Issue 212

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Header image courtesy of Pexels.com/Dalila Dalprat.

RIP Phil Lesh, Grateful Dead bassist and vocalist and one of the greatest musical titans who ever walked the Earth. Grateful Dead fans and millions of us offer boundless tribute to a true legend.

We mourn the loss of audio industry veteran Richard Colburn, most recently of Tone Imports. Richard was one of the most well-loved and respected people in the high-end world, a friend to so many of us, and the news of his loss sent shock waves through the industry. We will miss him greatly.

Folk Alliance International has announced its 2025 showcase lineup, to take place in Montreal, Canada, February 19 – 23, 2025. (Wayne Robins covered the 2024 conference here and here.) More than 175 artists will participate, including Ron Sexsmith, Mimi O’Bonsawin, Tania Elizabeth, Mama’s Broke, Kaïa Kater, Jorane, Basiat Bulat, Wesli, Connie Kaldor, and more. The Annual Folk Alliance International Conference is the largest gathering of folk musicians and music industry professionals in the world. ‍For more information, click here.

The Listening Chair With Howard Kneller has launched its website, thelisteningchair.net. Howard is a Copper contributor, as well as a veteran audio reviewer and writer. The website features show reports, video and print reviews, coverage of dealers and manufacturers, and other news and features.

In this issue: We have the first of a three-part interview with Jamie Howarth of Plangent Processes, which corrects for the minute speed variations in master tapes to provide sonic improvements. Wayne Robins reviews Gillian Welch and David Rawlings’ Woodland album. Octave Records’ latest is Pennies From Heaven, a set of jazz classics and standards from singer/saxophonist Jeremy Mohney. I cover the recent Audio Engineering Society (AES) convention. To commemorate its 75^th anniversary, McIntosh has released the LP McIntosh SESSIONS Volume 1: The Peter Erskine Quartet. Larry Jaffee talks about Lou Reed and Joey Ramone as rockers growing up Jewish.

B. Jan Montana discovers dandelion therapy. Ray Chelstowski talks with Thurston Moore, Sonic Youth co-founder, about his new album, Flow Critical Lucidity. The Vinyl Beat covers reissues from the Doobie Brothers, Miles Davis, Klark Kent, Ray Baretto, and more. I continue my series on playing in a rock band by asking: what do you want to play? Paul McGowan reminisces about 50 years of PS Audio and a new beginning in the 1970s. Tom Lane offers songs of love. From The Listening Chair focuses on cables. PS Audio earns positive reviews for the Stellar Strata MK2 and Aspen FR5 loudspeakers, and garners Editors’ Choice picks from The Absolute Sound. Ken Kessler encounters reel-to-reel high crimes and misdemeanors. The issue wraps up with a blanket statement, a RadioShack extravaganza, and a cactus cornucopia.

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Contributors to This Issue:
Ray Chelstowski, Frank Doris, Harris Fogel, Larry Jaffee, Ken Kessler, Howard Kneller, Tom Lane, Paul McGowan, B. Jan Montana, Rudy Radelic, Wayne Robins, James Schrimpf, John Seetoo, Peter Xeni

Logo Design:
Susan Schwartz-Christian, from a concept by Bob D’Amico

Editor:
Frank Doris

Publisher:
Paul McGowan

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 – FD

Plangent Processes offers a unique playback system that corrects for the wow and flutter present in the master tape of a recording, to provide speed stabilization. It’s a combination hardware and software suite that, as their website explains, “combines state-of-the-art analog electronics with unique digital signal processing.” The system employs a custom tape playback head and preamp, followed by proprietary DSP that provides speed stabilization and wow and flutter correction.

Jamie Howarth, President of Plangent Processes (photo above) gave a demo and a seminar about the Plangent system at AXPONA 2024. I was highly impressed and wanted to learn more, and talked with Jamie recently.

Frank Doris: Can you explain the Plangent process? What gave you the idea for it?

Jamie Howarth: Well, the germ of the idea was somewhat accidental, but pretty obvious in retrospect. I’m fortunate to have solid absolute pitch, so, records with wow, and warped or off-center records, drove me batsh*t since I first began listening to 45s in the Pleistocene Era.

I got hired in New York 1980 by a great legend named Howie Schwartz, a highly successful jingle studio owner. He had opened a brand-new top quality facility I had helped install and he wanted to compare the tapes of the day. He had the resources: the studio maintenance shop had some very early extremely sophisticated spectrum analyzers/ FFT (Fast-Fourier Transform) analyzers, and digital frequency oscillators. This stuff cost $50,000, $60,000 bucks, and now they’re free plug-ins. But back then this kind of analysis had never been done before at the studio level. Howie was jazzed to prove he had the best taste in tape formulations.

So, I'm testing a variety of tape stocks, and ironically, I found what that I thought was the best – and not his favorite 3M 250 – or the most popular Ampex 456. Probably not the smartest move but I was too young to know he wouldn’t be thrilled to hear that the most linear tape was Agfa 468. I learned a lot about tape compression and the effect it had on the sound of rock recordings, and why 456 was favored – in the nature of its overload characteristics, it de-essed a lot. But another more hidden and surprising aspect of the sound was the distortion caused by the tape transport. One of the newer MCI machines sounded rough off tape, and it turned out to be a bad bearing causing the distortion – causing fast flutter that acted as intermodulation distortion. IM is the result of sum and difference beat frequencies with no harmonic relation to the music, and it sounded nasty with this brand-new, highly-advanced-design tape recorder. When the mechanical bearing was replaced the machine sounded good. The mechanics of the transport influenced the audio quality.

With these test playbacks I could always tell that it was not the same as the original, even on an extremely good machine – in this case a top-notch brand-new MCI JH110B with extremely tight digital servo control. It had amazing long-term speed stability, but still something wasn't quite right. When we looked at a frequency synthesis input we saw a perfect spike in the FFT, a perfect vertical line at one frequency. And when it came back off the tape it looked like a shimmering pine tree sliding sharp and flat – varying frequencies… and that was the machine’s speed sliding back and forth, AKA wow and flutter. Rather than a simple percentage metric the speed performance was starkly rendered graphically by the new digital test tools that made their debut back then.

As good as the servo of a modern tape machine (or many turntables) is, it’s always trying to catch up with itself, and it often is too slow to correct the faster mechanical variations in the machinery. It's never perfect. There's a phase lock loop in there that takes a moment to deduce and correct the speed. So, it's always trying to catch its own tail – some measurable transport flutter even in a servo controlled machine like the JH110 is still rather high – the servo itself jitters and under/overshoots, which causes a very fast flutter >50 Hz in rate. We didn’t think of flutter [as being] that fast; it was defined at lower frequencies as an obvious warble, much slower. Instead, via the faster flutters that were too high in repetition rate to be perceived as that familiar “gargle,” the transport was causing distortion, intermodulation distortion to be exact. IM was the province of electronic circuit performance, not considered as a problem in the tape transport. And yet there it was.

This was in 1980, about the same time that digital audio was just beginning to become possible. The digital tools had only recently become available to carefully analyze a piece of analog like a tape recorder. But if you can do that, then of course, why bother, just record the audio itself digitally. So, these advanced techniques for analyzing the machines were relevant, but only for a very short period of time. Most of the machines had been designed at least 10 to 15 years earlier, even the best ones back then in 1980. And still, to this day, one of my gripes is that the tape machines that are still revered – the Ampex ATR102 and Studer A80 and 820 – and exclusively employed in archive and reissue remastering - are great in and of themselves, but they're also 1975 designs. There’s resistance to the idea they can be improved, even 50+ years later, because to the older engineers there’s simply no concept that they could be faulted in any way.

I was triggered by the revelation that there was so much pitch and speed deviation going on, and it was visible, and I could adjust the servo of the MCI to minimize it, but I could never get rid of all of it. And I saw some patterns in it that were kind of odd. You'd see not only the big “pine tree,” but also some little tiny “pine trees” on either side of the main fundamental tone, symmetrical little deviations. I didn't know what that was until much later, but I saw it. Those are actually the beat frequencies that are caused by the flutter modulating the fundamental. They are the intermodulation products, sidebands straddling the fundamental signal. Imagine the motor cogging at 60 Hz. Put in an A 440 tone and you’ll get back 380, 440, and 500 Hz. That’s not gonna sound good. And it’s not that specific – there are a myriad of provoking causes and it’s not on A 440, it’s on everything. So what’s the fix?

And [one day], I was working with 30 ips (inches per second) tape, and I was scrubbing (manually rocking) the tape back and forth just to make edits and stuff. And I was hearing this whistle as I scrubbed the tape, and asked one of the older guys what it was and he said, “that's the bias.” That's the signal that is recorded on the tape in order to be able to make the magnetic materials respond pretty much linearly. Basically, the tape is blasted with a very-high-frequency signal way above the audio, which serves to pre-condition the magnetic domains of the tape so that the oxide will respond linearly.

AC tape biasing has been around since the very late 1930s. One of the perhaps apocryphal, but perhaps true stories was that although the nonlinearity problem was known, no one knew what to do about it. As legend has it an experimental German Magnetophon design accidentally picked up a radio station from a nearby ship-to-shore radio transmitter broadcast leaking through a cold solder joint, and it ended up bleeding at a high level onto the recording, which suddenly sounded fabulous, and they couldn't figure out why. They went back and corrected everything they could see that was wrong with the circuit, and they lost it. They went back and realized the trail went cold when they repaired this solder joint: a cold solder joint was acting like a crystal detector, like a rectifier, and the result was the carrier of the radio station being heavily amplified and blasted onto the tape. Well, there was a good illustration of what was among the first uses of AC bias.

FD: I wonder how long it would've taken somebody to discover that if that accident hadn't happened.

JH: There's a great book by a guy named Thomas Kuhn called The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. It speaks to the fact that simultaneous invention is a thing, and stuff tends to come along in waves of consciousness. We’re pre-conscious about the art of science, if you will, and that's going on in various places at the same time. So in the late 1930s or early 1940s a US inventor, Marvin Camras – an early designer of wire recorders – figured this would work. Another guy in England came up with a similar idea.

Back to scrubbing the 30 ips tape at low speed and the bias oscillator in this MCI recorder: I was hearing the ultra-high-frequency signal and realized that it's got an actual wavering pitch to it. Then I looked at the schematic; It was very clear that the source of this high-frequency tone in the MCI was a quartz oscillator, with a frequency of parts per million, and yet the machine couldn't [reproduce] anything like parts per million mechanically. So, what I realized was that the recording of the fixed bias oscillator after it was recorded reflected a perfect pattern of the speed variations on the tape.

In other words, the playback variations in what was originally a fixed oscillator are frequency deviations – created solely by the mechanical errors of the machine – and that turns out to be exactly proportional to the tempo and pitch variations in the music – the wow and flutter in the audio is imprinted in the frequency modulations on the bias. For example, if the tape speed varied by a semitone then so did the frequency of the recorded bias – exactly.

I asked my mentor, the late Dave Smith, Phil Ramone’s chief engineer, a much beloved genius whom I was fortunate to have worked for at the Hit Factory and elsewhere: “Why don't they use the bias playback as the servo source, rather than trying to measure the machine's speed indirectly with an optical sensor or something? Why don't we just use the actual recording?” He thought this was a distinct possibility, but others scoffed that it was too high a frequency: it clocks in at anywhere from 50 kHz to 432 kHz. “You'll never be able to play it back,” they said. Well, I was hearing it at low speed, so I dunno fellas, it's playing back!

The idea sat in the shadows for a while. I worked for about 15 years in the TV industry, not in the record biz, but I always had this idea in the back of my head… David and I talked about this again when I left the ABC network in 2000. He said, “don't try to control the tape machine. You're going to be back to chasing your tail because you're at the mercy of the servo system.” He said, “just do this in DSP (software).” So I took a chance and hired smart guys and built it.

The Plangent Processes system is an FM detector chasing the speed of the original recording, followed by a DSP pitch shifter; a very, very, high-precision pitch shifter. It operates internally at a minimum high sampling rate of 24 MHz/32 bit sampling rate and it's rendered, not real-time. This minimizes any potential artifacts coming from the fact that the musical material is constantly being resampled; the patented system’s pitch shifting is done with an irregularly-shaped resampling algorithm, aka weird math. Don’t ask.

That technology was barely available in 2003, when I went to the AES convention in Amsterdam and I ran into a young fellow, Patrick J. Wolfe, who was studying for his PhD with Simon Godsill – who among other things had developed the CEDAR noise-reduction system. I asked him to write up a software routine that looks at a varying ultrasonic frequency signal coming in and translates that into a pitch map or a drive mechanism, if you will, a servo drive mechanism that's done digitally, followed by a sophisticated time warping routine to reverse the wow and flutter in the recording. And he said, yeah, I can do that. And it worked on the first try. I disrupted the tape path with a pencil eraser and squiggled the audio horribly, and what came out of Patrick’s laptop 30 minutes later was perfect. Next try I couldn’t get the eraser in, so some “unwowed” audio was rendered. THAT sounded way better than the original source – no more bees and sidetones in the clarinet. “Why? “Patrick said, “look at the frequency modulation before the processing. It has all these sidebands and we’re removing them when we take out the FM.” That’s the IM, the “little pine trees” – beat products caused by the mechanism.

Sample of "Born in the USA," FFT spectrum of drift, wow and flutter with sidebands on a 240 kHz bias signal, Studer A80 tape deck.

The same sample after being corrected with Plangent Processes: all speed-related issues are resolved. 

FD: So, basically you had the idea a long time ago, but the technology wasn't available to implement.

JH: Correct; it was conceptualized long before it could be achieved. One challenge is that tape heads are designed such that they'll give you a lot of audio output, but they'll roll off at something like 30 kilohertz. That's the obstacle – the recording [of the high-frequency signal] is definitely there, but the playback of it was impossible. Only NASA-style instrumentation recorders could record and play back such very high-frequency material and they sucked for audio. In fact, when we were first doing this, John French, the unsung hero of the audio business who’s designed or installed practically every replacement magnetic tape head that's ever been sold in the United States, loaned us some rare instrumentation heads that would actually play back the bias, and still work in the audio spectrum.

Then we had to do a fair amount of work on the preamp in order to be able to retrieve a signal that's minus 70 dB [down] off of the tape. The technical challenges were [solved] by two guys. One was Dave Smith, and another unsung hero – John K. Chester, who's been by my side with all this stuff all the way through after David tragically was lost in 2005. John started as a front of house guy at the Fillmore East and was on the audio team at Woodstock. They were able to develop an extraordinarily low noise, wideband tape system with not only this trick capability but also a substantial update to the analog electronics of tape playback, where, as stated earlier, not much had been done since 1975. So it’s current-day electronics, with this additional purpose. As a piece of analog gear, it’s superb, and modern.

FD: When you digitize the audio signal, aside from the processing for the pitch correction, what is the sampling rate and bit rate?

JH: 384 kHz/32-bit, currently is tops. We've got an RME analog to digital converter that'll do 768 kHz, but we don't prefer it for audio, at least not yet. We employ both Mytek and Prism ADCs.

FD: What is the result of the Plangent Processes system? What are some of the things to listen for?

JH: What I would suggest is, don't get too hung up on the fact that it’s “digital.” Don’t even necessarily think “audio”…pitch and tempo are musical performance criteria, and we find that while the sonic quality is certainly advanced, there’s definitely a positive effect on recapitulating the original performance, which is what high fidelity is all about. There’s an authority that comes through – and more personality. More realness. What they played.

We recently worked on Phil Ramone’s original A&R Recording masters of Getz/Gilberto for an IMPEX SACD, and the you-are-there factor is stunning. “The Girl From Ipanema” players and singers are in the room with you. There’s absolutely no timing/pitch-based abstraction layer messing with your hearing and perception of the performance and dimensionality.

Our interview with Jamie Howarth will be continued in Issue 213.

The 2024 AES (Audio Engineering Society) convention took place in the Javits Center in New York this past October, in conjunction with the NAB (National Association of Broadcasters) convention, which focuses on television, radio broadcast, and video technologies. These two events showcase the latest in hardware and software technologies, and offer seminars that cover a wide range of cutting edge topics and research. (I didn’t cover NAB except to quickly walk through the exhibit floor.)

My main takeaways from AES this year:

You can always learn something at one of these shows, usually many things.

Those of you who are concerned that high-end audio will disappear when older audiophiles age out need not worry. There was an abundance of younger people at AES, and they had tremendous enthusiasm and energy. They are the future of audio, and the future looks bright. High-end audio gear as we know it (the kind you see at shows like AXPONA) may change or perhaps fade, but the desire for good sound will not. I’m confident there will always be products that deliver outstanding sound, though perhaps in forms we can’t even imagine today.

The AES show was smaller in size than the last few years, and there were no big booths from major companies this time, while NAB has now grown to be bigger than AES. I suppose it’s a sign of our videocentric, social media, video on demand streaming age, and economic factors I can’t parse at this time.

The show was well-attended.

The video production hardware at NAB, like this Blackmagic suite for example, was dizzying in its capabilities and variety.

Here are highlights of what I encountered at AES.

Imersiv, a new brand from microphone and phono preamp company Millennia, showed what they say is the world’s first 28-bit DAC. The D-1 DAC utilizes a multi-path architecture, a configuration that company head John LaGrou said took 10 years to develop. As he said, “the general idea isn’t new but it’s so wickedly hard that nobody has ever succeeded in doing it (to my knowledge).” How it works: 64-bit DSP splits an incoming digital signal into two “dynamic paths” that handle the high-level and low-level aspects of the signal. The low-level portion is up-shifted to a higher signal level, which allows the signals to be converted to the highest-quality bit range of a D/A converter. The two split signals are then recombined.

The Imersiv D-1 DAC.

This multi-path process translates to what Imersiv states is “vanishingly low” noise and THD at low program levels. What the process claims, and what I heard, is greater low-level detail resulting in exceptional spatiality, what I noted as “fantastic” clarity, and heightened realism. The specs are impressive: true 28-bit resolution, greater than 170 dB dynamic range, and greater than 170 dB linearity. The D-1 is slated to ship around January 2025 at about $12,000. The patent-pending multi-path process can work in the entire signal chain, and an advisory board has been formed to license multi-path technology.

Chord is a name familiar to audiophiles, and they had a presence at AES 2024. The company has introduced its Alto nearfield monitor/headphone amplifier ($4,250), which delivers 50 watts into 4 ohms, can drive four headphones at the same time, and has the characteristic Chord compact and distinctive design. Though aimed at pro users, it’s suitable for home use as well. I listened to Fleetwood Mac’s “Dreams” through Audeze LCD-1 planar magnetic headphones, and the sound was smooth, warm and richly addictive.

Speaking of Audeze, the company debuted their CRBN² (“Carbon”) high-end electrostatic headphones ($5,995), which will be shipping at an undetermined date. I’ll throw out the tired audiophile descriptions and just say they sounded sublime, thanks to second-generation carbon nanotube drivers and SLAM (Symmetric Linear Acoustic Modulator) bass-improvement technology (the Audeze website doesn’t go into details). Current CRBN owners can have their headphones updated to CRBN² status for $995 until February 1, 2025.

Audeze's CRBN² electrostatic headphones.

Designing a loudspeaker is an extremely challenging balancing act. I say this as preface to a remarkable demonstration I witnessed by TOA Electronics with the US debut of their ME-50FS professional monitor speaker (pricing TBA). It was developed in Japan as a reference for their in-house listening. The speaker is modestly proportioned (about 12 by 15 by 13.5 inches) and utilizes two 4-inch cone woofers and a 1-inch tweeter in an enclosure with a unique triangular bass reflex port, said to suppress port “squeal.” The three drivers are positioned close to one another for optimal localization and phase response. The ME-50FS is powered by a built-in Class D amplifier. It’s available with dedicated stands.

The TOA ME-50FS loudspeaker system and stands.

When I first walked into the demo room the TOA people asked if I would listen to the speaker with and without these mysterious (to me) rectangular boxes connected, and give them my opinion. I said I certainly would. Without the boxes, the speakers sounded excellent, with superb clarity and tonality and a surprising amount of bass and dynamic power, especially considering the small woofer size. With the outboard boxes connected, the sound became more spacious and more detailed, with more precise imaging, and nuances like the piano player’s left and right hands, reverb trails, and the articulation of the bass easier to hear. The sound simply became closer into making you feel like you were hearing the real thing.

So, what do those boxes do? It turns out they house an impedance correction circuit, to compensate for the impedance irregularities of the drivers and crossover. The correction is done in the analog domain – this sounds better to the designers than using DSP. As I noted, speaker design is a balancing act between the impedance of the speakers at various frequencies, crossover points and slopes, phase response, on-and off-axis response, and many other factors, all of which interact with one another. I could not believe the sonic improvement that the ME-50FS impedance correction unit created. The measurements of the ME-50FS show very flat frequency and phase response (down to its low-frequency rolloff point). This demonstration gave me new appreciation for the challenges that loudspeaker designers face…and introduced me to a superlative new speaker design.

And if you want to design a loudspeaker, you need to know what it’s doing – accurately. Crysound showed a complete speaker driver testing setup, including an isolation chamber. You can’t do accurate measurements without a proper measurement microphone, and Crysound offers a wide range of these, along with associated equipment. The company even offers a drone-mounted acoustic imaging camera that can detect sound source distribution data and superimpose it on a video image! It’s used for applications like industrial noise and vibration testing, and gas leak detection. Crysound also has products to measure sound emitted from hearing aids, laptops, smartwatches…and even microphones.

Crysound displayed a complete loudspeaker driver testing rig at AES, complete with an acoustic measurement chamber.

Adam Audio showed their just-released D3V desktop monitor speakers, offering a heck of a lot of value at $299 per pair in black or white finish. They feature 3.5-inch aluminum woofers, dual passive radiators, and a 1.5-inch AMT tweeter. They looked really sharp, and have a frequency response which is so flat I did a double take when the company rep showed me the graph. I wasn’t able to hear them…every time I went by the booth it was packed with mostly younger people playing guitars, synthesizers and other instruments that were set up in the exhibit for demos.

Telegrapher is a new company from Istanbul, Turkey (they made their debut at NAMM 2024) offering powered studio monitors and a subwoofer with a variety of attractive matte finishes. The three handmade models and subwoofer are delightfully named the Gorilla, Fox, Elephant, and Gorilla S, (prices range from $5,499 to $11,499 per pair) and the enclosures are made from FCS (Forest Stewardship Council) accredited birch trees from the forests of the Eastern Black Sea Region. The circuitry is all-analog – no DSP. According to the company, their design goals were to “deliver warm, neutral, and realistic sound across the entire frequency spectrum. The Telegrapher engineering team spent thousands of hours refining its analog crossover and analog circuitry to ensure balanced sound, ample headroom, and minimal distortion.” That description certainly matches what I heard.

Adam Audio's D3V powered studio monitors garnered a lot of attention.

Telegrapher demonstrated their complete lineup of powered studio monitors and their powered subwoofer.

I find it an endless source of fascination that there are so many different varieties of loudspeakers on the market, all aiming for true high-fidelity reproduction. Reflector Audio USA showed their unique-looking SQT (Square Two) monitor, an approximately 12-inch cube with a central high-frequency driver flanked by four small woofers that are angled inward, all in a bass-reflex enclosure. Reflector states that this configuration offers a coherent blend between the drivers and makes them ideal for near- and mid-field listening. At the show, two SQT units where placed atop Reflector’s new SQT Bass active subwoofer with DSP and built-in 700-watt amplification. It works.

In fact, I feel like I’m going to start repeating myself in reaching for loudspeaker descriptors like “clean,” “detailed,” “powerful,” and so on, but the Reflector Audio system sounded like all that and more, with a sense of effortless dynamics, and I have to say that I didn’t hear a single speaker at AES that didn’t impress me. This hasn’t always been the case.

However, I wasn’t able to get a proper audition or even quick impression of some of the loudspeakers on display since the show floor was crowded at times, and the ambient noise high. Let’s just say that there were a wealth of speakers on display other than the ones I’ve mentioned, including models from Grimm Audio, PSI Audio, Augspurger, and others. Diversity in audio was evident in both the gear on exhibit and the makeup of the crowd from younger folks to the older audio legends – musicians, producers, mixing engineers and others – who were roaming the hallways and conducting seminars.

Immersive audio was huge at AES, from the impressive Genelec demo room featuring a full immersive audio setup, to numerous seminars on the subject (sadly, I didn’t budget enough time for any of them this time out) to a host of immersive audio software and mixing tools, like Audeze’s demo of Maxwell Head Tracking for the Dolby Atmos Renderer, which “knows” where your head is positioned while wearing headphones. Very cool! You can literally get very deep into the sound with software like Applied Psychoacoustics Laboratories APL Virtuoso v2, which can create the sound of a virtual binaural headphone listening environment with remarkable fine-tuning capabilities.

One of the most popular seminars at AES included a panel discussion with The Immediate Family, the group of storied L.A. session musicians formerly known as The Section who played on countless records by Linda Ronstadt, James Taylor, Jackson Browne, Warren Zevon and many others. The seminar included clips from Immediate Family, a documentary about the musicians available on various streaming services.

The Immediate Family and friends: Denny Tedesco (producer of Immediate Family and The Wrecking Crew), musicians Waddy Wachtel and Danny Kortchmar, record producer Russ Titelman, musician Steve Postell, and record producer Niko Bolas.

And now for something completely different: the Demon Box ($699), a Kickstarter-funded product from newcomer Eternal Research. This triangular-shaped device, which looks like it would be right at home on an alien spaceship, turns electromagnetic frequencies into sound. As their description states, “it can make music from anything with EMF – from cell phones to tuning forks, drills to hair dryers.” 33 inductors capture EMF, convert it into sound, and route the audio through three channels, with various knobs to alter the output. It sounds…strange and otherworldly, a natural for science fiction movie soundtracks and experimental music artists.

DSP technology keeps advancing, as I witnessed over and over again at AES. The Fohnn Audio Americas exhibit gave an enlightening demonstration of beamforming in loudspeakers. Beamforming is the process of changing the output of multiple speakers using delay, volume differences or cancellation effect to control the behavior of an acoustic wave. It doesn’t really have an application in home audio since you need some distance from the speakers for the effect to “focus,” but it offers major advantages for live sound, public address, stadiums and other applications where sound intelligibility needs to be optimized.

Fohnn’s Fernando Vidal Wagner gave me a demo where he could aim the sound from a loudspeaker directly at me, or at another point in space just by entering parameters into the speaker’s DSP software. It worked exceptionally well from each of the company’s four beam steering models on display. It’s one thing to read about such a technology; it’s another to hear it in action.

Or not hear the tech, as was the case with the CEDAR Audio noise reduction system. Designed for applications like live broadcasting where the ambient noise can’t be avoided, CEDAR works in real time to eliminate the noise. The company’s Clive Osborn had me don a pair of headphones and hear a mic feed from the noisy AES show floor. He pushed a button on a CEDAR black box and the noise disappeared. Completely, while I could hear him talking over his mic.

Yet there will always be a place for old-school tech. Legions of electronics designers or guitar players will tell you that transformers are a critical element of the sound of an amplifier or preamp. (1960s Marshall amps are fabled for their use of certain “lay down” transformers, and the resale value of vintage Fender amps is drastically reduced if the transformers have been replaced.) The inner geek in me could not help but linger over the Triad Magnetics display, where dozens of transformers of all types were on display. Triad offers an almost dizzying array of them, and you can learn about them by clicking on the following link to get their e-book, “Transfomers in the Audio and Sound Industries.” I will be doing an interview with them to delve into the secret sauce of transformer engineering in a future issue.

Here's a wide variety of transformers from Triad Magnetics, as shown off by company president William Dull and Christine Dull.

I haven’t even touched on the cornucopia of all the other audio hardware and software on display at AES that help make today’s recordings and live sound happen, from mixing consoles to equalizers, compressors, mics of every conceivable variety, and much more. However, I have to single out a demo I heard at the Dangerous Music exhibit that proved to be another variety of audio education.

Their booth, which also featured Manley Labs electronics, Jam Racks studio furniture, Chameleon Labs preamps and processors, and Ex Machina studio monitor loudspeakers, had a rack of signal processing, mixing, and mastering equipment that made me once again realize that recorded sound is an art as much as a science. Audio Alchemist’s Marek Stycos played a song through the equipment rack, and by tweaking knobs and parameters, was able to bring the lead vocal forward or back in the mix, add depth and spaciousness, firm up the bottom end punch, and change the sound in subtle and not-subtle ways that made me realize that what you think is “real” on a recording is the sonic reality that the artist and producer want you to hear, an artistic artifice that represents their vision, not some sonic absolute that just happened to be captured on tape or bits.

This Dangerous Music gear provides extensive sound-tweaking capabilities.

The piece of processing equipment that fascinated me the most was the S&M (Sum and Minus) Chris Muth 20^th Anniversary Limited Edition, a mid/side processing matrix that made the width of the stereo sound field wider or narrower to a controllable degree just by turning a knob. As Dangerous Music notes, this black box can do everything from altering vocal levels without remixing, fix overly wide or narrow stereo fields, enhance the width of anemic stereo synths, or set the stereo image of the mix without altering the tonal content.

The biggest takeaway you get after attending an AES convention is realizing that technology has the ability to empower music creators as never before. Most of us know that home and “prosumer” recording has exploded in the last generation, thanks to easy-to-use high-fidelity software like GarageBand, and a wealth of tools for home and live musicians. I always enjoy visiting the Hear Technologies booth, a company that offers equipment to improve live sound, recording, home studio and other environments.

One of my favorite products of theirs is the Hear Back PRO personal monitor system, which gives every musician the ability to tailor their own individual monitor mix. It connects over Ethernet and provides 16 knobs that can access up to 128 channels. Its new Pro Connect App even lets users customize the channel names for each knob display. Boy, do I wish I had one of these when I played places like the Country Corner and Down Under, where I could barely hear myself or anyone else in the band clearly.

A Hear Technologies Hear Back PRO personal monitoring system.

Although nowadays people can make incredible music with the touch of a button or click of a mouse, a few days after AES I attended a jazz concert at New York’s Birdland, and it made me realize that the magic of a live performance by a great artist is something that no technology will ever replace – but it sure can do an ever-more amazing job of capturing and reproducing it. The sound quality at Birdland was wonderful, enabling every musician to be heard with superb clarity and tonality.

Audio technology really has come a long way. AES 2024 reminded me of that again and again. If I could sum it up in one moment, it would be when I listened to the incredible young woman guitarist who was playing beautiful fingerpicked chord melodies in the Adam Audio booth, sounding gorgeous through their speakers. It once again confirmed my belief that future of audio and music is in good hands.

You should have seen this guy's hands move like lightning on this DiGiCo Quantum 225 mixing console.

It all starts with the microphone: Schoeps was one of the many mic companies at AES.

It wouldn't be an AES without the Telefunken Volkswagen van, purveyor of modern and exact vintage replica mics like the classic U47.

Focusrite offered the fourth generation of their renowned and highly popular Scarlett USB recording interfaces for home and project studios.

These Grimm Audio LS1 Series loudspeakers feature an interesting upward-firing servo-controlled subwoofer, along with built-in amplification and DSP processing.

Perfect for a Pink Floyd tribute band: Froggy's Fog offered a wide variety of fog and other effects, as well as bubble machines and even scent-distribution equipment.

That Old-Time, New Style Roll and Rock

You're sitting on a porch in the Shenandoah Valley, or maybe the hills of West Virginia, where freight trains are as common as a house finch or tufted titmouse. You hardly notice them. You're passing the pipe around with your new friends David Rawlings and Gillian Welch. They're friends because of the way their music always draws you in, makes you feel part of the conversation.

One of them says, "Saw a freight train yesterday," and at first you wonder what the deal is, because you see freight trains every day around here. Story continues: "Just a boxcar of blue/Showing daylight clear and through/Just an empty trainload of sky."

You try to visualize this, and it doesn't make any sense: a transparent freight car, with no sides or roof? The other says, kind of like a put-on: "Was it spirit, was it solid? Did I ditch that class in college?" In reply, the first one just quotes from a favorite Neil Young song.

"I said, Hey hey, my my." If the Welch/Rawlings body of work had four boxcars rolling slowly because the tempos are always slow but steady, moving forward without much if any percussion propulsion, one would be the Stanley Brothers, one would be Bill Monroe (spiritual forebears), one would be Bob Dylan, and one would be Neil Young (hovering gurus). And the sun shining down would be Elvis Presley, and all the music he mixed and mashed until it spontaneously combusted in Memphis in 1954.

No haste, no waste: Welch and Rawlings’ steady pace.

My favorite Neil Young cover might be Welch's live version of "Pocahontas," a bit of stoner time travel involving the massacre of Native Americans, the Astrodome, "Pocahontas, Marlon Brando and me." It's on a short album called Music from The Revelator Collection (2006), which features live songs from or left off Welch's game-changing Time (The Revelator) album from 2001, produced by Rawlings. It includes the nervy "I Want to Sing That Rock 'n' Roll," nervy because it was recorded live at the country music temple, the Ryman Auditorium, before they were really established in Nashville. There's also a nearly 15-minute tune, "I Dream the Highway," which unspools at the same meditative yoga-for-snails pace as most of the rest of their work, yet never drags. Time stretches. There's also "Elvis Presley Blues," recorded in RCA Studio B in Nashville, where Presley, of course, recorded. The song goes in part: "I was thinking alot about Elvis/Then he died, then he died." This Welch/Rawlings song would make them either time travelers or young prodigies, since Welch was still nine when Elvis Presley died, Rawlings seven.

But back to the present and "Empty Trainload of Sky." It's the opening track from the new David Rawlings & Gillian Welch album, Woodland, released August 23 on their own Nashville-based Acony Records label. They wrote all the songs. They both play guitar, and they both sing, so much so, in such tight harmony that, as they sing in the closing song, "Howdy Howdy": "We've been together since I don't know when/And the best part's where one starts and the other ends."

Other musicians do appear: Brian Allen plays bass, Russ Pahl pedal steel, and Chris Powell drums on "Empty Trainload of Sky." But you don't play with Welch and Rawlings, or Rawlings and Welch, to get noticed for your brisk solos (there really aren't any) or extraordinary chops. They're basically do-it-yourself-ers. Woodland was not only recorded at their Woodland Sound studio: Rawlings mastered and cut the lacquers, which is a tradesman's craft, distinct from that of musician. He also mastered the recordings, with the help of studio pro Ted Jensen. You can't do everything by yourself.

If I told you this was the the first studio album by "Gillian Welch & David Rawlings," it would be technically true but wildly inaccurate. Since they met in the early 1990s at the Berklee College of Music in Boston, they've been a team on records released by Gillian Welch; David Rawlings; the David Rawlings Machine (my favorite, the 2015 with the telling title Nashville Obsolete). The previous album credited to Welch & Rawlings was a 2020 live-at-home COVID covers record, All the Good Times (Are Past & Gone), which features traditional songs such as the title song and the murder ballad "Poor Ellen Smith"; John Prine's "Hello in There"; Norman Blake's "Ginseng Sullivan," (say what?), and two Bob Dylan songs: "Abandoned Love," which was recorded most notably by Doug Sahm, and "Señor," an infrequent cover from the Street-Legal album. It won a Grammy Award for Best Folk Album, one of many categories the duo both defies and identifies: there's blues, country, roots, traditional, old-timey (is that a Grammy category?) and the word I dread to use because it describes marketplace rather than music: It's very American and rhymes with banana.

Rawlings and Welch. Photo courtesy of Berklee College of Music, all rights reserved by the copyright holder.

In early March 2020, a tornado tore through Nashville, making a direct hit on Woodland Studio, blew the roof right off. Welch and Rawlings spent a very wet, windy night salvaging guitars, recordings, equipment from the storm. Amanda Petrusich takes you inside that night in a recent The New Yorker interview. This was two weeks before the COVID lockdown. Petrusich describes them as "singing as if they have one mouth," and that again is true.

Welch and Rawlings, both class of 1992, received Berklee "American Masters" Awards in 2016. "She and Rawlings give a slow and sometimes lulling cadence to their songs, until a revelation draws out their theme," the alumni affairs office accurately wrote in its online magazine. "After graduation they moved to Nashville and began to explore the music she loved, such as Bill Monroe, Bob Dylan, and the Stanley Brothers."

Dylan plays a small but useful role in their work: They leave Dylan fragments on this album like computer code Easter eggs.

David Rawlings and Gillian Welch, Woodland, album cover.

"Here Stands a Woman" could be an excellent Loretta Lynn song, a perfect wedding tune. But it mirrors "Just Like a Woman," who "breaks just like a little girl," as Welch sings: "Here stands a woman/who was once a little girl." No matter: "It's all right ma," she sings. But no one is "only bleeding" here.

Then comes a shift, as the narrative continues: "Just like the song says . . . " and your ears wait for a cliché. But "Here Stands a Woman" continues: "Just like the song says, 'I've been around the world.'" The first thing that comes to my mind with that line is Steely Dan's "Show Biz Kids." Who knew? Fagen and Becker, wayward sons of Bill Monroe.

Then there's "North Country," no relation to Dylan's "Girl from the North Country," or is it? It's sort of geography as destiny, about a couple, unlike Dave and Gillian, destined to be kept apart by wrong time, wrong place. It gives your heart a squeeze. And "Turf the Gambler," sung by David, is clearly an outtake from John Wesley Harding that Dylan didn't bother to write or record, but he could have: it's that close to that album's vocal nuance and lyric mode.

In touch with modern slang? There's a song called "Hashtag," definitely not from the Bill Monroe catalog. (But it could be Taylor Swift’s.) You know how you go on X Twitter and see Keith Richards trending? The entire internet is ready to say Kaddish for Keith until, holding one's breath, you click and doomscroll and...Keith is still alive! (It was like that for years for Betty White, who was cut down in the prime of her life in 2021 at age 99.) So about "Hashtag": "You laughed and said the news would be bad/If I ever saw your name in a hashtag."

Sometimes they finish a song and they know it's got a problem. "The Day the Mississippi Died" is a hall of fame title. The verses roll on, muddy but unbowed, but the listener keeps hoping for something that would elevate this to "Mid-American Pie" or something monumental. Towards the end of the song, which is entirely pleasant and a good listen, David and Gillian sort of note they didn't quite nail it, didn't live up to the potential of the title. "I'm thinking this melody has gone on long enough," they sing. "The subject's entertaining but the rhymes are pretty rough." That in itself elevates the song for me: That the writers/singers have once again broken the fourth wall, and tell you what they're thinking as the song unspools. It's very intimate and inviting, as is all of Woodland, the album, and most likely the studio and the people who live and work there, too.

Header image courtesy of Alysse Gafkjen.

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, New York, and writes the Critical Conditions Substack, https://waynerobins.substack.com/.

Octave Records’ latest release is Pennies from Heaven by vocalist and alto saxophonist Jeremy Mohney. The recording features 10 selections from the Great American Songbook in a swinging style that takes listeners in a nostalgic trip back to the classic style of a bygone era – captured with today’s finest recording techniques in superb high-resolution DSD sound.

“Jeremy’s smokey, bouncy vocals sound like they could have come straight from a 1930s movie soundtrack, and he and his quintet capture the flavor of songs like “Ain’t Misbehavin’,” “Fly Me to the Moon,” the title track, and others with authenticity and feeling,” said Octave Records’ Jessica Carson, who produced the album and assisted with the recording and mixing. “The album really captures the spirit and fun of these timeless songs.”

The quintet is comprised of Jeremy Mohney with Reid Poole on trumpet, Matt Cantor playing electric guitar, Connor Hollingsworth on upright bass, and drummer Chris Carland. Pennies From Heaven covers a wide variety of musical moods, and the group shifts seamlessly from the relaxed swing of Frank Loesser’s “On a Slow Boat to China” and the George Gershwin/Ira Gershwin/Dubose Hayward standard “Summertime,” to the infectious bounce of numbers like “Muskrat Ramble” and the Dixieland feel of Gershwin’s “Oh, Lady Be Good,” where you can almost see the flappers dancing in front of you. The ensemble playing is tight and lively, with plenty of adept soloing from Jeremy, Reid on open and muted trumpet, and Matt offering some nostalgic yet beautifully-recorded agile soloing and chord voicings.

Jeremy Mohney.

Pennies From Heaven was recorded with Octave’s Pyramix-based Pure DSD 256 recording system, using microphones specially selected to capture the tonality and dynamic range of the instruments, presented with each instrument and Jeremy’s vocals specifically placed on a realistically-sized soundstage. 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. Additional selections on the album include “Honeysuckle Rose,” “On the Sunny Side of the Street,” and the perfect closing song, Hoagy Carmichael and Mitchell Parish’s all-time classic, “Stardust.”

Pennies From Heaven 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.)

The kids in the area called our neighbor’s boy “40 watt” because he wasn’t very bright. Like the rest of us, Danny lived in poverty, but he didn’t realize it because he had Down Syndrome – a genetic disorder that disrupts brain and body development.

One day, as I charged out of the house pissed at yet another personal assault from the character assassin who postured as my father, I bolted past Danny sitting on the lawn staring at a weed. I asked facetiously, “What are you doing Danny, gardening?”

He looked up at me and smiled from ear-to-ear. “This dandelion flower has hundreds of petals.”

That stopped me in my tracks. I’m as ticked off as a trapped badger, and this kid is as relaxed as the Dalai Lama. Does he know something I don’t? Maybe I’m not living right?

I sat down with him and studied the dandelion. “It does have a lot of petals, doesn’t it.”

“Everybody calls them weeds,” he responded, “but they are really a kind of daisy. People kill dandelions but they keep coming back, so they are the toughest daisies.”

He was right; you can’t keep dandelions down. They are persecuted more than any other flower, but they consistently bounce back with a smiley yellow face – which was not exactly my current modus operandi.

A couple of kids rode by on their bicycles and hollered, “Retard!.” I got angry but Danny just ignored them.

I was reminded of something the philosopher Epictetus said: “It’s not what happens to you, but how you react that matters.”

Maybe Danny knows this intuitively, I thought. Nothing seems to faze him.

The next time my stepfather assaulted my character, I walked out quietly for some dandelion therapy. That became a pattern.

“Where are you going, Jan?”

“I’m going out for some dandelion therapy, mom. I’ll be back soon.”

She knew what I meant.

Courtesy of Pexels.com/photokip.com.

A few years after my family moved out of the neighborhood, I ran into Danny at a shopping mall. An ear-to-ear smile came over his face as he ran over to hug me. His mother told me he'd always considered me a friend because I was the only kid in the neighborhood who ever spent any time with him. This hit me hard as I’d had no idea.

“Where are you going?” he asked.

“I’m going to a concert at the library down the street, Danny.”

“Can I come with you?,” he pined, with a look that indicated he really, really wanted to go.

His mother looked on approvingly, so I took him to the concert.

After that, we went to the library every month for the free classical music concert presented by music students from the local university. They played everything from Dunstable to Dvořák.

It took Danny a while to absorb the idea that audience members shouldn't talk during the performance, so he smiled instead, and talked excitedly before and after the concert. He wanted to know what each instrument was called, how come the “’violins’ were different sizes,” why there were so many horns, and why the harpsichord didn’t sound like a piano:

“It looks like a piano. Can’t they afford a piano? We should give them our piano. Nobody plays it, you know.”

Afterwards, I’d take him out for a burger and a milkshake.

His mother said he couldn’t stop talking about these outings for days afterwards.

One day, when I came by to pick him up, Danny asked why I was wearing a leather jacket. “I bought a motorcycle, Danny. It can take me to many more places than my bicycle.”

“Can I ride with you?”

“Of course, that’s why I brought an extra helmet.”

“Where do you go on this?” I told him about Glacier National Park, Waterton National Park, Banff, Jasper, and many other places.

He pined that he’d really, really, really love to go there too. His mother looked on approvingly.

Shortly afterwards, I took Danny on a day trip to Glacier National Park. Each time I looked over my shoulder, he was smiling from ear to ear. He smiled riding through the city, across the prairie, into the mountains, everywhere we went. He wanted to stop at every scenic site, step in every creek, walk on every trail, talk to every tourist, and try every ice cream cone. He never complained and took nothing for granted.

His mother said he was exhilarated for weeks after we returned home.

Glacier National Park. Courtesy of Pexels.com/Nathan Steele.

I was struck by the fact that it took so little to bring so much joy into his life. He savored each moment like it was his last.

Danny died at age 18 from congenital heart failure; common at that time for people with Down Syndrome. I wasn’t heartbroken. I’d venture to say that in his short life, he smiled more than most people who live three times as long.

Some might say that by the philosopher’s standard, he’d mastered life.

Header image courtesy of Pexels.com/Sharefaith.

Today, having a sense of daring is something anyone who chooses a life in rock and roll must possess in large quantities. There are few fast tracks to the top, and “the top” is difficult to locate or define. But even when it was easier to find a way to establish a commercial viability in rock, exploring its creative boundaries is something few had the courage to test. Thurston Moore and his bandmates in Sonic Youth did, and they struck a balance between building a big base of fans and creating art that was fresh and focused on always digging deeper.

Since Sonic Youth disbanded in 2011, Moore has pursued a very eclectic professional life. In addition to test-driving participation in black metal bands like Twilight, he engaged in projects that were entirely experimental, like 2012’s Moore and Kim Gordon collaborative album with Yoko Ono, Yokokimthurston. He also started a publishing imprint, launched a record label, and has taught songwriting at various universities here in the United States and abroad. He’s also released a series of solo records.

Thurston Moore. Courtesy of Vera Marmelo.

Moore has just released his ninth solo album, Flow Critical Lucidity, where he enlisted the help of many. Laetitia Sadier, a founding member of Stereolab helps with vocals, Deb Googe of My Bloody Valentine contributes on bass, Jon Leidecker (aka Wobbly) delivers electronic parts, Jem Doulton is on percussion, and multi-instrumentalist James Sedwards plays everything from guitar and piano to glockenspiel and organ. Lastly, the lyrics on all but one track are credited to Radieux Radio, an alias of Moore’s wife, Eva Prinz.

The record delivers an interesting collage of much of what Thurston Moore has explored across his career. The songs sit in a sonic realm that is spacey and fluid. The songs are hypnotic is many ways, and his guitar parts offer the listener a rich collection of sounds to explore. In fact, this is a record for audiophiles.

We caught up with Moore and talked about the making of the new album, and about how technology helped him discover a vast world of music and how that continues to this day.

Thurston Moore, Flow Critical Lucidity, album cover.

Ray Chelstowski: The new record is a highly collaborative affair. How many contributors are too many?

Thurston Moore: I have always liked working collaboratively in the context of a band. Sonic Youth was always collaborative, even though I’d bring a lot of structural ideas forward. I always thought it was most successful when everyone created their own thing around whatever I brought in. It created more of a group dynamic. That’s the only way it would work in that band because we came up as a democracy.

It maybe was most interesting when nothing was brought in by any of us, but we were there in a circle creating in the moment, together finding ideas that we thought were strong. So I think about that when I do solo work, because it doesn’t often happen there. I tend to write the songs and I share them with musicians that I’ve chosen to play with. It’s usually because I’ve admired their work and trust that they will come up with something that’s interesting without me having to force it. But it’s not like being in a band [when you’re] in your early 20s where everyone is kind of feeling their way toward what will become their musical vocabulary.

I do like to somewhat control what I present as songs. It would be rare for me to tell the band to do whatever they want with them. Many times, I’ll demo the songs myself on a digital recorder and when I bring them to the band I can get pushback to try something different. So, allowing the musicians to be expressive and creative turns out to make things better.

RC: Your wife Eva Prinz wrote most of the lyrics. How much if any direction did you give her?

TM: I have always enjoyed singing lyrics that weren’t mine. I started this band in London and at first I started writing [the] lyrics. But Eva is a writer as well, and I would see some of the stuff she’d write and it was great, and I’d use it. For this record we worked even more closely together. We were in an artist’s residency, and as I was composing on guitar, every once in a while she’d drop a piece of notebook paper in front of me with words and lyrics on them. And things became incredibly collaborative.

It’s very much like the bass or percussion elements and allowing others to bring something forward that has a shared aesthetic in terms of the voice. On this record that was very prevalent, and in that sense Eva becomes part of the vision and part of the band. It’s very much like Robert Hunter with the Grateful Dead or Bernie Taupin with Elton John. It’s not like I was trying to equate it to that at the time, but the approach is less uncommon than most would think.

RC: Sonically, no pun intended, the record really resides in a sort of dream space. Is that a creative decision you made before any other?

TM: There was a lot more material [that we had recorded for the album] and a number of songs that had a rougher edge. I put some of them up [on digital platforms]. [But] when we went to sequence the record, we were looking for it to have a thematic narrative. Sometimes you hear records that are just too long because the artist thinks everything is of value, and sometimes it works. But I wanted to step away from that approach. So, the sequencing was a little challenging, and I have to give Eva credit here as well because she thought it all worked better with just the more “dreamlike” music, and gave the record a more consistent sonic theme. I agreed. It plays better and it’s more accessible.

RC: Piano plays a prominent role in the songs and it feels like the most consistent part of the album.

TM: Our guitar player James Sedwards is a very high-tech musician. He also knows his way around piano. Eva, knowing that and knowing the music, thought that a piano would be a really wonderful addition. It’s something I’ve never really utilized at all [in the past]. But a piano has always been a part of my world. My father was a great pianist and studied piano from his mother, who was a society pianist. The piano was a sound source that was always part of my world. But I never thought of bringing it into my songwriting; I sometimes almost thought it was a lazy decision to do so, the instrument is so big. So on this record, we decided to try having James not only play guitar, but keyboards on a few songs, and it created a whole new sound for me.

RC: I have read that getting a transistor radio on your birthday when you were young was transformational. Do you think radio can return as a driving force of discovery, and what do you turn to most as a way to listen to music today?

TM: I don’t think the radio is going to return to what it once was. I think technology has moved too far away from that. Streaming is certainly the most popular format of the day, and I personally don’t find that I have time to go beyond what I enjoy, which is the physical interaction I have with records, CDs and cassettes. I hardly stream at all unless I have to source or monitor something.

RC: What excites you about the future?

TM: I’m really excited about the future. I have always believed in the power of creative energy that happens in the community of artists and musicians. I think it’s important for the entire world to have that energy of intrigue and inspiration, as opposed to anything else.

I’m always listening to what 15-year-olds are listening to, to hear what is happening musically at the margins along with new experimental ideas. I find that there are so many incredible recordings being made and the one platform I like for discovery is Bandcamp, because I think it’s like an open record store that for the most part is artist-friendly, [and] focused on equal values for everyone. I like that.

Header image of Thurston Moore courtesy of Shore Fire Media.

There is a captivating quality to music recorded on analog tape and released on vinyl during the 1970s, in particular, that has been seared into the memories of countless music and audiophile fans. While digital technology has been able to surpass analog tape in terms of measurable signal to noise ratio and other acoustic criteria, the intangibles from timeless music of that era and medium are still heralded as the pinnacle of artistic and sonic musical artistry by many.

To celebrate its 75th anniversary, McIntosh Labs is collaborating with mastering facility Sterling Sound on a series of AAA analog tape-recorded vinyl releases. These recordings are intended to take advantage of the resurgence of interest in vinyl recordings and to demonstrate what state-of-the-art can sound like with world-class equipment and studios combined with top-caliber musicianship.

Heralded for his iconic drum work with Jaco Pastorius in Weather Report and with Joni Mitchell, Pat Metheny, Steely Dan, Stan Kenton, and countless others, as well as his landmark ECM recordings, film soundtrack, and orchestral work, Peter Erskine is a Grammy Award-winning artist with over 700 recorded credits, and a music professor at the University of Southern California (USC).

Tabbed as the first artist to showcase this McIntosh/Sterling collaboration, Peter Erskine leads a quartet with himself on drums, Alan Pasqua on piano, Bob Mintzer on saxophone, and Darek Oles on bass for McIntosh SESSIONS Volume 1: The Peter Erskine Quartet. The eight compositions were recorded at Henson (formerly A&M) Recording Studios’ Studio A in Hollywood and mastered at Sterling Sound in Nashville. Produced by Jeff Levenson, it was recorded and mixed by Rich Breen.

With the McIntosh goal of reproducing during playback the exact sound heard by the producer and engineer in the studio during the recording, a classic Studer A800 MkIII - 2-inch, 24-track recorder, similar to what Prince had at Paisley Park, was deployed along with RTM SM900 tape. The stereo 2-track mixdown went to an Ampex ATR 102 1/2-inch stereo deck.

The McIntosh gear used for playback were its famous tube-powered C8 preamps, solid-state MC830 power amps, XR50 monitors, and MT5 and MT10 turntables.

McIntosh SESSIONS, Volume 1 kicks off briskly with “Leaving L.A.,” which Erskine and Oles (who takes an early solo, followed by Pasqua, Mintzer, and then Erskine himself) announce with a drums and bass intro. The main riff only shows up a handful of times just to frame the solos, and announce the signature virtuosity of each participant.

The Peter Erskine Quartet: (back row) Alan Pasqua, Bob Mintzer, Darek Oles,(front row), Peter Erskine.

“Old Friends” is reminiscent of Henry Mancini’s The Pink Panther scores with slinky upright bass and throaty tenor sax. Also hearkening back to the 1960’s, Alan Pasqua’s piano solo is reminiscent of the work of Vince Guaraldi, and towards the end, Erskine’s drum-led call-and-response trade off demonstrates his philosophy of “composing with his drums” that he has mentioned in past interviews.

“Chillispo” is an upbeat happy tune that starts on drums, and continues in a breezy mood through various solos, with Erskine’s understated drum solo a highlight of the track.

Erskine commented that one of the challenges of recording to analog tape is the pressure to “get it right live,” since the digital recording process allows an ease of editing and note correction that can ostensibly cause musicians to lack the focus and intensity to “bring their A-game” on a take.

Mintzer’s evocative sax and Pasqua’s piano colors and textures are spotlighted in “Gumbo Time,” while Ole’s sterling upright bass introduces and sets the mood for “Into the Dark.” The track’s two-chord riff and Erskine’s drum buildup of tension and release evoke 1970s spy movies and crime dramas soundtracks. “A Few Good Notes” allows Mintzer and Ole to shine on this bouncy tune, with Erskine and Pasqua supporting and responding with musical phrases to punctuate the sax and bass lines.

“David’s Blues,” penned by Erskine, starts in a chromatic line that could be from Ornette Coleman, but quickly swings into a groove that all four participants lock into. After a somewhat more dissonant sax solo than on the other tracks from Mintzer, Pasqua channels some Chick Corea phrasings to lighten the mood. Erskine’s extended solos are the highlight, which demonstrate his mastery of the drums, from minimalist cymbal phrases to full-on polyrhythmic rolls.

The final track, “The Folks,” opens with a sax and piano introduction that brings the work of Toshiko Akiyoshi and Lew Tabackin to mind. The piano phrasings and the way the composition progresses are very much in Pasqua’s sphere, ending with Erskine’s snare drum brush rolls.

Hanging out in Henson Recording Studios.

The McIntosh Sessions - Volume 1 is sonically immaculate, even on the streamed copy I was given to listen to for review purposes. From a performance perspective, this latest Peter Erskine Quartet release ranks on par with his ECM releases with John Scofield, Bill Frisell, John Abercrombie, Gary Peacock and Mark Johnson. Not surprisingly, those records, lauded by audiophiles, were recorded on analog tape as live performances with no overdubs.

Manfred Eicher knew there was a magic to recording ace musicians playing together live that could be lost with overdubbing, and that’s what he accomplished with ECM’s top releases. The McIntosh series pays homage to that tradition and will hopefully revive it for a new generation of vinyl enthusiasts.

Frank Doris Comments:

I listened to a high-res 44.1/24 stream on my high-end desktop and main systems (the latter featuring PS Audio Aspen FR10 loudspeakers). Like John, I didn’t want to just glom a free copy of a $150 LP (which will probably sell out among McIntosh enthusiasts), so this isn’t comparing apples to apples. That said, John’s comment about this recording being “sonically immaculate” sums it up succinctly. The first two words in my listening notes are, “excellent clarity.”

John’s musical descriptions are right-on, but I can’t resist adding the fact that I got a kick out of Bob Mintzer’s “Somewhere in Paradise” sax quote in “David’s Blues.” There are many musical highlights.

The sound leans toward illuminated rather than dark, but this is not to say it’s a “bright” recording. The instruments have outstanding definition and weight, with a solidity and dynamic attack to the piano, in particular, that is often lacking in recorded jazz piano. The instruments are well-placed in the sound field, with an excellent balance. The sound is open, airy, and yes, evocative of that ECM spaciousness.

As you might expect considering drummer Peter Erskine is the leader here, the drums sound sensational. Their dynamic impact can be startling when the music calls for it (and Erskine never overplays). The tonality and tuning of the drum set is a delight to hear, from the distinctive character of each tom tom to the little after-ring on the snare drum that adds so much to its liveliness and personality. Erskine’s control of dynamic shadings and percussive textures is fantastic. At times, the drums provide subtle coloration, at others, they drive the music with authority.

Above all, the recording really lets you hear the musical nuances that tell you that you are listening to the playing of master musicians blending together as only players of this level can. Well done!

Welcome to the November Vinyl Beat! This month might be all about elections and (for those of us in the United States) tryptophan from too much Thanksgiving food, but at Casa Rudy we’re enjoying a couple of Doobies, being overrun by Rhinos, wearing a Tutu, adding some salsa to life’s recipe, and operating under an assumed identity.

Klark Kent: Klark Kent Deluxe
Kryptone Records/BMG International

The first set in my stack this week is a reissue of what might be an obscurity for most music listeners but to fans, is something we are very happy to see. Klark Kent recorded an 8-song EP released in 1978, originally on 10-inch green vinyl. The liner notes on the EP imply that the identity of this particular Klark Kent was unknown, but that Stewart Copeland might have an idea of who this might be. (So in other words, it was no secret that Copeland was Klark Kent!) This two-record reissue includes the complete studio recordings of Klark Kent all in one place. A previous and sought-after CD compilation, Kollected Works, assembled most (but not all) of them, and “Guerilla” from the original EP was lost on that disc as a hidden bonus track. This new set makes everything right in the Klark Kent universe.

This reissue, on two 12-inch LPs, leads off with a “reunion” track recorded circa 2020, followed by the contents of the original EP. The second record includes all of the non-album tracks Copeland recorded, such as “Thrills” and “Office Girls” which appeared on the I.R.S. Greatest Hits Vols. 2 & 3 compilation, the single “Too Kool to Kalypso,” and “Yo Ho Ho” which appeared on a holiday music compilation on I.R.S. Records. I’m happy to say that this release nudges a little of that late ’70s brightness off of the sound, and gives it an additional warmth that is welcome. These tracks sound better than ever.

The CD and digital download versions include 12 additional demo tracks. They are interesting curiosities for completists, but I don’t miss them on vinyl. Otherwise, if you’re in the mood for something a little quirky with a Police-ish lean to it, and haven’t heard this recording yet, Klark Kent is your man. And if you don’t like his arrogance, you can suck his socks! (Fans know exactly what I’m talking about!)

The Doobie Brothers: Takin’ It to the Streets
Rhino Sounds of the Summer reissue

The Doobie Brothers: The Captain and Me
Rhino High Fidelity

Time to fire up a couple of Doobies!  In this case, we have two different eras of the band on these Rhino reissues. Takin’ It to the Streets was the album on which Michael McDonald joined the band, and his songs “Losin’ End,” “It Keeps You Runnin’,” and the title track are represented here. I have always enjoyed his work with the band and this album has other good songs in addition to McDonald’s contributions, such as “Rio” and “Wheels of Fortune.” This reissue is in the Rhino Sounds of the Summer series. No mastering credit is given on the hype sticker, but the runout shows the familiar inscription “CB” (Chris Bellman), and he has given the recording a nice, clean presentation with plenty of detail. The vinyl is about what you’d expect for recent colored vinyl – not perfectly quiet, but still unnoticeable during the music. A nice, enjoyable listen all around!

Rhino High Fidelity reissued The Captain and Me, the Doobies’ third album, which includes two of their most popular songs “China Grove” and “Long Train Running.” Remastered by Kevin Gray and pressed at Optimal, the sound is lively and as with Streets above, there is plenty of detail presented here, which especially helps accentuate the guitar on this set. The vinyl is dead quiet. Rhino so far has been hitting them out of the park with this High Fidelity series.

Miles Davis: Tutu
Rhino High Fidelity

I didn’t intend for November to be “Rhino Month” but so far, it is turning out that way! I realize that opinions on Miles Davis’s output over the years vary like the weather, but that never stopped me from enjoying certain records of his. I’m as fond of Kind of Blue and Seven Steps to Heaven as I am of Tribute to Jack Johnson, Bitches Brew, and this Warner-era album Tutu. It famously signaled a change of record labels after recording for Columbia for three decades. Part of the appeal of Tutu for me was the involvement of Marcus Miller in production and song compositions, and this record is just as much Miller’s as it is Davis’s. The only cover here is a remake of Scritti Politti’s “Perfect Way,” a playful interlude in what are a series of often moody songs throughout the album, “Portia” being my favorite of those.

This is another Kevin Gray remastering, and what I like about this vinyl version is that it tempers some of the mid-’80s synthesizer brightness along with the slight digital glare that my original CD version had. This pressing tames those qualities and makes the vinyl a pleasure to listen to. And the vinyl, like the Doobies’ record above, is dead quiet and flat. Another stellar release from Rhino High Fidelity.

Ray Barretto: Indestructible
Fania/Craft Recordings

This record is yet another gem unearthed by Craft Recordings in their series of reissues of Latin-American recordings on the Fania, Tico, and associated labels. Indestructible is a high point in conguero Ray Barretto’s catalog, a salsa-based album with a hot horn section that occasionally flirts into jazz territory, somewhat reminiscent of Tito Puente’s recordings. Kevin Gray remastered this album and given what I’ve heard of genuine Fania/Tico pressings, this one has much more life to it, while also sounding cleaner. (Many of the used Fania records out there have been played to death, on top of their somewhat questionable sound quality.) My only request for Craft at this point would be to reissue Barretto’s classic Acid album. In stereo, please. (Vinyl Me Please reissued it…but in mono.)

November Vinyl Featurette

This treasure goes back decades, to 1953. I don’t know what prompted my mother to buy this record, but she always did have a bit of an adventurous streak in her listening habits. Moondog and his Friends was a record I stumbled across while looking for something to play, and it got quite a few spins by me at a young age. That, along with Burt Bacharach’s shifting time signatures, is probably what made me so comfortable with odd-metered songs throughout my life. There is no indication of who his “friends” were, but Moondog was Louis Hardin, a blind composer and musician who composed music around his own exotic handmade instruments. He was also a street performer, known for stationing himself on the streets of New York City and performing for those who encountered him in their travels.

This EP was one of his earliest releases. Side one is a scattering of various songs and poems, where the second side contains two similar but contrasting musical suites more rooted in the classical music tradition. It would take paragraphs to fully explore the music on this 10-inch record, but it certainly at the time was unusual.

I currently possess two copies of this record. One was the copy I grew up with which, of course, had its share of battle scars (scratches, scuffs, a few stuck grooves). About 20 years ago, I set about finding a better copy of it. At the time, even back then, copies sold on eBay typically sold in the $150 range; I lucked into an auction and got an excellent copy for half that price.

It was “reissued” in recent years but, having heard a sample of it, the source is a poor-quality needle drop, with revised cover art. I wouldn’t say it’s a pirated release, but it certainly is of questionable origin, being on an unknown label.

The sound quality is certainly not audiophile-grade on this record, but the music is such that a listener gets pulled in and can’t pay attention to anything else. For reference, if anyone has ever heard his three records on the Prestige label (Moondog, More Moondog, The Story of Moondog), those records are not too much different from this one.

For being 71 years old, the record itself has held up well. And all these years later, I’m still fascinated by the music.

Here is my needle drop of this record, posted on YouTube:

So, you want to play in a rock band. An obvious question is, what kind of music do you want to play?

Maybe you don’t want to play rock at all. Perhaps being in a country band is more your thing, or you want to do folk music, or jazz, or electronica, or hip-hop, or R&B, or some crazy experimental thing that defies categorization that no one’s ever heard before, even in a hipper-than-thou Brooklyn club. But you need to decide what you want to play, and if it’s rock, what variety, whether classic rock, death metal, hard rock, Top 40, and so on.

You need to have a brand…er, band identity. Check that…you do need to have a “brand” identity if you expect to get booked. Club and venue owners won’t hire you unless they know what kind of music you play. (Even then, until or if you ever build a following, you’ll be banging on doors constantly trying to get gigs.) And if you ever get to the point where you might get a record deal, label execs will have to know what category to market you in (or they’ll shove you into one). You also want to be in a group with fellow band members who want to play the same music you do.

The basic dividing line to consider is that there are two types of bands: cover bands, and those that play original music.

Cover bands are overwhelmingly more prevalent, and there’s some real money to be made if you’re in a tribute band, do corporate gigs and weddings, or build a strong local and regional following. You might have heard of some of the more successful cover bands or even seen them, like Brit Floyd, or the Fab Faux. Many tribute bands go through great pains to get the original band’s sound, look, and even stage lighting as exact as possible. Listening to and watching The Musical Box, the world’s premier Genesis tribute act, is spooky, like going back to the 1970s in a time machine. (Perhaps it’s not surprising that they’re officially sanctioned by Genesis and even use some of Genesis’s original props and slides.)

Looking the part: Beatles tribute band Britain's Finest. Courtesy of the band.

But if you really want to follow your artistic vision (or the band’s), and have aspirations to a record deal, radio play, and artistic recognition, you’re going to be playing in a band that does original music. You’ll never be the next Taylor Swift or Bob Dylan or Chris Stapleton or Rolling Stones by playing in a cover band.

The odds are strong, though, that you’re going to wind up playing in a cover band. Whether your band plays originals or covers, you'll need to develop an appropriate repertoire.

This goes hand in hand with what kind of band you are, what kind of gigs you’ll be playing, and where you’ll be playing them. Bar bands in my neck of the woods (and from what I've seen on various forums, elsewhere) play a pretty standard group of songs, some of which haven’t changed in 50 years. (More on that in a bit.)

Playing in the (bar) band: Corn Cob Mojo at The Laurel, East Northport, New York, July 2024. They play Johnny Cash, Merle Haggard, the Band...they don't play Beyoncé or Billie Eilish or Sam Smith.

Wedding bands have a very different set of expectations to fulfill – they have to play cocktail hour music, a first set, a dinner set, a dancing and partying set, and know all the expected songs for Italian, Greek, Irish, Jewish and other ethnic-group weddings. For library gigs, you need to have a theme, whether it’s the music of the Sixties, a doo-wop show, playing the Great American Songbook, and so on. Corporate gigs are run by the event planner, and their word is law.

For family-oriented events like outdoor festivals, fairs, art walks and car shows, you’ll need to play songs that are familiar and family-friendly. Motown, classic rock, pop and country will go over, and Meshuggah, the Mahavishnu Orchestra, and Nina Hagen will not. At an outdoor festival this summer, a School of Rock band played “Killing in the Name” by Rage Against the Machine. For those not familiar with the song, it ends with the lyric “F*ck you, I won’t do what they tell me” repeated over and over. I wonder what teacher thought that would be OK for a crowd that included very young kids? The host of the event was not pleased.

Rockin' the Showmobile: The Soul Jam Revue at the East Northport Chamber of Commerce Festival, September 2024. The all-ages crowd loved their blend of soul and R&B. They did not play "Killing in the Name."

Naturally, and this goes along with your band’s musical identity, you’ll need to choose songs that fit your style. Classic rock audiences are going to want to hear Pink Floyd, the Stones, Led Zeppelin, Fleetwood Mac, Eagles, Skynyrd, Petty. Classic country bands better know their Johnny Cash and Hank Williams. Soul/funk/R&B bands will be playing Earth, Wind & Fire, Sly, Stevie…you get the idea.

Then there’s the age-old consideration: do you want to play the songs you and your band want to play, or do you want to play crowd pleasers?

Sometimes there’s an inverse relationship between the two. Almost every musician I know dreads playing the same hackneyed old bar band standards that have been played for years and decades. Poke around online and you’ll see the litany: “Brown Eyed Girl,” “Sweet Caroline,” “Keep Playing That Rock and Roll,” “Keep Your Hands to Yourself,” “Valerie” (which has become a rite of passage for aspiring female singers, almost comically so), “Sweet Home Alabama,” “Tequila Sunrise,” and the single most dreaded cover song of all time for veteran musicians: “Mustang Sally.”

But these tired old numbers get people singing along or onto the dance floor every time. So, do you refuse to play stuff like this because you don’t like the music, or do you have the attitude that you’re there to entertain, you’re getting paid, this is the stuff that people want to hear, so do your job, stop complaining and play the songs! Many musicians who do it for a living take the latter attitude, and hey, entertaining a crowd and having them like you doesn’t suck. Although every musician I know is mystified by how popular “Wagon Wheel” has become, the Bob Dylan song popularized by Old Crow Medicine Show some years ago. Whether it’s a bar or street fair, a young or old crowd, everyone lights up and sings along when you play this. I don’t get it. And yes, I’ve played the song. Many times.

It still mystifies me how this song got so popular. It'll never be on my iPod playlist.

You need to have a set list. For me, the most amateur unforgivable sin a band can make is playing a song, then looking at each other and going, “what song do you want to do now?” “I don’t know, what song do you want to do now?” And repeat, and repeat. It wastes time, kills whatever momentum you might have built, and makes you look really, really, really unprofessional. Have a set list for each of your sets.

Those sets need to be carefully paced. Usually, you want to hit the audience hard right out of the gate and play a few of your best and most up-tempo numbers. Then the band can ease up a bit during the middle of the set, and end with a few strong songs. If you’re a dance band, it’s a great idea to string a bunch of songs together to keep the momentum going. Not for nothing, club owners want to see people dancing, having a good time and drinking. The more cynical among us will say that the job of the band is to sell drinks. I’m not quite that jaded, but it’s a fact of life.

If you're playing in a bar band and there's a dance floor, this is what you want to see. Original Gossip at the Memory Motel, Montauk, New York, May 2024. Yep, the place the Stones wrote the song about.

That said, don’t look at your set like it’s cast in stone. You need to be flexible and read the crowd. If everyone’s dancing in a conga line around the pool table, ditch that slow song. Conversely, if the bar is emptying at 1:30 in the morning and you’re playing to three people zoning in front of the TV, you can experiment with trying out newer songs.

Set list from a band (I didn't catch their name) who played the Lindenhurst Summer Concert Series, Lindenhurst, New York, July, 2024. If you guessed they were a country/rock band, you'd be right.

Once in a while people are going to ask for requests. If you know the song, great! (And you might get a nice tip.) If you kind of know it, I’d say try to get through it as best you can, as the person requesting it will be very grateful, and usually, experienced musicians can finesse their way through a song. In fact, this is the one situation where I’d consider it acceptable to read lyrics off an iPhone.

How do you become able to play off the cuff? Play, play, and play more, and when you’re not playing, listen to the music you encounter in day-to-day life, absorb the chord changes, develop an ear, and if in doubt, lay out. Most rock and country songs are not so complicated that you can't fake your way through it if you're an experienced player.

If your band doesn't know the song, politely say that you don’t know it, even if, and perhaps especially if, you’re dealing with a belligerent drunk. One thing that works well is to tell the person, “we don’t know that song, but how about if we play one like it, or another song by the same band?” That’s usually fine. Or you can take the hard-nosed approach, which also works: tell the person you don’t know the song, then signal the rest of the band and immediately count off and go into the next song you were going to do anyway. If you have a regular gig at the venue, you can tell someone that you don’t know the song but can learn it for next time. (FYI, the times our band or the person making the request remember this at the next gig has been exactly zero.)

On the gig, whether you're in an original or cover band, pay attention to what works and what doesn’t. As noted, there are certain cover songs that just work live, and if you have the audience’s attention, do everything you can to keep it! Again, this involves a balance between what you want to play and what people want to hear. One of the bands I used to play in worked up a very cool (if I say so myself) and intricate version of “Modern Music” by Be-Bop Deluxe. We loved playing it. It died every time. The band I’m in now plays “Cruel to be Kind” by Nick Lowe. It’s a guaranteed winner.

If you’re playing all-originals, you’ll also find out which numbers engage the audience and which fall flat. You and your band members (and if you're on a higher level, your manager and producer), should already have a good idea of what your stronger songs are, but there's nothing like playing them in front of an audience to find out what works...and what may not. Sometimes they may not always coincide. There are many stories of artists being caught off guard by how popular a song became. Joe Walsh wrote the lyrics to "Rocky Mountain Way" in the middle of mowing his lawn. After decades of audiences wanting him to play it every night, in an interview, he said something to the effect of, “if I knew that this song was gonna be the one I'd be playing for the rest of my life, I would have written a different song!”

Know your band’s musical and vocal strengths and weaknesses, and play to them, literally. If you’ve got a vocalist who can nail Led Zeppelin’s “Going to California” or “Crazy on You” by Heart, then let them loose to blow everyone away with their talent. However, most bands don’t have vocalists with that kind of range, so be realistic. I have a less-than-stellar voice, so I’m never going to be able to sing a Daryl Hall and John Oates song and sound anything but terrible. But I can do a good Johnny Cash. If the band has great instrumental soloists, flaunt them! No one would have wanted to hear guitarists Duane Allman and Dickey Betts of the Allman Brothers restricting themselves to four-bar solos.

A band’s repertoire is a constantly-evolving process. Aside from seeing what works and what doesn’t, there are always new songs to write, or cover, and as you add more strong songs to the set, you can cull the weaker ones. Sometimes the band just gets flat out bored playing a song one or 50 times too many.

Aside from playing your own gigs, go out there and listen to other bands and study what they’re doing, whether it’s the dad band at the local dive bar or a drum-tight Las Vegas show band, a young new singer/songwriter finding their way through their material or Steely Dan playing with note-perfect precision. Every time I see a band or play a gig, I learn something. You can too.

Header image: a wall at Stitch Bar and Blues, Manhattan, New York. They will be expecting you to play blues.

Recently, Copper contributor Larry Jaffee, the co-founder of record industry conference Making Vinyl, gave a talk at Long Island University called “The Ambivalent Jewish Lives of Two Rock Gods.” Jaffee is currently an adjunct assistant professor teaching Writing About Music at St. John’s University. For the lecture, Jaffee researched Lou Reed and Joey Ramone’s experiences as Jewish young men growing up on Long Island, and how it influenced their music and lives. I had planned on attending the session but unforeseen circumstances intervened. Larry and I are also Jewish.

So, I asked Larry to send me the slides for his presentation as a springboard, and used them as the basis for this interview. (You can view the video of Larry's presentation at this link.)

Frank Doris: As you point out, for a lot of Jewish people, including Lou Reed and Joey Ramone, Judaism influences their lives, but they don't wear it on their sleeve. For both Reed and Ramone, they went out of their way to avoid talking about their Jewishness early in their careers, but thought differently about it by the end of their lives.

Larry Jaffee: The interesting thing is that his first wife Bettye Kronstad told me that when they would visit Lou’s parents, he was the perfect Jewish husband. Not so much from a religious standpoint, [but] just protective of his wife. He felt like he should be the breadwinner. They weren't even married in the early years. They met in 1968 and he wanted to marry her right from the start, and she kept fending him off. And then finally, guess it was 1972 or 1973, she finally just said yes and [felt like] he was head over heels for her. Although she was concerned about his drinking problem.

FD: Lou Reed has this image of being a rock and roll badass, and picturing him having a Bar Mitzvah and going to temple doesn’t square with the image he was cultivating.

LJ: But you and me and both of them, we were controlled by our parents. We didn't really have a lot of say in the matter.

Lou Reed at the Hop Farm Music Festival, July 2011. Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons/Man Alive!

FD: Being a rock star is so intertwined with your public image, and it was especially so in the pre-internet days. It was all about cultivating a mystique, a persona, and if people like Joey Ramone or Lou Reed or any rock star, for that matter, told the world they were Jewish or Catholic or atheist it would break the air of mystery.

For you and I, growing up Jewish in the towns where we were on Long Island gave us a feeling that we were in a minority. As you’ve noted to me, you encountered anti-Semitism in your high school. And feeling like being in a minority had to have informed Lou Reed’s and Joey Ramone’s lives. Lou Reed’s family changed their name from Rabinowitz. Joey Ramone’s real name was Jeffrey Hyman. So you’re looked down upon by a portion of society because you were a rock and roll musician, and in some circles, also because you were Jewish.

LJ: Joey's case was a little different because his parents went through a divorce. Lou's parents did not. Lou obviously had [great] musical talent.

The Ramones in 1977, with Joey Ramone at left. Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons/press kit photo.

FD: You said that in November 1975, Lou Reed heard a tape of Ramones demos from Danny Fields (soon-to-be co-manager of the Ramones) and responded, “middle-class Jews are going to be so offended by this.” Why would he think that?

LJ: Joey was a hippie. That was one of Johnny Ramone's complaints about him. Whereas Lou was older and was more probably under the influence of Mad magazine and Lenny Bruce, and loved doo-wop music. And [Lou’s] parents were concerned [about him]. They gave him electroshock treatment. I think that had a lot to do with the way his personality was, why he was so angry a lot at the time.

Getting back to his thoughts about the Ramones demo, [he really liked it] and said something like, “this is what parents were afraid of.” What astounded me is that I had never heard Lou Reed get excited about anybody [other rock bands]. When I finally had a direct encounter with him we talked a little bit about jazz, so I knew he could get excited about jazz, but never rock. It seemed like he disliked everything [in rock], including Patti Smith.

FD: You said that Lou warmed up to Judaism later in his life. I'm wondering if he just got more spiritual in general. I know he was into tai chi.

LJ: His second wife Sylvia gave me a couple examples of when things started changing. There was a 1981 Ralph Bakshi film called American Pop. It’s a story about four generations of Russian Jews who are musicians. One of the characters was obviously based on Lou as a blonde at his strangest period. Sylvia said that watching that movie hit him so hard, all of a sudden he [had a realization about his Jewishness]. They ate regularly at Jewish restaurants, and Sammy's Romanian Steakhouse on the Lower East Side was his favorite. They would go to Zabar’s and Barney Greengrass on the Upper West Side.

FD: I noticed in one of the slides in your presentation that Joey Ramone is buried in the Jewish section of Hillside Cemetery in New Jersey, and his headstone has a Jewish star on one end and eighth notes on the other. Was that specified in his will?

LJ: Don't know. I did send an e-mail to his brother, who's the only person that could really talk about that. But Mickey did not respond.

A book called The Heebie-Jeebies at CBGB’s: A Secret History of Jewish Punk devotes a lot of space to Joey and Lou, as well as other musicians from the evolving NYC punk scene like Richard Hell, “Handsome Dick” Manitoba [of the Dictators] and Lenny Kaye [of the Patti Smith Group].

Joey Ramone's gravesite. Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons/Tony.

FD: I think I told you that when I first met Joey Ramone, backstage at a New Year’s Eve gig where our band was warming up for them (in 1980 at Malibu nightclub in Lido Beach, New York), I was surprised about how humble he was. When you see him up on stage, you think, man, this guy is a serious badass dude. And he was just this sweet guy. He was so nice to me and we talked quite a bit, and he gave me a lot of advice about what I might encounter if I wanted to pursue a rock and roll career. That was one of my first life lessons when I was young: that the person in the image can be very different from the actual person.

LJ: When I met him the first time in 1977 at My Father’s Place (a famous club on Long Island), they were going to open for Blue Öyster Cult at the Nassau Coliseum [at a later gig]. And I said to him, “it's a pretty big stage compared to My Father’s Place. What will you do with all that space?” He said, “I don't know!”

I find Lou and [his relationship with] Long Island very interesting because when he was a kid, he loved living in Brooklyn. When he was about nine or 10 they moved to Freeport (Long Island), and he found it traumatic. He had a really hard time acclimating. I wonder if it was from his parents [being concerned about him being Jewish in an unfamiliar environment] and warning him to be on your guard.

FD: When Lou Reed went to Syracuse (University), you said college changed everything for him.

LJ: He was at NYU for a semester or so, then dropped out. Apparently he had some sort of breakdown. He originally planned to go to Syracuse with a Jewish high school friend, and the last minute changed [his mind]. I think the reason he wanted to go to NYU is so he could go to jazz clubs. But meanwhile, he was going through electroshock [treatment], which began while he was in high school.

FD: He had to have been resentful about that.

LJ: At Syracuse, he was a bit of a troublemaker, and he also studied literature with acclaimed [writer and poet] Delmore Schwartz, his professor. He would go and get drunk with Schwartz, who was an alcoholic. Schwartz died in 1966, just before the first Velvet Underground album was released. Lou wrote at least two songs about Schwartz, “European Son” and “My House.”

Aidan Levy’s 2016 biography of Lou Reed, Dirty Blvd., contains amazing stories from his college friends, some who were his bandmates while they were at Syracuse. They would be booked for a gig at the Jewish frat house. Lou would show up purposely late, almost as if he tried to sabotage the gig.

Anne Frank statue, Amsterdam, the Netherlands, courtesy of Larry Jaffee. Steve Katz, Lou Reed’s former producer, tells a disturbing story in his 2015 memoir Blood, Sweat, and My Rock 'n' Roll Years: Is Steve Katz a Rock Star?, about he and Lou visiting the Anne Frank House in 1973. After Lou came down from the stairs, he yelled for everyone to hear, “who the f*ck is Anne Frank?”

FD: It's impossible to sum up somebody as complex as Lou Reed in a few sentences, but what do you think Lou Reed's real impact will be when history looks back?

LJ: I think Lou’s lasting effect was him introducing – through the Velvet Underground – musical dissonance and [lyrical] subject matter that were not silly love songs. “Sister Ray” is a pretty amazing piece of music, but also lyrically, note the seedy story Lou is telling. Loaded was full of would-be hits if we were in a perfect world.

FD: When I first heard [“Sister Ray”] I literally didn't know what he was talking about. “I couldn't hit it sideways.” Later I realized, good lord, the guy's talking about shooting heroin. And then I realized after learning more about him that he wasn’t just making up a story. He was speaking from experience. This was probably unheard of before the Velvet Underground.

LJ: In the song “Heroin,” when Lou says, “when I'm rushing on my run and I feel just like Jesus’s son”…I wonder if this is a rebellion against his [Jewish] father? It’s similar to Dylan on “Highway 61 Revisited”: “G-d said to Abraham, kill me a son.” [I think] basically that was Dylan rebelling against his own father, whose name was Abraham. And then two [Velvet Underground] albums later, Lou has a song called “Jesus,” where he says, “Jesus, help me find my proper place, help me in my weakness.” I wondered if that was more rebellion against his roots.

FD: There's a part in your presentation where you say his wife Sylvia never saw Lou Reed angrier than when he felt that anti-Semitism was happening.

LJ: I think that was more in business encounters, like negotiating for a gig or a recording contract or something like that. He had friendships with Clive Davis (founder of Arista Records, one of Lou’s later record labels) and (Sire Records founder) Seymour Stein and I think he admired both of them because they were Jewish. And in both of their autobiographies, they talk about their friendships with Lou. In Clive's book (The Soundtrack of My Life), he said Lou would come to his apartment to watch the Thanksgiving parade down Central Park West and nosh on bagels. [And here’s Lou with] his black nail polish.

FD: What an image.

In their own way the Ramones were just as groundbreaking as Lou Reed, and certainly not appreciated for it at the time. Did Joey have any sense that what they were doing was revolutionizing music and sowing the seeds for punk, or not?

LJ: When I finally sat down for a real interview with Joey and with Dee Dee separately in 1985, they were still angry at the band’s lack of success. They had been together for more than 10 years [at the time], were never taken seriously as a groundbreaking band in the US, [and] felt they were better-appreciated in Europe. They basically taught the Clash and the Sex Pistols how to do punk.

FD: Along with the Stooges and the MC5 probably.

LJ: Right.

Dee Dee Ramone and Joey Ramone, East Village, New York City, July 1985. Photo courtesy of Larry Jaffee, all rights reserved.

Danny Fields told Lou Reed that Clive Davis passed on [signing] the Ramones because he thought they were too raw. And Lou said, “oh, that's just like Clive. He doesn't even realize this is the future. How can he pass on them?”

FD: But I’ve heard time and again that Lou Reed became more at peace after he met Laurie Anderson, and he accepted death readily and was calm about it.

LJ: I asked him about whether he ever recorded with Laurie, and he felt he wasn't really worthy of that. Can you imagine? He called her “Madam Tech.” We didn't really talk about spirituality [when I met him]. He talked about racism, and he got really choked up.

The other thing about when I finally got to interview Lou – and it took me 25 years – was that I asked Lenny Kaye [author and guitarist for the Patti Smith Group] and [writer] David Fricke about what was the best way to deal with Lou in an interview. Lenny said, “stick with [talking about] technology.” So the magazine that I edited [at the time] was called Medialine, which covered [physical media and things like that]. I brought all our sister publications with me, Guitar Player, Keyboard, Modern Drummer, and Lou was devouring them.

Lou Reed at Arlene Schnitzer Concert Hall, Portland, Oregon, 2004, the year after Larry Jaffee's interview with him. Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons/dannynorton.

FD: He was fanatical about gear. And people think the guy can't play, but they say the same thing about Jack White. My response is, you try to play like that.

That's another thing about the Ramones. They were looked down upon for just playing two or three chord songs – which is actually not true – and people would say, “all he's doing is playing bar chords” about Johnny Ramone’s playing. And again, if you try to play like that, with all downstrokes at warp speed, you’ll probably give up after about a minute. I saw Green Day do a Ramones tribute and they needed two guitarists to get the sound of Johnny Ramone. And Joey Ramone could double-track his vocals perfectly.

Joey Ramone and the Ramones, Seattle, Washington, 1983. Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons/Mrhyak.

LJ: Joey was originally going to be the drummer but he had difficulty singing and playing drums at the same time.

FD: It’s known that towards the end of the Ramones’ career they didn't like each other very much, and when they broke up it was with little fanfare. Even though the Ramones had success, it gets frustrating when you don’t get the recognition you deserve and it starts to wear on you. I don’t know how much of their breakup resulted from that, and how much was from personality clashes.

LJ: It goes earlier than that. Around 1980, Johnny was having an affair with Joey's girlfriend and then married her. It’s captured in Joey’s song, “The KKK Took My Baby Away.”

FD: When I tell people about some of the things we experienced as musicians being around New York in the late 1970s and early 1980s, they sometimes get jealous. It was almost like living in a golden age. Did you ever read the book Love Goes to Buildings on Fire: Five Years in New York That Changed Music Forever?

LJ: I have it here.

FD: It’s a brilliant analysis of what was happening at the time in punk, new wave, hip-hop, disco – really incredible. (The book is by Will Hermes, who also wrote the recent and excellent Lou Reed: The King of New York.)

So certainly, Lou Reed and Joey Ramone would have had a different musical and personal development if they hadn’t been Jewish and if they hadn’t grown up in New York. Do you have any final thoughts on that?

LJ: What I find interesting about both is that they acted out occasionally against their Jewish roots midway through their careers. For example, Lou actually had an Iron Cross briefly dyed into his hair in 1973. The turning point was in 1989 when on the New York album, he criticized a well-known politician for not renouncing a high-profile anti-Semite. Soon after Lou regularly attended the Downtown Seder organized by Michael Dorf.

A week after my in-person interview with Joey, he actually threatened me over the phone, inquiring whether the article I was writing, which was eventually published by Mother Jones, would include his real name and that he was Jewish. Both were germane to the article, which was principally about the Ramones song “Bonzo Goes to Bitburg.” Rumor has it that Sire did not release the song, which eventually showed up on a 12-inch import single from the UK indie label Beggars Banquet, because it didn’t want to risk angering the Reagan administration.

I told Joey the honest truth, that I did not know because I had no control over what an editor might do. His words, “I know where you live,” will forever echo in my brain. Meanwhile, he was buried in a Jewish cemetery.

Lou Reed’s autographs of the author’s original promo LP of Metal Machine Music (1975), and 8-track tape of The Velvet Underground Live at Max’s Kansas City.

Header image collage courtesy of Susan Schwartz-Christian from images sourced from Wikipedia.

Audience, located in San Marcos, California, mostly designs and manufacturers home audiophile products. These include cables, power conditioner products, a few system accessories, a loudspeaker, and other items. Though the company also makes several pro-audio goodies such as guitar cables, that’s a story for a different day.

Perhaps somehow knowing that my “career” playing the bass guitar unceremoniously ended in junior high school only a year or two after it began, Audience sent me samples of some their home audiophile wares. Indeed, I’ve previously had the company’s aR-12 12-outlet power conditioner and frontRow power cord in my room. But Audience has just released a new line of flagship cables called frontRow Reserve, and John McDonald, Audiences’ President and CEO, asked if I would like to try them. I was eager to do so because Audience does not launch a new flagship line of cables very often. The frontRow cables have served as the company’s top-dog line for about five years.

Included in the rather large box that I received from Audience were several samples from the new frontRow Reserve line: a power cord, single-ended and balanced interconnects, and a USB cable. Plus, there was a sample of the company’s Hidden Treasure CAT 7 Ethernet cable. I think it’s about here that I must mention that Audience calls its power cords “powerChords.”

The AC connector on a frontRow Reserve powerChord.

In getting these products ready to be shot for this photography column, I noticed that they had some weight to them. This was particularly true for the power cord, ummm I mean powerChord, which clocked in at 2.5 pounds.

Having auditioned only one frontRow product (the power cord) in my system quite some time ago, I am in no position to say how, if at all, the new frontRow Reserve products might be better than those from the frontRow line. Although I have just begun listening to these newcomers in my audio system, it seems that that they will have no problem competing with other cables I have auditioned in their class. That’s not faint praise. Attributes like transparency, detail, and eerie soundstaging are all there with these cables in my system. And in all fairness, Audience calls for 300 hours run-in for full performance.

The cables are offered in a variety of connection options.

Here's a look at a Hidden Treasure Ethernet cable.

Disclaimer: The editor has done some occasional work for Audience. He did not select the company that would be featured in this photo essay or know its identity until he received the relevant copy and photos from the author.

All images courtesy of Howard Kneller. Howard is the co-founder of The Listening Chair with Howard Kneller, a reviewing and news organization for all things audiophile.

Check out the latest from TLC on the web (www.thelisteningchair.net) and its YouTube channel (https://www.youtube.com/@thelisteningchair_).

Also note TLC’s growing TLC’s social media ecosystem, including its Facebook group (https://www.facebook.com/groups/217745678009888), where members from around the world show off their gear; and LinkedIn group (https://www.linkedin.com/in/howard-kneller/), Instagram (www.instagram.com/howardkneller/), Threads (www.threads.net/@howardkneller) and X (www.x.com/HowardKneller) pages.

"I hope these songs bring back happy memories. You will know why I picked them. Every day we were together was the best day of my life. I will love you forever."

Who is J? My wife Judicia. On May 9, 2023, I add the first songs to a 16-track Spotify playlist that only my wife was supposed to see. At first. I made the mix private. But how would she see it if I happened to pass away before her? She doesn't have a Spotify account. That's where my son would come in. I would tell him in advance about the playlist and he would share it when I was gone.

Wait? When I'm gone? I wasn't planning on going anywhere. This is true. But I've always had this premonition that I would die before my wife. I'm 60 years old.  She's 62. My son is 32. We're all relatively young.  But something has always nagged at me about death. And I wanted to leave behind for her something that would be different than any other keepsake. A “mixtape” – Spotify playlist – seemed the way to go. She knows I'm a music fanatic. My idea was that the “tape” would be a look back at our time together. Especially our early days. Going out, getting married, having a child. Those were the cornerstones of our young relationship.

But the plan almost took a disastrous turn on July 30, 2024. I suffered a stroke and was incapacitated for three days.  Luckily, I awoke from the stroke and am doing fine now. But for a few days things were not looking positive. My son came all the way from Australia to spend a week with me as I recovered. When he went back home I remembered the mixtape I had made for my wife. Luckily he played it for her and all turned out well.

Still, I'm reminded how fragile life is. Had I not come out of the stroke as strong as before, what would have become of the musical gift I made for my wife?

"I will love you forever." And I always will.

Click here or on the image above to link to the For J Spotify playlist.

Header image courtesy of Pexels.com/Asad Photo Maldives.

When I asked folks to tell me what bit of PS Audio history they'd like to have me tell the story of, one of the most popular was that of how the PowerPlant power regenerator came into being.

In 1997, after seven years together, Arnie Nudell and I split up to go our separate ways. Genesis Technologies was struggling and so too were Arnie and I. Let's just say we were two Type-A bulls locking horns too many times.

It had all started back in 1990 when I had sold PS Audio to Steve Jeffery and Randy Patton in order to move to Colorado and start Genesis Technologies with Arnie. Seven years later, at about the same time as Arnie and I were getting a divorce from each other, Steve and Randy were doing the same thing (must have been something in the audiophile air).

The one remaining owner of PS Audio following Steve and Randy's breakup was Steve, who had heard I was no longer at Genesis and called me asking if I wanted to repurchase PS Audio. His asking price? $1.00. Clearly, there was nothing left of the company but the name; still, this was an amazingly generous act of kindness on the part of Steve (for which Terri and I have always been grateful).

Now jobless and living in Vail, Colorado with our four teenage sons, we were free from one company and eager to get started with revitalizing PS Audio. The company structure was simple. Terri ran the front end with all the accounting and sales, while I ran the back end with building a website, designing the products, and getting them made. Just the two of us along with our subcontractor, my dear friend and colleague, Rick Cullen back in California.

Simple, clean, but with one big problem.

We had nothing to sell.

Still, it was our baby, and Terri and I were happy to have it back (despite the fact "it" wasn't anything more than two initials famous in the audio industry).

I was free. Free to dream, free to invent, free to imagine what the next line of audio products might be. And dream I did. In fact, it's where the vision I have worked so hard towards over the last three decades originated: build an affordable state-of-the-art end-to-end hi-fi line that I would be thrilled to have in my home (a vision we finally completed in 2022 with the addition of Chris Brunhaver's Aspen speakers and the creation of Octave Records).

The more I thought about it the more I was convinced that's what I wanted to contribute to the high-end audio world – an end-to-end hand-curated system, from the AC outlet to your ears and everything in between.

As in any good story or novel, if you know what the ending looks like, the best place to start is the beginning – and that would be the AC wall socket.

At the time there was very little on the market for AC power products. If memory serves me, the only two products of any consequence were the Tice Power Block and the MIT Z-Stabilizer, along with a handful of off-the-shelf power wannabes.

George Tice had built a respectable power isolation getup using big isolation transformers that seemed to clean things up nicely, while Bruce Brisson's Z-Stabilizer was more of a parallel AC network said to do all sorts of great things.

Sonically, I wasn't happy with the bleaching of sound I experienced with the Tice products, but the MIT box seemed to help rather a lot (though I could not measure any improvements). But, clearly, getting the AC power right had a rather major impact on sound quality, something I already understood from years ago when Stan discovered the impact of using oversized power transformers – a practice we champion even to this day.

In the mid 1980s, Stan Warren (the “S” in PS Audio) had stumbled onto an amazing discovery. The bigger the power transformer, the better the sound. And this didn't really make sense. Think about it. A transformer capable of running a 200 watt-per-channel Class AB power amplifier capable of consuming 600 watts of power, being connected to a preamplifier that consumed no more than maybe 30 watts max, dramatically improved the sound of the preamplifier.

Bonkers, right?

Let's remind ourselves of a few things. First, power transformers take the AC out of the wall (120V or 230V) and through their coils of wire and magnetic coupling, they reduce (or increase) that voltage to what's needed for the circuit they are powering. So, let's imagine our preamplifier runs on +/-30 volts DC (which all of ours did). This means you need a bit more than the cumulative voltage (30 + 30 = 60 volts) so that your voltage regulators have headroom to do their business. So, let's imagine we want a total of 75 volts coming into our preamplifier. Great. As long as the power transformer feeding your preamplifier is big enough to supply that 75V to the preamp (without strain or loss) then all is good. Choose the smallest viable transformer for your circuit and you're in (transformers are expensive and you can usually price them by the pound).

But, here's the thing. While a minimum-size transformer is needed, there is no requirement for a maximum-sized transformer. In other words, once you satisfy the transformer size, you could then switch to a transformer the size of a Honda Civic and, as long as its output voltage is the same as a small transformer, it would theoretically perform the same. The preamplifier circuit shouldn't care it's connected to a beast or a wimp.

That thinking works well for slide rules and calculators, but not for sonic performance.

Our preamplifier was under development at the time, and Stan didn't have on hand the standard small power transformer we normally used. He did, however, have a same-voltage 'former used for our power amplifier. This sucker was easily 20 times the size we would ever consider using, but, what the heck?

He (and later me) nearly fell over. From the very first note, this preamp sounded out-of-this-world better than anything we had ever heard. And, it was thanks to the lower impedance and superior regulation provided by this massive power transformer.*

*Side note: this revelation would lead to our release of what we called the HCPS (High Current Power Supply), one of the world's first optional external power supplies available in high-end audio. It would also lead to the development of the PowerPlant AC regenerators).

This insight was clue number one on the trail for how to make a new "Blue Ocean" product.

Having discovered the importance of lowering the source impedance of the AC feeding a preamplifier or power amplifier, the positives and negatives I was hearing with the early crop of power conditioners were beginning to make sense.

Bruce Brisson's MIT Z-Stabilizer sounded significantly better than Tice's isolation transformers and I now knew part of the reason why: parallel conditioning versus series conditioning. The Z-Stabilizer featured a parallel network, which meant that it added no additional impedance to the AC power feeding my equipment. The Tice, on the other hand, did the opposite. It, like 99.9 percent of all power products, added to the series impedance, and that is why it sounded cleaner, yet bleached.

If I was going to change the world with a Blue Ocean product, I now understood it could not add to the series impedance of the AC power feeding the equipment.

At the same time, I also realized a basic problem with any parallel device: they don't do much. By their very nature they cannot do much, and this is because they can add to what is there but are unable to subtract something. Perhaps a good example of this can be found in a power supply where we rely upon a parallel process to get the results we want. In any AC-to-DC supply (which is inside all of our stereo equipment), we have a pretty important parallel element: capacitors. These instantaneous energy storage and release devices are like little buckets. When they are empty they will greedily suck power from the wall and fill themselves once every 50th or 60th of a second. Once full, they regurgitate that energy back onto the line in a sort of see saw manner of sucking and spewing (we can get into the details of this in a later post but suffice it to say the reason we want this activity is to fill in the gaps of AC in our quest to make smooth and constant DC).

The more of these parallel caps you add the better they work in this scenario. So, this is a pretty good example of how a parallel process is beneficial. It's additive. Problem is, it can't work in the other direction. In order to remove something, you need to add back in a series element which, as we now know, is something we want to avoid because it adds impedance and, impedance in line with our AC power is the enemy of good sound. It holds back a product's potential and the tradeoff between the cleaning it can provide versus the degradation it wreaks is not worth the price asked.

There had to be another way.

Once you know something you can't un-know it.

Learning that impedance in the AC line is the enemy of good sound unlocked Pandora's Box, unleashing an entirely new set of problems I never knew were there.

Having just figured out that the elephant in the room was that 99.9 percent of all power conditioners were designed in such a way that it made worse an already bad problem – and that nothing in the world of passive components (inductors, capacitors, resistors) could make it better – I began to realize there was an even bigger elephant in the room. To make a pun, the next problem was a mammoth of a problem.

The AC wiring in our homes.

Dang it. There seemed a conspiracy afoot! No sooner had I realized technology's solution to one problem (dirty power) was exacerbating an even bigger problem (AC line impedance), the futility of the next one boggled the mind.

All wire has impedance (resistance). The longer the wire, the greater the impedance. For example, most homes are wired inside the walls with 14-gauge copper. This thickness of wire adds about 2.5 ohms of resistance per every 1,000 feet. That's a problem. Consider the probable length of wire connecting your hi-fi equipment to the source of AC power – somewhere in your neighborhood, sitting either underground or high atop a utility pole, is a big power transformer. It could be literally a mile or more away from your home.

Ugh. Big problem. Here I was, worrying about milliohms (one-thousandth of an Ohm) getting in the way of our musical pleasure, and it had just occurred to me that there were thousands upon thousands of these unwanted milliohms between me and my source of power.

I can't avoid the necessity of my home having to be connected to the utility company's power source.

Good lord!

And, while I was  stressing about this latest problem, yet another was rearing its ugly head. One that was potentially even worse. But what’s the old saying? "Things always get worse before they get better."

Once I had realized the main culprit to holding back the performance of our beloved hi-fi systems was the impedance of the AC power delivered to our wall sockets, and then got slapped over the head with the worse news ever, that the very means by which power is delivered into our homes – the wires themselves – was making the problem so much worse, I was half-ready to throw in the towel on my dream project.

And then things went even further downhill.

I knew that the AC power leaving my city's power generating station was a beautiful sine wave – exactly what the Hi-Fi Doctor ordered. Pure, clean, steady power. What I had never stopped to consider, though, was the quality of the sine wave after it traveled through miles and miles of wires and transformers before reaching my home. And if that weren't enough, I figured out an even bigger issue – sharing. We share the power grid with industry, stores, and worst of all, our neighbors. Yup. That neighbor next door? You know, then one with the irritating barking dog? You share your power with them. And why does that matter? Because the more people using the power at the same time, the worse the shape of the sine wave gets. In fact, because all AC power sine waves are synchronized in time, whenever the sine wave rises to the top of its range for me, it is doing the same for every single person on the same grid throughout the state.

And what that means is that at the peak of the sine wave, right when we most need it to be full and beautiful, it's often clipped and hideous. Looks something like this:

When this happens, it means the energy we need to charge up our capacitors is missing. Gone.

When does the bad news stop?

Think about where I now am at in my quest. I now understand the following:

1. The single most important aspect to getting great sound from our equipment is achieved by lowering the impedance of the AC power.
2. Any power conditioner that effectively cleans the power does so by adding impedance and thus, we get cleaner sound but at a cost in sonics we're unwilling to pay.
3. The only effective way of improving the AC quality is by placing something in series and that doesn't work (see point 2).
4. Our homes are connected via hundreds and hundreds of feet of wire that adds resistance and makes this worse.
5. And even if we were to get around those issues, the actual quality of the sine wave sucks.

I was in a real pickle. All I could see in front of me was bad news getting worse.

Then, I had an idea. A flash idea that just popped into my head.

To be continued in Issue 213.

This article was previously published in a series of "Paul's Posts" and has been edited for Copper.

Header image courtesy of Pixabay.com/distelAPPArath.

High Crimes and Misdemeanors

Nobody ever accused the record labels of unnecessary largesse. While the audiophile companies like Impex, Analogue Productions, Mobile Fidelity, Speakers Corner, Intervention and others show care and diligence above and beyond the call, by thinking and acting just like the collectors, music lovers, and audiophiles they serve, the majors have the morality of fast-food chains. Just compare the quality of any audiophile label’s LP sleeves with those of any mass-market releases if you don’t believe me, let alone the grade of the inner sleeves.

It’s all about the bucks and cutting corners and generally taking the cheapest route – and it was true even for premium products like pre-recorded reel-to-reel tapes way back when. As a reminder, I have in front of me a 1/4-track tape – not even the premium 1/2-track edition of the same title – and the manufacturer’s printed-on-the-box price in 1960 was $9.95. That’s $96 in 2022 dollars. And we earn a lot more than they did in 1960.

Make no mistake: aside from promotional samplers, such as the Realistic-branded tapes for RadioShack stores selling for $3.95, pre-recorded open-reel tapes always cost more than the equivalent LPs. When open-reel tapes first appeared, though, they were as luxurious and high-end as today’s 180-gram or 200-gram 45 rpm limited-edition, boxed LPs.

This inexorable decline in the quality of commercial tapes is yet another of the historic rediscoveries I’ve made by turning my clock back to what was the original audiophile era. All you have to do to repeat my learning experience is to acquire a few tapes by a single favorite artist or tapes from a single label, over as short as a 10-year span, to see how the record companies made everything cheaper. Think of any singer or conductor who had a long contract, and who issued a steady flow of titles. You will be shocked by the degradation.

Just as hard-hitting an illustration of this downgrading comes through comparing an early tape to its later release; for example, any best-selling soundtracks or classical albums which stayed in the catalogue for years. I have six different copies of one favorite (which I will not name as I was not put on this planet to subsidize lawyers) spanning 15 years, and you don’t need any set of particular forensic skills to detect how everything from the tape stock to the quality of the box to the tape speed was downgraded.

Only rarely, as in the case of the Beatles, did the packaging or the tape quality go up, as when Capitol Records realized that the Fab Four was the biggest musical act ever. The label stopped releasing the Beatles’ albums as economy-minded 3-3/4 ips 2-on-1 tapes and reissued them at 7-1/2 ips. Better late than never, I guess, when you appreciate the cash cow that happens to be in your barnyard.

Sadly, it’s exactly like the makers of candy bars shaving off a gram or two of chocolate while the price stays the same, rather than raise the price and thus aggravate customers who see the immediate pain of inflation: it’s blatantly obvious when you see a piece of candy go from $1.49 to $1.79, but not so noticeable is a 3-ounce candy bar suddenly dropping to 2.8 oz. Only much later do you realize that the peanut butter cup is much smaller than you recall…and it ain’t nostalgia at play.

Record labels were once the leaders in recording technology, and one cannot praise enough the geniuses in the studios of Capitol, CBS, RCA, EMI, Decca or a few others. But – as seen with the BBC’s decline – commerce always trumps worth. To facilitate the decline in tape quality over its first decade, from sound quality which is still to be bettered 65 years later to something less astounding, the record labels made moves far more egregious than using cheaper boxes, nastier tape and thinner spools, which I’ll get to in a bit. Instead, they weakened the core product.

Sadly, the biggest enabler was the actual technology they were promoting to the very end as the best-sounding format of them all. Just as the deaf morons in the music biz circa 2022 try to get the masses to believe that streaming sounds as good as LPs (or CDs, cassettes or whatever other source you can name), so did the record labels a half-century ago try to convince the public that every new development in tape technology was desirable and an advancement. You cannot believe the raves they applied to moves which technically halved the quality, just as idiots still insist that anything digital is automatically superior to anything analogue.

As the blank tape and tape deck manufacturers created different tape formulations and devised new head configurations, the record industry swiftly moved from the first stereo configuration of 7-1/2 ips, 2-track tapes to 7-1/2 ips, 1/4-track tapes. This immediately halved the amount of tape needed for the same playing time. Ker-ching!!! Instant savings in raw tape! Unfortunately, the quality dropped, too, and I have enough early tapes issued in both formats to demonstrate to anyone who cares to sit in my listening room that the difference is audible.

(Note: Debate rages as to which compromise causes the greater degree of loss in quality: going from 1/2-track to 1/4-track, or dropping speeds from 15 ips to 7-1/2 ips to 3-3/4 ips. The consensus, according to my mentors, is that irrespective of speed, moving from 1/2-track to 1/4-track is the greater loss. As for slower speeds, it is arguable that the quality loss incurred by moving from 7-1/2 ips to 3-3/4 ips is more audible than the drop from 15 ips to 7-1/2 ips. Before you hit Send on your “F*ck you, Kessler!” e-mail, I emphasize that this is NOT a statement of fact, merely a gathering of opinions from professionals with whom I have discussed it. Obviously, a 15 ips 1/2-track tape betters the rest, but I am concerned only with pre-1980 commercial tapes. I mention these permutations only for you to gauge precisely how the record industry chose to economize.)

Next came the speed drop to 3-3/4 ips, halving the amount of tape needed once again. Hooray! sang the accountants and shareholders. Far be it for me to defend the music industry, but it is worth noting that 7-1/2 ips tapes did not disappear altogether, though it seems that the 1/2-track tapes of the format’s early days were fully supplanted by 1/4-track tapes by 1960.

As for the continued use of the higher speed, and not counting the aforementioned upgrade to the Beatles catalogue in the USA as late as 1970, certain labels and specific artists continued with 7-1/2 ips 1/4-track tapes long after the slower speed became common. Indeed, I have precious few classical tapes which were not released at 7-1/2 ips, while some artists such as Andy Williams and Herb Alpert were afforded the higher speed for most of their tape releases. (I like to think Williams and Alpert insisted on the better sound quality – closet audiophiles perhaps?)

Then came the physical cost-cutting. Box quality was an early victim of downgrading, and one can easily follow the trail from substantial, cloth-hinged boxes to thin card. The relative quality of the boxes is readily apparent due to the passage of time: 1950s Jackie Gleason titles in Capitol Records “brown boxes,” the cloth-hinged South Pacific soundtracks, early Johnny Mathis and the like versus the later releases, ad nauseam, which the years have shown suffered poor protection. Along with learning how to splice and attach leader tape, I also learned how to reinforce the box spines with clear 2-inch-wide packing tape.

Speaking of splicing, another area of record label penny-pinching was the fitting of leader tape and tail, or the failure thereof. A rough estimate from my collection of 2,500 tapes is that only one in 50 left the factory with both. How do I know that the leader and tail weren’t merely discarded or sacrificed by the early owners? Simple: I have now acquired at least a dozen sealed, NOS (new old stock) tapes, all from major labels and by name artists, and not one had leader or tail.

Spool quality, too, dropped, from thick, precision-molded plastic to some spools so thin that they warp. One tape’s spool – I date it around 1975 – was so thin that I was reminded of the worst scam ever foisted on pre-recorded music: those horrible RCA Dynaflex LPs which weren’t much thicker than freebie flexi-discs. This spool was so thin that it couldn’t be gripped by the trident spindles on any of four tape decks, the spindles with the cross-section like a Mercedes-Benz logo and a specific range of height travel, which suggests that it didn’t even adhere to industry standards. To keep it from rattling and shimmying, I had to play it on tape decks like the Denon DH-710F, with a smooth spindle and a friction grip rather than a trident spindle.

Bent out of shape: our editor demonstrates the flimsiness of a 1974 RCA Dynaflex record. It wasn't the LPs finest hour.

They didn’t stop there. To save on production costs, the boxes often used the exact same front and back artwork as the LP, which kinda sucked when the A- and B-sides were flipped, or – worse – the track order changed. When an album’s track order was carefully sequenced, this was an insult to the artist as well as the customer.

It has been suggested by one colleague that this might have been due to the playing times of the two sides, as the labels preferred to avoid an imbalance, where one of the sides finished earlier than the other, leading to a long silence at the end of one of the sides; most of the tapes I have seem to be within ±3 minutes from A-side to B-side. However, I have more than a few classical tapes where, in the interest of not interrupting a movement, one side is far longer than the other. Does it bother me? Not at all. But did ruining Buffalo Springfield’s Last Time Around with a messed-up track listing upset me? You bet your head demagnetizer: as a hard-core Buffalo Springboy, I ended up buying two copies because I thought the first had been reprogrammed by some putz with two tape decks. It cost me $65 to find out that the record label had done it.

Note the track listing on the box versus the track listing on the tape. Why?!

Ironically, the dearer 7-1/2 ips 1/2-track versions of tapes that were released both in that format and also as 1/4-track tapes (albeit at the same speed) contained less material. I have a number of these and the 1/2-track version often had three or four fewer songs on it, though most were identical. The labels would publish both track listings on the box, so there was no deceit and you knew which songs you were losing if you opted for 1/2-track, while the boxes and the labels on the spools would have an ink stamp or sticker to indicate that the tape was 1/4-track rather than 1/2-track.

If the above sounds like I am being anally-retentive, or that I suffer from OCD, well, that pretty much defines all audiophiles. We are anally-retentive and obsessive. So, be warned: the next time, I will terrify you with even worse horror stories…appalling treatment of tapes from the original purchasers themselves.

Header image: for KK’s money, the best of the commercial tape spools.

This article originally appeared in Issue 159.

The Tracking Angle called the Stellar Strata MK2 “a no-nonsense utility integrated amp with exceptional sound.” Review Evan Toth liked its resolution, soundstage capabilities, and “a detailed and accurate view of the material that it is fed.”

He noted, “…an original pressing of 1979’s Regatta de Blanc…bestowed cinematic amounts of space and excellent instrumental separation, most notably on the beginning of ‘Walking On the Moon.’ Summer’s guitar chords gently hung in the air as though they were suspended by the Moon's gravitational pull. Listening on the Stellar Strata brilliantly showcases a trio like The Police. Copeland‘s high hat work, Sting’s solid bass lines, and Summer’s six-string landscapes were appreciated simultaneously, but also as a whole.” Toth concluded by saying, “…like many of the world’s greatest products, the Stella Strata MK2 may be one of the more successful marriages of functional utility and performance.”

Aspen FR5 loudspeakers.

 Enjoy the Music enjoyed the Aspen FR5 loudspeaker. Ron Nagle said, “I found that the midbass driver and tweeter can handle a lot of power and play loud without breaking up.” He added, “…You can lose yourself in the clarity and warm intimacy that is especially part of Steppin Out with Diana Krall and her jazz ensemble. The resolution and textures of the album are so microscopically detailed that you can hear the resonant sound of fingers sliding on the bass fiddle's strings. I can hear her enunciation and the timbral shift from chest to head and back again.”He continued, “the Diana Krall soundstage is so intimate you can take a step forward and join the performance. Listen with the lights turned down low. What I needed was all there, painting the back wall of my room with height, depth, and width; these speakers do what I love.”

The Aspen FR30 loudspeaker appears in The Absolute Sound’s online listings, “The Greatest Bargains in Loudspeakers: $25,000 - $50,000.” TAS said, “The FR30 is truly outstanding, highly recommended, and well worth the set-up effort necessary to make it perform at its best!”

Several PS Audio products are listed in The Absolute Sound 2025 Editors’ Choice Awards, including the Aspen FR30 loudspeakers, Stellar S300 stereo power amp, Stellar M1200 mono power amp, Sprout100 integrated amp, DirectStream DAC MK2, and StellarGold DAC.

This cartoon originally appeared in Issue 164.

We rocket into November with an all-RadioShack edition of "Audio Anthropology." The Shack was a retail store familiar to audio, electronics, musician, DIY and computer hobbyists from 1921 until 2017, when it shifted to online operations. All catalog images are courtesy of RadioShackCatalogs.com.

In 1972, you could fly high in a 747 jumbo jet, or with a RadioShack jumbo stereo system for $747, complete with Realistic's newest components.

The venerable RadioShack Sound Level Meter, used by old-school audio people everywhere. This circa-1980s model belongs to the author, who finds that smartphone SPL meters just don't have the same charm.

You wanted adapters? RadioShack had 'em! Here's a store in Metairie, Louisiana in 1972, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons/Phillip Pessar.

In 1990, RadioShack engineers dreamed of receivers with no tuning knobs, pointers, or those quaint old frequency scales – it was pushbuttons and numerical readouts all the way. Leave the antediluvian Gyro-Touch Tuning to Marantz!

Header image: from the cover of the 1990 Radio Shack Catalog.