Copper

Stereophile, What Hi-Fi? Sold

Consolidation in the publishing world is nothing new, but it is nonetheless an odd coincidence when the sales of two major English-language audio magazines are announced on two sequential days. Stereophile was founded by J. Gordon Holt in 1962. Holt had previously been a reviewer for High Fidelity, and created Stereophile to focus upon how audio components actually sounded in use (radical concept, no?). Holt sold the magazine to Santa Fe businessman Larry Archibald in 1982, and in 1986, John Atkinson left the editorship of the UK magazine Hi-Fi News to become Editor of Stereophile–a role he still holds. In 1998,... Read more...

My Helios

I’ve been asked a couple times about the recording / mixing console I own (with a friend). So I thought I might write a little about it. Helios began at Olympic Studios in Barnes, London: Dick Sweetenham had been the chief electronics designer there, and according to at least one conversation I had with Glyn Johns, he and Island records owner Chris Blackwell seduced Sweetenham away from Olympic to build consoles. I’ve been told that Sweetenham, as a point of pride, would say back then, “Studios install Neve. Musicians install Helios. “ He... Read more...

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 . (I thought it’d be fun to yaw you back and forth across genres and the Atlantic there.) They now run a performing arts center just outside Bangalore, India, with a packed schedule of drama, dance, and music. I started working for the group as a lighting designer, and after a workshop in 1994, began writing plays. My two most... Read more...

Vintage Voltage: A Photo Feature

Researching and writing theoretical and historical pieces is a lot of work, and can get a little dry. As a change of pace, I present pics from Vintage Voltage, a local... Read more...

Charlie Patton: Father of the Delta Blues

It’s June 1929. A young man in his early thirties takes the long train ride, 750 miles, from Jackson, Mississippi, to Richmond, Indiana. It’s so hot in the coach compartment the ground outside hardly seems to move outside the open windows. The train route runs from Jackson up to Memphis where it picks up the Mississippi River and follows it all the way to Cairo, just to pick up extra humidity. The ride takes two days and one night with stops and in the summer of 1929 there wasn’t a... Read more...

Happy Passover/Easter/April Fools' Day!

Welcome to Copper #55! It's a little odd when holidays come in clumps of threes---but then, I'm not sure if April 1st could properly be considered a holiday. Whatever. Be safe, and... Read more...

The F16s

Chennai, capital city of the state of Tamil Nadu on India’s southeastern coastline, is home to the five men who make up The F16s. Billing themselves as a “Madras/Bangalore-based Dance/Punk band with a penchant for the weird,” the group has been recording and performing for about six years. There are many indie musicians in India, but few who write in English. And fewer still who present such an odd view of the world in their songs. On the band’s first EP, Kaleidoscope (2013), “My Shallow Lover” is a good song to plunge... Read more...

Macy’s

“What did you say to Mr. Segal?” My boss grabbed my arm and pulled me aside. “Who’s Mr. Segal?” I asked. Through some fudging about my education on my resumé, I landed a job as a market representative in the corporate buying office in Macy’s department store on 34th Street in Manhattan. I was a senior executive. This came with one distinct perk. I was given a key to the senior executive washroom, allowing me to pee alongside the big shots in the store. What a thrill. My job was... Read more...

A Very Twisted Tower Tale

The response to my tone control/ equalizer article brought out the inner fight in many of you. I would hope that high-end manufacturers are listening, and reading many of your... Read more...

How Do You Know When To Quit?

No, don’t worry—I’m not planning on retiring any time soon. It just ain’t an option. Besides which, I’m having fun— at least as much fun as a morose, depressive upper-Midwesterner is capable of having. Any performer or public figure is subject to the constant appraisal of the public. All of us have likely passed judgment upon the performance of athletes, actors, musicians, politicians, CEOs. Athletes are likely subjected to more continuous scrutiny than any group, with the added benefit/liability of having their performance daily measured against reams of data on... Read more...

Daughters, Part 2

Talk about in medias res. In “Daughters, Part 1” we stopped virtually mid-sentence after introducing Milica Djordjević (b. 1984), Serbian composer now based in Berlin. The waves she’s making in Europe are only beginning to lap at these shores; soon you’ll hear more. Her story is a fascinating one. Barbara Eckle’s notes for Wergo WER 6422 2 fill in some background: war-torn 1990s Belgrade; piano lessons; a newfound passion for painting, succeeded by a passion for theatre; then dual enrollment at the School of Music (piano again) and university (physics); further studies in composition and audio... Read more...

Lalo Schifrin

Hailing from Buenos Aires, Argentina, composer Lalo Schifrin has had an incredibly diverse career over the past six decades. With numerous classical and jazz compositions inspired by South American music and his iconic film and television scores, from Mission: Impossible and Mannix to Enter the Dragon, Bullitt, The Amityville Horror, and Dirty Harry to the Rush Hour trilogy, Schifrin’s body of work is impressive by any measure. In completion of the Copper retrospective look at the Audio Fidelity label, and its pioneering efforts to introduce the American music industry to Bossa Nova, we are happy to present an email interview with one of Audio Fidelity’s most prestigious... Read more...

Much Ado About Nothing

Sometimes the dumbest questions can be the toughest ones to answer. Take this one, for example: “What does space look like if you take everything out of it?”. On the face of it, that would seem to be a trivial question. A philosophical, or even a metaphysical one perhaps. But really, it’s a tough old nut when you look into it deeply enough. Lets start with the entire universe. We’ll push a magic button that makes everything in it disappear. All of the galaxies, the stars, the interstellar dust and... Read more...

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 are a very different animal than high input-impedance interconnecting cables. A speaker cable connects to an extremely inconsistent 2 to 32 ohm (or even lower and higher!) reactive load created by the speaker. RCA and XLR interconnect cables see a much more consistent and resistive load, making their electrical measurements far easier to predict. While speaker cable also suffers from... Read more...

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