that's really all I’ve cared about.

I did naively assume that once you got good enough, you just become famous. And then once I got into the business I realized, no, in fact, you have to want it. You have to go after stardom. You have to want that. And I must admit that I never wanted that. Plus, to tell you the truth, I always felt like a star. I never needed any corroboration to feel that way.

We all have an artistic signature. Sometimes it takes longer to find it. When I write something, it sounds like I wrote it. When I play the guitar, it sounds like me playing the guitar. And that's when I thought, well, I guess I'm an artist. I sound like me. I don't sound like anybody else.

The joy is in the doing it. Everything else is gravy.

All images courtesy of James Lee Stanley.

Hyeseon Hong Jazz Orchestra: Things Will Pass (Pacific Coast Jazz)

This is one of the best records I’ve heard in a very long time. The music is wonderful, and the sound is sublime.

Hyeseon Hong is a Korean jazz composer and arranger who has spent time (born and raised in) Seoul and studied jazz in New York City. She received bachelors and masters degrees in music, served as an assistant professor at Dae Gu Art College, has taught classes in jazz arranging, composition, and other areas. She now resides in New York. Things Will Pass by the Hyeseon Hong Jazz Orchestra is her second album, following the release of EE-YA-GI (“Stories”) in 1977. Things Will Pass features a 19-piece big band comprised of piano, brass, woodwinds, bass, drums, and other instruments. It was recorded by Aaron Nevezie at The Bunker Studio in Brooklyn, New York, with additional recording by Chris Sulit at Paramus, New Jersey’s Trading 8s Studios.

The album’s nine all-original compositions offer a mix of modern and traditional jazz, fusion, Korean influences, and other less-categorizable flavors. The music flows over and around you, whether the relaxed groove of the opener, “Road to Hana,” the slowly-unwinding “Memoirs of Ladies,” or the playful “Raindrop’s Journey,” though I’m still scratching my head trying to figure out what time signature “Dance With Dracula” is in! Although calling it “jazz” is a convenient catch-all, and there’s plenty of superb jazz soloing here, the music ultimately goes beyond such an easy categorization. You just have to listen.

Which I can’t recommend enough. I’ll reiterate: Things Will Pass is a fantastic album. And emphasize: this is an incredible-sounding record. It’s warm and rich, though detailed and open. It has a spacious sound and fantastic dynamics, a crucial element in reproducing the sound of a big band. Individual instruments have exceptional body and presence. One of the things I love to hear in a jazz recording are saxophones that have that “creamy” full-bodied sound, and they’re beautifully-recorded here. This album sounds equally gorgeous on my main system and via my high-quality desktop setup, though it’s just thrilling on the big rig.

Hyseon Hong Jazz Orchestra, Things Will Pass, album cover.

The musical highlights are many and varied, with sophisticated chord changes and voicings, and delightful ensemble textures and combinations of instruments, like the wooden flute being doubled by the female vocal in the melody of “Memoirs of Ladies.” This track will also reveal the purity of your speakers’ upper-mid and high-frequency reproduction or lack thereof, and have you reveling in the brass and woodwind ensemble sound.

“Run Away” features vocals by Aubrey Johnson and outstanding soloing by guitarist Matt Panayides and Alejandro Aviles on alto sax. It’s captivating. The Rhodes electric piano sound is sumptuous, as is David Smith’s fluegelhorn playing on “Waltzing With Dad.” “Treasure Hunt” has some truly inventive orchestrations, and the amazing sound of the baritone sax in the intro will make you realize it’s one of the coolest instruments on Earth. The band is unbelievably tight on this one. “Night Climbing,” with its bossa nova-tinged melody and easygoing pace, had me forgetting time and space and getting impatient about taking listening notes – I just wanted to revel in the music. The sonics and the drums on “Dance With Dracula” are particularly outstanding.

The album ends on a plaintive yet positive note on “We Will Meet Again,” the perfect closer to an album filled with musical and sonic wonder.

If you’re in the Manhattan area on October 13, the Hyeseon Hong Big Band will be playing at Birdland. I already bought my ticket.

I spoke with Hyeseon Hong about the making of Things Will Pass, and with engineer Aaron Nevezie on recording the album.

With Hyeseon Hong:

Frank Doris: Why is the album titled Things Will Pass?

Hyeseon Hong: I wanted to tell people, and also remind myself, that suffering and tough times will eventually pass. It's both self-assurance and a way to comfort others at the same time. When we're in the midst of hardship, it often feels like there's no end in sight, as if it will last forever. But we need to remind ourselves – and others – that it will end, and things will get better. This message is not only to comfort ourselves, but also to offer hope to those around us who are struggling. As a composer speaking to my audience, I’ve been where you are, and I’m telling you this: things will pass, and you will be all right.

Hyeseon Hong. Courtesy of the artist.

FD: Why did you decide to use a big band, rather than go the usual jazz quartet or small-group jazz route?

HH: It’s the sound that drew me in – full and rich.  There’s no reason why you are drawn in. That’s what I hear and imagine in my head.

You can have so much fun doing different orchestrations with many different instruments.

FD: You’re from Korea, yet have settled in New York. Is it because New York is a worldwide center of jazz?

HH: I lived as a professional musician in Korea for a while. I could see myself experimenting with different approaches, being more flexible in finding experienced musicians, and staying open to new music and fresh audience perspectives in New York City. I wanted to challenge myself more by engaging with the ongoing new developments in the city.

FD: How do you go about composing a piece? It seems that many of the songs on Things Will Pass were inspired by particular events, people, and memories.

HH: That’s right. They stem from my travels, personal losses, memories of loved ones, childhood experiences, books I’ve read, and historic figures I’ve studied.

FD: Your orchestrations are unique, yet also draw on classic jazz and other musical traditions. What inspires you to create these musical blends of instruments?

HH: If you are asking about orchestration itself, I have to say my influences include classical composers like Brahms, Debussy, Prokofiev, Bartók, Mahler, Scriabin, and Charles Ives. As I developed my musical studies, I was also inspired by Gil Evans, Bob Brookmeyer, Maria Schneider, and Bill Holman.

If you ask about the spirit of my music, I have to say I am very much inspired by sources of music from the theater, including film music by Ennio Morricone and the musical theater that I have been involved with.

My music is also inspired by some of the classical symphonic music that I grew up listening to, and my long-time study of painting.

FD: The musicians on this album are fantastic. How did you find them?

HH: They’ve been playing in the band for over a decade. Some are long-term committed members and we grew together as musicians. I met some at concerts. I liked their playing and contacted them. For [others], I got recommendations by other musicians who knew my music well.

With Aaron Nevezie:

Frank Doris: What format was the album recorded in?

Aaron Nevezie: I pretty much always record jazz in 24-bit/96 kHz in Pro Tools. 

FD: What hardware did you use to record the album?

AN: All the mic preamps are the Neve 31102s in the Neve 8088 console in Studio A at The Bunker Studio.

FD: What kind of mics did you use for the various sections (brass, piano, etc.)

AN: The mics were RCA ribbon mics on the trumpets, Coles 4038s on the trombones, Neumann U67 on saxes, and Neumann U47 and Schoeps mics on the bass. We used Neumann M49s on our Steinway C piano and for drum overheads.

FD: What was the overall sound and feel you were going for? The album has a very warm and rich sound, yet detailed in the upper midrange and highs. The presence of the instruments, like the baritone sax on “Treasure Hunt,” is excellent. The Rhodes piano sounds wonderful.

AN: It’s a pretty standard rhythm section (recording) setup for me, looking for clarity, detail and air. I’m focused on capturing the subtleties of the performances and the individual character of the musicians. For the horns, I’m looking for a unified group sound yet with separation between sections for musical definition. The Rhodes is a vintage 1974 Suitcase model, recorded in stereo through a Radial JDI direct box into the Neve console.

The Musicians on Things Will Pass:

Ben Kono – soprano sax, alto sax, flute and wooden flute
Alejandro Aviles – alto sax and flute
Rich Perry – tenor sax
Quinsin Nachoff – tenor sax and clarinet
Andrew Hadro – baritone sax and bass clarinet
John Lake, David Smith *5, Colin Brigstocke, Jonathan Saraga – trumpet and fluegelhorn
Mike Fahie, Daniel Linden, Nick Grinder, Becca Patterson -- trombone
Broc Hempel – piano
Matt Panayides – guitar
Evan Gregor – bass
Jeff Davis – drums
Aubrey Johnson, Lauren Lee – vocals
John McMahon – whistle
Hyeseon Hong and Matt Panayides – additional percussion

Seeing all the brand-new, but distressed-looking Relic instruments at Fender and on the show floor at NAMM 2024 (see my articles in Issues 210, 209 and 208) reminded me of the perhaps touchy notions of class, status, and their wicked country cousin, insecurity. A book that has affected me in a profound way is Understanding Toscanini by Joseph Horowitz, published in 1994. It clarified class distinctions for me in a way that few books had. I had thought I understood classical music, but I didn’t. For one, the impact of Jews on classical music in America had largely escaped me. Horowitz’s clear-headed examination of Toscanini, the importance of RCA Records, and the realities of “high culture” vs “mid” and “low culture” in classical music were enlightening.

A brand new Fender Super Heavy Relic Series Stratocaster, available for purchase at Sweetwater.com. From the Sweetwater.com website.

The other book with a major influence on me is Class: Style and Status in the USA by Paul Fussell, who quickly became one of my favorite authors. This 1983 book examines the idea of the “selling” of class. How best to sell the public on wide-body jets with hundreds of passengers, endless boarding times and far more people stuck together than ever before? Easy, sell the advertising pitch that this was a “good” thing, when everyone knows that having real status is being able to fly on a private jet with a handful of passengers and always-attentive passenger service. This of course ties in with the idea that by virtue of an expensive purchase, you are now part of the class above yours. Tired of being middle class? Fly first class, buy an expensive stereo or ludicrously-priced watch, or purchase a crazily-priced camera.

Both books helped me to understand the ideas of culture, money, status, and the appropriation of the idea of class. They have also helped me to spot when the assumptions go wrong, admittedly often in a snarky, ironic sort of way. An example of this is the use of gold-plated connectors on audio cables and gear. I like them, and found they have less tendency towards corrosion then lower-priced connectors, but I also realized that a tiny bit of gold flashing really didn’t mean anything about the other qualities of the gear – including sound quality. In fact, there are other plating materials that others consider superior. But still, gold sells. For a while, a sure sign of both bad taste and aspirations to class level-leaping were pointless gold-plated grilles on cars, as if a few cents worth of gold plating made the car any more valuable. I suppose someone might be impressed, but I’m not sure who. Still, there are parts of the world where the Western standard of natural-looking dentistry is rejected in favor of bright shiny dental work, letting the world you have arrived I suppose.

When I taught classes on the history of photography, the idea of the portrait as something that only the wealthy could obtain by commissioning a painter was one of the things that propelled photography as an art form. Suddenly, even the poorest person could have a portrait done, just like the rich folks did. Those inexpensive tintypes were an affirmation of the sitter’s humanity, but also served as an inexpensive assault on the transference of class placement. One of the things that former RCA head David Sarnoff so brilliantly achieved was the migration of classical music, something that was mainly the province of the upper class, which became suddenly available to everyone else through Sarnoff providing free radios throughout the country. The promotional efforts of Arturo Toscanini and the NBC Symphony Orchestra certainly didn’t hurt either. In effect, Sarnoff moved classical music from “high-culture” to mid or even low-culture. Now any schlub with a radio could listen to what was formerly the province of the wealthy cognoscenti.

This kind of cultural shift is fascinating. The first time I saw porn was as a little kid, in Orange, California. One day some kids were in the alley in back of the supermarket a block from our house. I was in elementary school and all these kids were looking a black leather book with grainy black and white photos in it. It was shocking to me of course. I’d never seen that much body hair, and the rest of it I couldn’t actually figure out. Step ahead 40 years, and in our local Clipper Magazine was a full-page ad for a chain of adult stores, right next to discount coupons for a neighborhood pizzeria. In the middle, a lovely headshot photograph of an adult film star. Something that formerly existed in the low-culture shadows had become acceptable. These cultural shifts are constantly changing, and our assumptions don’t always keep up. To my mother, even cleavage on an awards show elicits a derisive snort, so for her that cultural shift never occurred.

Something so terrible that it was a crime to produce, distribute, and even own, truly low-culture, somehow shifted to mid-culture, or for some folks it’s their idea of high-culture. The same goes for music. Pop music was never intended to be any more than faddish, quick-lived, hopefully-charting music that made money. The idea of deluxe boxed sets 50 years later was unthinkable. It was low-culture, kids’ music. Now of course that music is being played on systems that can eclipse half a million dollars. Does that mean the music is has shifted in its cultural level? You might get different answers from an opera devotee, jazz enthusiast, or symphonic lover.

Audiophiles, whether joyfully pilloried by Mad magazine or seen as the latest hipster trend are also subject to this shift. Just think of the term “Yacht Rock,” music for the wealthy to enjoy on their luxury-lifestyle vessels. Hence the photos I submitted to Frank Doris showing signs that warned that no Pink Floyd, Steely Dan, or Eagles were allowed in certain rooms at audio shows. Of course it’s all in good fun, but one of the reasons that young people avoid audio shows is that the music they listen to is almost never played. When I wrote about the New York Audio Show in Issue 175, I mentioned that Frankie Schramm Jr., who accompanied me, was grooving to the tunes in one of his favorite rooms, Pure Audio Project. After hearing “U.G.K.,” a track from Lucki/F1lthy, from their album “Wake Up Lucki,” Frankie declared this was one of his favorite systems. But most importantly, they welcomed his choice of music, happy to move away from the usual often-played fare.

In 1992 a colleague, the filmmaker Nicholas Barker, created a brilliant series for BBC Television called Signs of the Times: A Portrait of the Nation’s Tastes that dealt with class and status divisions as expressed through belongings, decorating, and other attributes. Martin Parr created photos for an accompanying book of the same name. It’s considered a prototype of the reality TV shows that have become so prevalent, but I never agreed with that assessment; it’s really an entirely serious yet ironic series of documentaries.

Signs of the Times by Martin Parr and Nicholas Barker, book cover.

The first segments featured a series of interviews on how people decorated their homes. Reportedly, after it was shown on the BBC, there was a huge increase in domestic disturbance calls. We’re talking serious fights, the kind the police are called in for, as the series unleashed a lot of inner rage among couples, with one person in the relationship usually domineering and the other slowly seething about the things in their homes, and the decorating choices they represented, along with their financial implications.

Part of the success was down to Barker’s direction. The camera lingered, perfectly still, on the items in the house, way past where it was comfortable to viewers. Parr’s own photography is often an uncomfortable linger, so the series was shot in the same style. I still remember a woman talking about her love of rabbits, while the camera spends a long time focused on a bunny doll, bunny toilet paper, bunny embroidered towels, bunny napkins, pillows, ad infinitum, while her husband seethed and challenged her to find one thing or spot in the house without a bunny of some sort. Hilarious but you can feel his pain. Grrrrr! That clip evidently never made it into the series.

Another memorable episode featured a well-known designer, who created a house that was a spotless, soulless, showroom clean example of minimalism with no soft edges. The architecture is modern and distinctive, all glass and light, standing out from surrounding homes. While they interview the couple on their couch, he mentions, condescendingly, that he doesn’t like it when others disturb the home it’s carefully thought out  design, while his wife lovingly describes a room with curtains, and that it’s important they have knickknacks around that their children made, that it sends an important message that they care and notice their creations, which to him is just unnecessary clutter. Her diplomacy under resentment is amazing.

Signs of the Times examined perceptions of what was good taste and bad taste in British homes. Interestingly, the series was inspired in part by hi-fi. Barker realized that his apartment had beautiful chrome and glass décor, that was centered around his set of attractive, black stereo components, all proudly displayed. Whereas for his father and his friends, their generation, all they really cared about in terms of interior design was a comfy lounge chair, a good TV, a refrigerator with beer, and a remote control so they could easily watch the game. His father didn't care about anything else in the house; the rest was up to his wife. He had absolutely no interest in decorating. Why the enormous gap between him and his father, Barker wondered? That generational disconnect is what led Barker to the idea for the TV series.

Barker’s follow-up series From A to B: Tales of Modern Motoring in 1993, a couple of years later in 1993, still working with Martin Parr, focused on people and the relationship they had to their cars. Similarly, it also caused an almost equally vitriolic response from viewers mirroring the reaction to the first series. The gender politics of male vs. female drivers plays a role, from both partners and automobile dealers, all adding to this almost dangerous mix. For the women, owning their own car is both about independence and freedom to do as they please, free from other’s rules.

One episode featured a young married couple, evidently tight on money, with the husband obsessed about his Renault turbo sports car that he kept spotless. He wore a Renault racing shirt, and because of the cost of the car, his wife had to wait five years to do an extension on their home. This long-suffering wife had to use a little wheeled cart to do the shopping even in the rain because her husband wasn’t going to allow a drop of water or dirt in his car or park near other cars in the lot. The wife noted, “if I got my way I would get rid of it tomorrow and just have a basic car, but there’s no way while we’re still married, he will not get rid of this car, ever.” If looks could kill, I’m sure her husband would been found impaled by a Renault stick shift. I’ve always wondered if their marriage survived.

Another couple argues about his beloved Citroen 2CV which she feels reminds him of his free and easy college and hippie days, and that she admits to being jealous of, and hating at the same time because of how much time and energy he devotes to it. I wonder how many audiophiles might have had similar conversations? Neil Young told me that the problem with Blu-ray (including his groundbreaking Archives set) was the equipment, that women didn’t like having all that gear, and thus he launched the ill-fated Pono music player as a response.

The point of all this is that those films reminded me that I didn't own a stereo to impress others – I bought it to listen to music. My wife isn’t very interested in the gear, although she has a lovely system with a NAD receiver from the ’80s, my old Advent speakers (the white ones), a Nakamichi tape deck, and a Technics turntable. She’s aware that the only reason for the gear was to listen to music. It certainly wasn’t something she was interested in as objects per se, or as status symbols. Nancy did take my advice on what to buy, and there is a pretty good probability that David Solomon of Qobuz fame sold her the gear as she was living in Atlanta at the time she bought it! It’s a great sounding system and still works fine to this day, with only a re-foaming of the woofer surrounds on the Advents. She was certainly proud of this wonderful little system, attuned to the understated and Bauhaus-inspired design of the NAD receiver. She was in graduate school for art history at the time, and knew more about minimalism then I did. Once it was working it was meant to be used, not stared at. Our friend’s wife used to say, “Mikey loves his record player,” irking the petulant young audiophile to no end. “It’s a turntable!” he’d shout, and, “it’s not a needle, it’s a stylus!” She knew this of course, but for her it didn’t matter; the system played records, hence, his record player.

Our editor thinks owning this vintage gold Audible Illusions Modulus 3 preamplifier gives him a touch of class. If only!

In college, the women I met didn’t care about your stereo equipment. What they did care about was your tastes in music, and how many cool albums you had. Friends used to joke that inviting someone to listen to your stereo was the equivalent of inviting them over to view your etchings. (You youngsters might not get the joke.) My male friends were impressed by my gear at the time: a G.A.S. Thalia II preamp, Hafler DH-200 amplifier, Luxman PD-272 turntable, and B&W DM2 Series II speakers. If you are wondering how a broke college kid ended up with great gear, it’s simple. The local audio shop in Eureka, California had ordered the system for a customer in the, umm, agriculture business, who had to suddenly leave the country for a few years, and the system was sitting in the shop with no customers. Still, I really couldn’t afford any of it and probably should have spent my money on other things, like tuition and rent. I was more of a hand-me-down Advent kid, the pair of which I traded a photo shoot for in high school. The Thalia II pre-amp came from the bankruptcy liquidation sale when GAS went out of business and was like $100 or so, new at their Northridge factory, which Nancy picked up for me on a winter break from school.

Pride of ownership is an issue which is inherently complicated for me. I once owned a BMW 2002, which I loved and worked on, and I knew that owning it was sort of “class-proof.” Which is to say that this was a vehicle known as an enthusiast’s car that would be equally “at home” at a country estate, as well as a being parked in some poor car lover’s driveway. It conveyed pride of ownership, and of course, and I’d be dishonest if I didn’t acknowledge that it made me feel pretty cool. Although its lack of air conditioning when I moved to Palm Springs, well…that wasn’t so special. Still, what I loved was that gorgeous four-cylinder engine, silky-smooth transmission, and understated styling. And it had a sunroof, so hey. I really did love the engineering more than anything else.

Even in college, I learned how differently you were treated by virtue of something as supercilious as a car. When having a Mercedes was the hot thing in L.A., I’d always be impressed, until I realized that as I visited friends in beat-up two bedroom apartments, their driveways were full of leased Mercedes. As Jackie Mason used to joke, in Beverly Hills, everyone’s a producer, but all they ever produced were business cards.

So how was I able to afford that stereo system? Step into the world of unskilled, over-tired, work-study gallery assistants. I was about to have my first solo exhibition at Humboldt State University. While hanging my work, a student worker drilled through two of my prints a few days before the opening. So, I pulled an all-nighter in the darkroom, reprinted and remounted them, and hustled the new prints to the gallery just in time for the opening. Since it was the State of California, every artist had to sign a contract and place value on their work. I arrogantly figured that since Ansel Adams was getting fifteen hundred to two grand for a print at the time, I was worth a grand, (which I obviously wasn’t). A hundred bucks maybe. After the show, I filled out another form asking for what I’d listed as the value of the two damaged prints, and poof, totally forgot about it. Nothing happened for almost a year, until one day, a check showed up, and since I’d spaced out about it, I had no idea what it was for.

Instead of paying off my rent, tuition, books and other things I should have paid for as a responsible young student, Nancy and I headed to the stereo store, where they were now desperate to sell the unclaimed system with the B&W speakers and all the rest, so they cut me an amazing deal. I still have and use that gear today. Ironically, instead of showing it off to friends after I got it, I tended to keep it a bit under wraps, to avoid making it a potential target of theft. So much for elevating my class structure via equipment purchases. (Nancy liked it, so there’s that. Although she still tells me to stop bugging her about the gear, unless she needs some sleep.)

I’ve long thought that the resistance to some of the better-sounding Chi-Fi components, like the Fosi V3 amplifier I’m testing, or the newly-released super-affordable Vera-Fi Audio Vanguard Scout bookshelf speakers and Caldera 10-inch subwoofer, is due more to wanting to show off what is perceived as status-symbol gear to others, as opposed to considering the actual quality of the audio reproduction of less-expensive audio equipment. Think about the astonishingly good amplifiers from Orchard Audio, small, unobtrusive, but quality gear from Leo Ayzenshtat. The same is true of Boris Meltsner’s products at Amped America. While they are priced much higher than Chi-Fi, both companies offer quiet understated products, with no need to hire an out-of-work NFL linebacker to lift your amp. The Vanguard Scout, despite its low price is beautifully made, real rosewood veneer cabinets, a lovely attention to detail. Like Steve Jobs, I don’t have patience for sloppy design or execution, but that’s more about reaching our potential and pushing, then impressing others. A thing of beauty is still a thing of beauty, and hopefully form follows function.

I still have both a passionate love of all things gorgeously made, and a suspicion of them. Part of that suspicion has to do with branding – do you pay more for a “name” brand? – and, do you really need such things as casework machined from solid aluminum? A study found the sales of generic (boxes with blue lettering on them) food was higher in higher-income areas than low-income areas, such was the need to people to essentially validate the enormous sums spent on advertising and marketing, vs. the folks who knew the advertising game and would rather their bucks went to more frivolous pursuits, like buying a British car with Lucas electrics and trying to start it in the rain.

On the other hand, as I’ve stated in previous articles, I think we are truly living in a golden age of music and hi-fi, quality control, technology, musical instruments, and so much more. Not to mention talent. Recording quality has never been better, and engineers, producers, and manufacturers can now record audio at a resolution and accuracy only dreamed about previously. Compare some of Steven Wilson’s remastering and remixing projects, and I think they leave the original releases in the dust. The same goes for what Jamie Howarth’s Plangent Processes technology does for improving the sound of analog reel-to-reel tape and cassettes. Just listen to the 2024 reissue of Bruce Springsteen’s Thunder Road and then a pre- Plangent version. It now sounds the way that Springsteen always expected it to sound, no more machine induced wow and flutter waver for that opening piano.. Heck, cue up Qobuz, find a favorite track with your streaming DAC, sit back and relax, or get up and dance, and realize it’s a great time to be alive.

The Vera-Fi Audio Vanguard Scout speakers have been getting highly positive reviews...at $299 per pair.

Header image courtesy of Pixabay.com/Nike_Noor.

This cartoon originally appeared in Issue 155.

Copper has an exchange program with PMA magazine of Canada (and other publications), where we share articles, including this one.

Let’s get one thing straight: audio quality starts with the chair. Sure, you’ve been brainwashed into thinking it’s the speakers, the amps, or the acoustics of your room that matter most. Wrong. The Perfect Listening Chair™ (PLC) is the only thing standing between you and auditory nirvana. And, friends, this isn’t just any chair. This is a Precision-Level Calibration system, scientifically engineered by the world’s leading chair engineers.

Turns out, every major technological breakthrough—from space exploration to supersonic jets—starts with the chair. Think about it: you’re not gonna successfully pilot a spaceship to Mars while sitting cross-legged on the floor, right? That’s why the Chair Engineering Division (CED) at NASA has been optimizing seats for decades. NASA knows that true breakthroughs don’t just happen with rocket engines and heat shields—sometimes, it’s the chair that makes all the difference. Just like Velcro, freeze-dried food, and memory foam, all born from NASA’s innovations, their advancements in seating technology have filtered into everyday life.

So naturally, when it came to designing the ultimate audiophile experience, we turned to the elite minds of chair science to develop the Perfect Listening Chair™. The same cutting-edge research that’s gone into astronaut seating now comes home to your living room.

Your Body: A Walking, Breathing Disruption

Let’s face it—your body is the enemy of perfect sound. Every breath, every pulse, every little movement sends shockwaves of imperfection into your otherwise pristine listening environment. Your lungs? A pair of over-enthusiastic bellows, exhaling air in a chaotic stream of sound disturbance. Your stomach? A bubbling cauldron of gurgles and groans, fighting the acoustics like it’s auditioning for a role in a horror movie. And let’s not even talk about your heartbeat—that relentless thumping, a drumline no one asked for.

But fear not, the Perfect Listening Chair™ has it all covered. SubsonicBody Dampening™ neutralizes every organ’s auditory offenses. Those bellows you call lungs? Silenced. That grumbling stomach? Muted. Even your heart’s rhythm is integrated into the musical flow, transforming your body from a walking cacophony into a finely-tuned vessel for sound.

The Headrest: An Acoustical Masterpiece

Positioning is everything. That’s why the Neuro-Acoustic Head Dock™—the pinnacle of headrest design—does more than just support your neck. It aligns your head at the exact angle required for optimal sound reception, calibrated to the millimeter. Our engineers discovered that tiny, involuntary movements in your head, what we scientifically term BrainBounce™, can cause significant disruptions in sound clarity.

The headrest compensates for this by using CranialWave Compensation™, ensuring your ears remain perfectly aligned with your speakers. In essence, it transforms your head into the ultimate sound receptor, perfectly calibrated to your high-end system. And with Reverb Cancellation Padding™, those pesky soundwaves that might otherwise ricochet away are absorbed and repurposed, powering the chair’s built-in AutoAcoustiMassage™ system. Because why waste good vibrations when you can convert them into a full-body massage?

The Chair That Went Too Far

But we didn’t stop at just making the chair perfect. Oh no, we might have gone too far. You see, the Perfect Listening Chair™ is so advanced, so completely in tune with your body’s every movement, sound, and desire, that it creates an experience so perfect…you may never want to get up. And why would you? You’re cradled in acoustic perfection, massaged by surplus sound waves, your body temperature maintained in a climate-controlled cocoon of luxury. And then it hits you: Why would I ever want to leave? And therein lies the problem. People don’t just sit in the PLC—they become part of it.

Introducing The PLC-X – For Those Who Never Want to Get Up Again

Enter the next step in audiophile evolution: the PLC-X. This isn’t just a chair. It’s your forever chair. Equipped with Full-Mobility Integration™, the PLC-X allows you to move around your home—nay, the world—without ever leaving your seat. Featuring a sleek, remote-controlled base, the PLC-X glides effortlessly from room to room, ensuring you remain in a state of perfect acoustic harmony wherever you go.

Need to get to the kitchen? The PLC-X has a pre-programmed trajectory to avoid kitchen clatter that could ruin your listening experience. Heading to bed? No need—the chair reclines into a SleepSync™ Mode, where it mimics the perfect sleep posture while playing subtle binaural beats for ultimate relaxation. You are the chair now.

Sure, some might call this extreme. They might say, “But don’t I need to stand up, stretch, and move once in a while?” Well, not anymore. The PLC-X has you covered with integrated Neuro-Acoustic Muscle Stimulators™, gently firing electrical impulses to keep your muscles in peak condition without you ever having to leave the comfort of your seat. You’ll be in Olympic-level shape…without ever standing.

And for those with an insatiable appetite for sitting supremacy, the PLC-X Infinite™ is on the horizon, and it’s not just a chair—it’s your gateway to ultimate control. With HoloPresence™ 360, a full-body holographic projection surrounds you at all times, making it look like you’re standing, even when you’re reclining like a monarch. In meetings, concerts, or even casual conversations, you’ll appear fully upright, radiating power and presence without ever leaving your seat.

And that’s not all. Harness the mind-bending power of NeurAudioSync™, which lets you literally control soundwaves, manipulating conversations, music, even the environment around you with a mere thought. Telepathic commands? Easy. Want to change the song, call someone, or project your thoughts into someone else’s head? Just think it, and it’s done—no buttons, no voice commands, just pure mental mastery.

A cosplayer at the Fan Expo Canada 2017 event doing their impersonation of long-time PLC-X Infinite™ enthusiast Charles Xavier. Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons/Nicholas Moreau.

JD Souther was as gifted a songwriter as he was a singer. I had the opportunity to speak with him at the end of July about the re-release of his epic 1979 album, You’re Only Lonely, and the beginning of a new chapter for him with Omnivore Records. (My article about JD Souther was published in Copper 209.) He was in great spirits, and readying for a return to the road with his frequent touring partner, singer/songwriter Karla Bonoff. His trip through my home state of Connecticut was bringing him to a fabled spot on the shoreline, The Kate, a theater in Old Saybrook dedicated to the town’s most famous resident, Katherine Hepburn. I missed that Tuesday night show, and it would turn out to be his second-to-last. JD passed away on September 17 at age 78, and according to his team it was peaceful.

JD was remarkably selfless throughout his career. Long associated with the Eagles, Linda Ronstadt, and Jackson Browne, it’s been often argued that he gave away his best-written songs to his friends. In speaking with him, those friendships were always worth more than the tunes. Along the way, songs he helped write for the Eagles like “The Best Of My Love” and “New Kid In Town” became anthems. And the harmony vocals he provided to songs like James Taylor’s “Her Town Too” gave them soul and made them linger, last, and chart.

But his best work will always be found in those records he decided to call his own. Backed by an L.A.-based musical brotherhood that included Waddy Wachtel, Danny Kortchmar, David Sanborn, and his great pal Glenn Frey, he created albums like You’re Only Lonely that showcased his exceptional writing skills and angelic blue-eyed soul vocals. JD wasn’t prolific, but what he decided to share with the public is defined by a great sense of storytelling, humor, and style.

He was born in Detroit and raised in Amarillo, Texas. But his cowboy persona had an élan that was polished and often burnished by the home he found in Southern California. I texted with JD a few times after our interview and he was happy about how it had turned out. But he seemed even happier about where life had led him and what kept things simple. I should have hopped in the car on that Tuesday night and caught him at The Kate. But I’ll be forever thankful for the gift of his music, the tales he told, and the promise of love that his songs always reminded us was just a beat away. In the end, I know that that was all he ever wanted from his fans, and in that sense we’re never lonely, even during times darkened by news like this.

Header image of JD Souther courtesy of Jim Shea.

Kenny Wayne Shepherd, along with artists like Joe Bonamassa, Gary Clark, Jr., Walter Trout, Christone “Kingfish” Ingram and others, has been a driving force in keeping blues-based rock guitar alive during one of the instrument’s most tumultuous times. Over the last 10 years, music retailers like Sam Ash, which recently declared bankruptcy, have struggled or disappeared as popular music has almost entirely moved away from the guitar, and rock radio has largely abandoned new music. Yet when other guitarists decided to add urban elements to their sound to try to connect with a younger audience, Kenny Wayne doubled down, continuing to release song-based music that had muscle and attitude, and choruses that you could sing along to – especially in your car at top speeds with the windows down.

His commitment to not only his craft but to the kind of music that has always inspired him is too often overlooked, and the current revival that is happening in guitar with emerging artists like Ariel Posen could only have happened because guys like Kenny Wayne never let the candle burn out, even in the most harrowing of musical storms.

This past fall he released a record called Dirt On My Diamonds, Volume 1. It kind of summed up his journey to date with a sense of musical maturity that took shape with a kind of balance that’s impossible to ignore. The album was strong, firm with feeling, and inherently fun. Even Kenny Wayne knew that he had made something so solid that it warranted a companion piece.

Dirt On My Diamonds, Volume 2, which was released in September, began with writing sessions at the legendary FAME Studios in Muscle Shoals, Alabama. The rooms in that facility are like the sweatband in an ace pitcher’s cap. They have soaked up every emotion felt during the endless stretch of strikes thrown in sessions that resulted in the creation of some of America’s most important music. Kenny Wayne then completed the album in Los Angeles and made a record that is the follow-up punch to a quick hit.

Kenny Wayne Shepherd, Dirt on My Diamonds Volume 2, album cover.

Dirt On My Diamonds, Volume 2 includes some surprises. The first are the vocal contributions of Corrina Gill, daughter of country artists Vince Gill and Amy Grant. Her voice is powerful, reminiscent of Tina Turner’s contribution to the Bryan Adams song “It’s Only Love.” Keep an eye out for her because her voice is so strong it can make the floors start to creak.

Both volumes welcome the return of former member Mark “The Loveman” Pender (of Conan O’Brien’s TV show and Southside Johnny and the Asbury Jukes) on trumpet. He and partner Joe Sublett on sax add soaring horn parts that are so strong that when they come in, they lift the songs into a full blaze.

This record also recognizes the end of a productive relationship with mixer Eric “ET” Thorngren, to whom the record is dedicated. Thorngren is someone who has worked on albums many consider to be among the most important in modern rock. He sadly passed away a few months ago. This project, among his last, is a powerful reflection on his remarkable talent.

We had the opportunity to catch up once again with Kenny Wayne Shepherd (we featured him in Issue 183) to talk about Dirt On My Diamonds, Volume 2,  and his participation in the all-star lineup of the Experience Hendrix Tour this fall.

Kenny Wayne Shepherd and a well-worn Fender Stratocaster. Courtesy of Mark Seliger.

Ray Chelstowski: When you made Dirt on My Diamonds, Volume 1, did you know then that the work there wasn’t complete?

Kenny Wayne Shepard: For sure. There was more to be done but at a certain point I realized that this might be a really cool package. At first it seemed as though we had enough songs where we could make two different albums. But then as time went on and the music started coming together I began to think it might be really cool to present them in a Volume One and Volume Two format; to release them separately but connect them. They were written around the same time and were recorded around the same time, and that allowed for this connection to exist and it shaped up to become a pretty compelling package.

RC: How did you decide which songs belonged where?

KWS: We just write songs according to whatever we’re inspired to put together, and as things progress the songs start to speak to you. Once I get about three songs deep you begin to see a direction begin to emerge, and you start to ask yourself what else fits that vibe. That’s eventually how the album takes its shape. Once we had one record [done] I started to look to see if we had another. As I moved things around I was able to see that we had [enough for] two albums. I think both albums stand on their own as great records, but the connection they share is pretty apparent, especially when you listen to them back to back. It works.

RC: The creative process began with a writing session at FAME Studios in Muscle Shoals. How did the history of those rooms inspire what you produced?

KWS: We went there and spent a week in the studio writing all of this material. We went with the intention and mentality that when you’re in that room you are going to feel that mood and vibe and that it’s going to impact what you are creating. It’s soaked into the walls; it’s everywhere. What I would like to do after having that experience is go back there [again] as an experiment and write and record at the same time.

RC: What has always seemed to set you apart is that your focus is on the songs, and the guitar is there to add dimension. Is that purposeful?

KWS: When we started out we had so much success on rock radio because it was always about the song; great songs telling great stories with choruses that stay in people’s minds. In fact, the song “Deja Voodoo” is probably a great example of the two approaches because the album version is like six minutes long. It’s probably one of the last radio singles that was that long and still got massive airplay. DJs loved it because it was so long they could use it for their smoke breaks. But that one had just enough guitar solos and fills throughout but also had a great chorus. Even with “Blue on Black,” there’s no flashy guitar hook. It’s always been for me about the entire song. Some songs are better platforms for me to venture off on during a live concert and do extended solos. Some are just meant to be short, sweet, and to the point.

RC: Corrina Gill’s vocals add an electricity to the song “Never Made It To Memphis” that’s pretty powerful.

KWS: I wasn’t there when she did her part. I was out on the road and Marshall Altman brought her in. When he sent me the track with her singing I knew that it had elevated the song to the next level. Any time you record a song and you’ve [already] got all the parts right there, you don’t add anything that doesn’t elevate it to the next level. She really took things up a notch.

RC: I see that Mark “The Loveman” Pender contributes on trumpet. Were the horns recorded separately?

KWS: Well Mark and Joe Sublett were my horn section for a few years. I brought them in to play horns on The Traveler album. They’re not in the band anymore but were with us for several years so they fit well into these two records. We recorded the horns separately because I think it’s too difficult to try and track the whole band with a horn section.

RC: Did you debut any new gear on this record?

KWS: Not really. The core of my gear has been firmly established now for several years. In my opinion, most stuff now is just a new version of old stuff. I don’t think the sound is very different and the instruments haven’t changed that much. When [legendary guitar amplifier designer] Alexander Dumble started building amps for me 10 years ago, that was the biggest change in my gear. He built me 11 different amplifiers over the course of our friendship before he passed away. That stuff fundamentally changed my sound and my playing because these amplifiers intuitively respond the way I always want amplifiers to respond. I used to have to force things out of them, where now I can just do it naturally. This frees up so much energy for me to more creative.

RC: The release of this record has to be bittersweet given the passing of Eric “ET” Thorngren. Was this his last project?

KWS: I’ve been working on four different albums over the past year. ET was a part of all of them. I have records he worked on that are not totally finished yet. So, I’m going to have to do that with someone else. The last complete project we did together as a record is going to come out next year. It’s something I did with Bobby Rush. We were literally were mixing the last song when he passed away in that motorcycle accident.

RC: You close the record with a fiery version of ZZ Top’s “She Love’s My Automobile.” It slams the door shut. How did you know this was the right way to wrap the record up?

KWS: I love ZZ Top. I love Billy Gibbons. And I love cars and guitars. We share a lot in common and that song just speaks to my passions. Billy is very much a car enthusiast like me and he’s been so good in writing these songs that pull both his passions together in such a cool and not contrived way. This has always been one of my favorite songs of his. It’s another one of those short and sweet songs that’s so familiar [and] leaves you on a high note.

RC: Are there any previews you want to share about the upcoming Experience Hendrix tour that you’ll be participating in?

KWS: Well, if you love guitar, then this is the show for you. You’ll have guys there from all different musical genres that are kind of bound together by the influence that Jimi Hendrix has had on all of us. You know the songs and you know the musicians who’ll be playing them and you’ll get to hear them play things you probably wouldn’t be able to hear anywhere else. It’s a tribute to the greatest guitar player of all time. What’s not to love?

Header image courtesy of Mark Seliger.

The Aspen FR5 stand-mount loudspeaker received high marks from Hi-Fi News. The publication called the FR5 (above) “seriously entertaining” and said, “the FR5 delivers grip, clarity, balance and bass punch to rival models selling for much more.” They concluded, “This is a small speaker that makes a big impression.”

The Dutch publication Alpha Audio ran a positive review of the PowerPlant 12 power regenerator, calling it a “clean machine.” The review noted, “What [the] PS Audio [PowerPlant 12] does a great job of doing is disappearing into the system. A good component has that quality…No sharpness, no messiness, no smearing. The PS Audio simply disappears into the system…you forget it’s there. A strength we really appreciate.”

In which Ken Kessler makes a discovery linked to his dad.

Only the churlish would deny that there’s an element of nostalgia in the Reel-to-Reel Revival, however much the inescapably superior sound quality motivates us to return to a costly, inconvenient, niche format. And while I admit that it was nostalgia rather than sonic merit which led me to buying five ostensibly useless tapes, a recent incident in a record store also informed the experience. It reminded me how quickly things are forgotten, like mimeographs and fax machines.

What happened was almost as much a shock about the passage of time as those YouTube clips in which someone hands a cassette to a child or Gen Z-er and they have no idea what it is. I dropped into the relocated HMV store in Canterbury, part of what was the UK’s biggest chain of record shops, which has been downsizing post-pandemic. As it turned out, the smaller store was much nicer than the old one, and – hot damn! – did they have a superb vinyl selection!

As is the staff’s wont, a hipster-ish twenty- or thirty-something approached me to ask if I was able to find what I was looking for, totally helpful and with not a hint of derision on espying a septuagenarian in the store. I told him I was OK, but could he answer one question for me: Is the Vinyl Revolution sustaining itself, or was it a flash-in-the-pan, a mere marketing myth?

“No, sir – it’s doing really well. But it is not without problems.”

“How so?” I asked.

“We get a lot of customers coming back saying their records won’t play. So, we look at them and they’re scratched to hell, covered in food, liquids, whatever. They think they’re like CDs, and that you can wipe ’em off.”

What this reminded me of were the myriad expletives I’ve uttered upon curating tapes which were owned by idiots. Some of you will say that’s not fair, but I must express my dismay at the treatment of tapes which always cost more than LPs, and the users I’m cursing do not have the passage of time as an excuse: they owned them from new. As for the “kids” turning up in record stores with ruined LPs, they simply didn’t know any better because they never experienced vinyl records, or perhaps their parents might have been just as innocent – not a stretch when you consider that CD has been with us for 39 years.

I’ll save the catalogue of tape horrors for another column, but I wanted to use the ignorance of vinyl etiquette as an indicator of my own unawareness of certain open-reel-tape-related matters, and not just the host of unfamiliar labels or artists. This latest revelation came about because of a logo, which caused me to swiftly post a high bid on eBay to secure a pile of tapes, which included five from Voice of Music.

Blame my father for this. He owned a Voice of Music 700 half-track mono all-tube deck (which you can observe him using in Part One of this series, in Issue 146). I hadn’t seen it since the late 1960s, and have no idea what became of it, but I remember it as vividly as our Electrolux vacuum cleaner. The manufacturer is long gone, but it’s supported by a website worth visiting if you’re fascinated by brands lost in the mists of time. (https://www.thevoiceofmusic.com)

When the pile of 5-inch-spool tapes appeared on eBay, among them five with “The Voice of Music” emblazoned on their covers and the burned-into-my-memory-banks V-over-M logo and – more enticingly – four with the legend “The Voice of Music Stereo Tape Library” and one a demo tape with “Not For Resale” on the back, I couldn’t stop myself. By this stage in my return to open-reel tape, I had acquired demonstration tapes and samplers from RadioShack, Ampex, Bel Canto, Capitol, Columbia, and other record labels or hardware manufacturers, tapes with Tandberg’s participation, etc., so why not Voice of Music?

 

How the Voice of Music tapes will appear on KK’s shelves.

Before playing them, I went through the usual procedure with each one of adding leader tape, fast-forwarding the tape, adding a tail and returning it to its spool in the speed at which it would play. All were 7-1/2 ips 1/2-track tapes, but – unlike LPs and yet unfortunately a condition all-too-common with open-reel-tapes – there were no dates to reveal their vintage.

I started with the sampler, titled Pleasure’s New Sound, with the tempting subtitle, “A Thrilling Demonstration of Stereophonic Sound.” The recordings included spoken introductions and sound effects, with music ranging from easy listening to a taste of Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture.

Because I’m anally-retentive, a completist who must own everything by an artist or author, I was dismayed to find that the other four comprised Volumes 1, 2, 4, and 5 of the aforementioned Voice of Music Stereo Tape Library. As Voice of Music’s otherwise-comprehensive website doesn’t yet carry a list of the titles that were issued (and I saw one or two more online), I have no idea what the missing Vol. 3 contains. [Note: I am now in contact with the website, and will report back if a list is forthcoming.]

As for the other four, Vol. 1 is titled Silk Satin & Strings, performed by Wayne Robinson and His Orchestra, with standards such as “Jalousie” and “From This Moment On.” Vol. 2, Big Beat With Mike, gives us Mike Simpson and His Big Band delivering “Cherokee,” “Take the ‘A’ Train” and others. The Musical Arts Symphony Orchestra conducted by Leonard Sorkin performs on Vol. 4, Symphony of Dance, with compositions from Bizet, Rimsky-Korsakov, Glière, and Sibelius. Lastly, Vol. 5, Christmas In Stereo, finds Sorkin again, this time conducting the John Halloran Chorus and the Sorkin Strings, with five seasonal selections.

So far, so good. The boxes were intact, the tapes properly spooled and playing through without snapping when I gave them their initial cleaning. Time to sit down and listen. Feverishly, I threaded the demonstration tape onto my TASCAM 22-2 1/2-track deck. The sound was nothing short of spectacular, as good as the early Jackie Gleason tapes on Capitol, or any of the other 1/2-track 7-1/2 ips in my experience. “Dazzling” doesn’t begin to describe the clarity, fidelity, transient attack or spatial concerns. But something was seriously amiss.

Way back when – 1973 to be precise – Sony or someone else promoting quadraphonic sound issued a 4-channel open-reel demo tape to stores which featured two marching bands fighting each other, performing different material, one band in the front channels, the other in the rear, all the better to convey the surround experience. I was working in a store in Bangor, Maine, and we played it enough times to tire of it, the problem being the disparity in two competing bands, an issue that had nothing to do with truly discrete four-channel sound via a 4-track tape deck, because quadrophonic sound worked perfectly in that format, however much it failed on when “matrixed” onto an LP.

What reminded me of this battle of the bands, and how their disparate performances were so confusing, was a time lag between the right and left channels on the Voice of Music tapes. I thought I had a pretty good handle on open-reel terminology, and knew that “stacked heads” were the same as “in-line heads” or that 4-track and 1/4-track aren’t the same thing. But nobody told me about “offset” or “staggered” heads. Those of you familiar with the format, please bear with me and try not to laugh.

Of course, a quick Google revealed all, how staggered or offset heads formed a short-lived, early stereo format. Prior to the arrival of conventional (a.k.a. stacked or inline) stereo heads, machines could be converted from 2-track mono layouts (like my dad’s 700) to stereo with a second “staggered” head installed next to the original mono head. These addressed the lower half, or track of the tape. They were not, however, aligned in time.

What I was hearing from the Voice of Music tapes via my TASCAM was the 0.167 ms delay between one channel and the next, and it was just enough to drive the listener crazy, like watching a DVD or Blu-ray with slightly out-of-sync dialogue. It was breaking my heart, because – delayed channel notwithstanding – the sound was breathtaking. The bad news was the scarcity of machines from (roughly) 1954 – 1957. But even if I was predisposed toward finding one, it would have been a waste of money. Seriously: Why would anyone buy a tape deck just to play five tapes?

But God bless the advice of the tape geeks! One solution is to record the tapes onto one’s computer and sort out the channel delay with software. Even better was an example of lateral-thinking, which suggested playing them on an Otari MX-5050 and monitoring one channel from the playback head and one from the record monitor head. Apparently, the spacing is precisely the same as those on a deck with offset heads.

Either that, or find myself a Voice of Music 714.

"When a man loves a tape deck...can't keep his mind on nothin' else..." Well, maybe we got those lyrics a little wrong. Uher ad, date unknown.

Here's a 1960s H.H. Scott Stereomaster 2400 FM radio. Think they might have been inspired by the KLH Model Twenty One? Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons/Joe Haupt.

It's a bird! It's a plane! It's a 1968 Radio Shack combination radio and reel-to-reel tape recorder, complete with microphone and AC or battery operation!

What the heck is this thing? Why, it's a Philbrick Model K2-W operational amplifier from the 1950s that was used in analog computers. Those are 12AX7s, which makes us wonder what you could do with this in an audio application.

This 1980s Sharp V2 um, portable player could play both sides of a record automatically. Try that with a VPI or Linn!