Copper
The 50 Best Albums of 2018
For me, 2018 was a blur, and seemed to pass faster than any other year before. Was it the politics? Was it work? Friends and Family? No idea. In all...
Val and Ed…and Amy
How would you react if you were suddenly face-to-face with one of your idols? I hope you’d be more prepared than I was on that day in 1984. I remember...
Early Music in the Bay Area: Sackbuts and Crumh...
It’s well-known for its fog, iconic bridge, wineries, redwood forests, and cable cars. It’s also known to early music enthusiasts as a world-class early music research center, for being home...
AES NYC 2018
Since coming into existence 70 years ago and still going strong, the Audio Engineering Society has hosted conventions that have become must-see/hear events for anyone involved in the audio industry, especially on...
Rocky Mountain Audio Fest 2018 Part 2
As pointed out in the last issue of Copper, the biggest news at RMAF 2018 had to do with the new venue for 2019. But that doesn’t mean that there was nothing new...
BASS! How Low Can You Go? (Or: Another Take on ...
This article’s title was taken from the great Chuck D who reprised his vocals for the 1991 Public Enemy/Anthrax video “Bring the Noise,” one of the earliest Rap/Rock partnerships along...
Rocky Mountain Audio Fest 2018 Part 1
The biggest news of the 2018 Rocky Mountain Audio Fest was, oddly, about the 2019 Rocky Mountain Audio Fest. After 15 years at the Denver Marriott Tech Center, the show...
Monterey Auto Week Part 2
[We began Rich’s tale of Auto Week in Copper #69, and reluctantly conclude it here. Many thanks to Rich for allowing us non-gazillionaires to dream, if only for a little while—Ed.] While Werks is...
Monterey Auto Week Part 1
“The Pebble Beach car show is this weekend,” followed a little later by, “It’s all a bunch of stuck up, rich assholes.” If you’re the person sitting behind me and...
CEDIA 2018
San Diego is famous as a nice place to live, mostly because of its weather. Recently, it’s become more crowded than LA, so it’s far less nice than it used...
Wine Like Grandpa Used to Make
When I told Editor Bill Leebens that I write about wine for a living, he wanted exciting, off-the-wall stories about my day job. Such anecdotes might have been more common...
Customers Behaving Badly
Customer: “There’s a violin in it.” Sales Manager: “What did you say?” “I just heard a beautiful piece of music on the radio. It had a violin in it. I...
Gut Punches and Heavenly Strains
A few years ago, my old Spica TC-50s finally came to the end of the line. John Bau’s brilliantly constructed wedges from New Mexico could have lasted a bit longer, but the tweeters were...
Bird Brains
Acclaimed British biographer Jenny Uglow has published a new study of Edward Lear, that eccentric Victorian whose playful verse has always delighted children, and the child in all of us. Lear was...
Restoring a Historic Pipe Organ on a Budget
[John Seetoo‘s interview with Kamel Boutros appeared in Copper #60. This article goes into the details of some of Boutros’ work at the historic Calvary Episcopal Church in New York–-Ed.] Calvary Episcopal Church was founded in...
Counting Butterflies
I used to be a moderator of a now-defunct Indian bicycling forum called Bikeszone. BZ, as it was called, was the epicenter of the burgeoning recreational cycling movement in India....
You May See Me Tonight With an Illegal Tweak
As I threatened to do in my last column , I wrote a long review on power conditioners and power cords. What I left out of that story though, because I ran out of...
Another Look at Axpona
What did Rudy find interesting at this year’s show? The 2018 AXPONA show has come and gone. In its new digs at the Renaissance Schaumburg Convention Center, the show has hosted more exhibitors...
Show Report: Axpona 2018
Normally, I’d think twice about visiting Chicago in April—winter has a way of ignoring the calendar around Lake Michigan, and those April showers are often white and fluffy. The lure...
Show Report: Montréal Audio Fest
When Editor Leebs asked me to do a show report for the Montréal Audio Fest, I thought nothing of it. I’ll be going anyway, so why not just take some notes and write...
I. Don't. Know.
I’ve been involved in theater most of my life—my parents ran an amateur English theater group, performing everything from David Mamet to William Shakespeare to Neil Simon to Harold Pinter...
Cables: Speaker Cable Design, Part 2
Part 1 of this article in the previous issue ended with the design brief for conductors in a speaker cable. I described why I chose a star-quad geometry using a 20-mil wire...
Cables: Speaker Cable Design, Part 1
In this series, we've discussed the basics of audio cable design (Part 1 Part 2 Part 3), RCA and XLR interconnect design, and now we look at speaker cables. These...
Cables: XLR Interconnect Design
In the previous article in this series, we discussed the design of an RCA interconnect, and how it’s important to have a good coaxial cable design in place before designing...
Cables: RCA Interconnects
There is no magic to good cables; it is adherence to strict design rules that also encompass those “magic” tertiary variables. In the three-part series, Cables: Time is of the Essence, ...
QED, Bitches!!
Agnostics are often assumed to be wishy-washy—that they dither and um when asked about greater things. But actually, an agnostic has a firm belief: they do not have enough information...
Schwartz Does NAMM
I’ve just been to my 41st NAMM show. I’ve only been to a few CESs, about a dozen exclusively Hi-Fi shows, a bunch of AES, but NAMM… I just keep going. For...
CES: A Look Around
Our little world is categorized as “High-Performance Audio” (HPA) by the Consumer Technology Association, the group that puts on CES every year, and I think that’s a far better term than...
Cables: Time is of the Essence, Part 2
[In the last issue of Copper, we began a series of articles by Belden engineer Galen Gareis on the science involved in the design of audio cables. We continue here with Galen’s explanation...
Cables: Time is of the Essence, Part 3
[We began this series of articles by Belden engineer Galen Gareis in Copper #48 , and continued it in Copper #49. We now present the conclusion of Time is of the Essence, on time-based distortions in audio cable design,—Ed.] 7) Dielectric...
