Copper

Subwoofery: The Finale
Electronic Adjustments  Ok, now that we’ve accomplished the bassic (pun intended, sorry!) steps, we are on the home stretch.  These final steps require personal choice/taste as well as some technical adjustments. In the following sequence, we’ll be looking at sub balance (tech), sub volume level (tech/taste), sub polarity (tech), & sub fine-tuning at the crossover point/level (tech/taste), & crossover techniques (tech/taste) Now, turn off the main loudspeakers. Sub balance – Now that the position/angle of the subs have been determined, we need to get them to operate withe same relative level in each channel. ... Read more...
Leon
2016 has been a helluva year. You know: the list of musicians and music-related people who have passed, in any one year, would be too much; David Bowie, Paul Kantner, George Martin, Prince, all of them giants; now Leonard Cohen, who went the day before the election. But this past Sunday came, for me,  the hardest departure of the year: Leon Russell. Most of these deaths are really too big to write about. I’ve tried to say something about a couple of them, but this one is very difficult — mostly to feel adequate to the task.... Read more...
Do You Even DIY, Bro?
Darren Myers’ Make It Yourself articles, run in Copper issues 15, 16, and 17, are among the most popular articles we’ve ever run. Unfortunately, projects take time to develop: plotting, postulating, obtaining parts, documenting the project, building it and then writing about it and photographing it…. You get the idea. Besides which, there’s that whole “day job developing new products” thing. We will be running some cool projects from Darren in the near future, but we know there’s an appetite for more, here and now. We know that a lot of our readers are experienced DIY-ers, having... Read more...
Sacred Ground
Sacred Ground
This room is our masterpiece. A two-channel haven for playback of what we record at Sacred Grounds Studios in North Hollywood, California. Resolution was the main design parameter in our... Read more...
Growin' Up Together: Stevie Wonder
I remember vividly the first time I heard ‘Sir Duke’ from Songs in the Key of Life.  It was the fall of 1976 and I was driving across the bridge between Windsor Locks and Warehouse Point over the Connecticut River.  There is still a bridge there, but the old bridge has been replaced with a flat ugly highway bridge.  This bridge was one of those riveted steel span jobs.  If you walked across it you could feel it sway with the cars.  That’ll keep yer feet moving. Wait…  That be the... Read more...
Bad Manners
We were just sitting there, listening to music. My friend Bernard the Cellist had come to town and I couldn’t help showing off my system. Someone suggested we hear some Mozart. Like the Requiem, perhaps? So I pulled out an old SACD of a live performance from Nikolaus Harnoncourt, Vienna 2003. First we heard my favorite part of the recording, the opening measures and the trumpets’ entrance: 00:00 / 01:08 I’ve shared this bit with Copper readers before. Isn’t it a killer? In an instant, the limping strings and mournful winds are drenched in terror. By... Read more...
Weathers
There are some brands whose influence extends far beyond their ownership base. When it comes to cars, I think of Alfa Romeo: nearly everyone has some sort of emotional connection to the brand, even if they never owned, drove, or even rode in an Alfa. They had a friend who owned one in college, there was that girl who used to drive a Spider with her long hair streaming behind her in the breeze, or there’s that connection to The Graduate. Amongst owners, there tends to be a certain wistful regret that... Read more...
Black Friday
I wondered when the term “Black Friday” came to mean the launch of the Christmas/Hanukkah selling season on the day after Thanksgiving. In my mind, “Black Friday” referred to the 1929 stock market crash in America. Typical of my understanding of history, I got it wrong: that crash started on Black Tuesday, October 29, 1929.  Oops. Way to go, Leebs. “Black Friday” apparently was a descriptor first applied to the panic of 1869, which broke on Friday, September 24, 1869. But—all audiophile geeks know Steely Dan’s song of the same name, which... Read more...
Vøringsfossen
Vøringsfossen
Vøringsfossen is located at the top of Mårbødalen on the western slopes of Norway's Hardangervidda National Park. A blend of two exposures. "After having shot the base exposure I lifted... Read more...
…and the Hits Just Keep On Comin’…
…and the Hits Just Keep On Comin’…
Welcome to Copper #20! I think this is a particularly interesting issue, and I'm happy to tell you that we have some surprises and new contributors lined up in the next few issues. The title above... Read more...
Fifty Years After
Back in 2000, Dr. Michael Unser of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne, published an interesting technical paper entitled “Sampling – 50 years after Shannon”.  In this paper he considers the state of the art in digital sampling.  It is not a puff piece.  It requires a post-graduate level grasp of mathematics if one is to follow it in any serious detail.  It mostly goes over the top of my head, for starters.  But in doing so, it makes some interesting points, including the dry observation that the... Read more...