Fantastico

I have been in the middle or writing a review of the North Stars, and guess what? Amp number two has failed. So, I have one amp that works fine, and two that don't. Unfortunately, I just bought a brand new iMac, so I don't have the money to replace them now. I'm lucky that two friends have lent me a headphone amp and a pair of Senn HD650s, so at least, once I rearrange my room to get the Capitole close to my desk, I'll have a temporary headphone system of decent quality. I'm so emotionally worn out right now that I'm not even really mad about this. Pretty shitty.

Well, well, well

JB Audio Pimp had a change of heart (I'm sure the credit card dispute and the BBB and AG complaints had nothing to do with it), and they are sending me a replacement amplifier. I'm pretty happy.

Finally, some good news.

Bad luck, as usual.

One of the amps failed yesterday. The dealer won't refund my money, according to him three weeks is a reasonable amount of time for a product to work after purchase. Crock of shit, right? Paypal won't do anything about it, but I made a complaint with the BBB and the Ohio Attorney Generals office. I doubt anything will happen, but I wouldn't feel right unless I did as much as I could. I'll probably buy a pair of ICE amps, which is what I should have gotten in the first place, but I really liked the North Star DAC I had, and thought I was getting a great deal. This is definitely an expensive lesson.

What I saw today

On the way to buying groceries to cook dinner for me and my best friend, I came up on a Ferrari F430 Spyder. My dream car after the Prosche 911 GT3, it was gorgeous and sounded amazing. It was bright, gauche yellow. The best thing was that I kept up with it in my 2000 VW GTI VR6.

The amps

I just talked to Perrotta Consulting's (the North American distributor of North Star audio gear)tefch, and he thinks the intermittent hum on the XLR input, and the lack of signal on the RCA input, is simply caused by either a miswire or a broken connector to the RCA input. Hopefully it will be easy to fix. If it's worst case, I can always ship it out, which wouldn't be a huge deal, as Perrotta is not that far away.

Culinarianism

Shun knives rock (I must buy more of them) and Alton Brown's salt crusted tenderloin is pretty good, if a bit messy to make. That is all.

The music of the moment

I really can't describe how fantastic this CD is without using a graphic sexual metaphor. Let's just say... it's really good.

More... weirdness

The days that my amps don't distort, since they started distorting, are days when I've changed the speaker cables (I've been making my own, constantly making them shorter, since I only really need about 16 inches, and I finally made a set out of Canare, as opposed to crappy power cables, which is gonna stay for a while), and then not used the system for a day or so. Weird and stupid, eh?

I never get a break

So, the intermittent issue with the amps is getting worse, so I will have to get them repaired. Fortunately, I've found a couple competent techs in the area, so it shouldn't be a huge deal (though it might be expensive). C'est la vie.

Oh, btw

all -3 of my readers should buy this CD:



Why it was claimed that Jaco ruined the sessions with his antics, I don't know, because it's funky as hell and tight as... well, something really tight. It sounds tremendously good, too, though that is of course much less important than the fact that the music is killer.

Ah, fun, finally

The North Star Monoblocks were added a week ago, and they are settling down nicely (they only had about 10 hours on them, when I bought them). I just got done making a pair of speaker cables (very difficult when your heatshink is too small, but manageable) for the very short runs from the monoblocks to the speakers. I had some heat related issue with the amps, caused by the very small stock feet, but 6 whisky corks later, and the issue seems to be resolved.

It's an awful picture, taken by an awful photographer (me), with awful artificial lighting, indoors (I'm sure Emily would be retching by now), but here is a snapshot of the system:



I really rather like my home made acoustical panels. They really do fill the soundstage hole caused by the rack being positioned between the speakers. Just MDF, an old wool blanket, an old sheet, and a staple gun.

It's nearly 8 am, I have classes in three hours, but I can't quite stop listening. It's taken some getting to used to, having amplifiers that can really drive these 4 ohm, 87 db/v speakers. Over the past couple days, I've had some weird experiences, listening. Strange, barely heard sounds on certain cds. I'm listening to a Philip Glass disc, symphonies 2 & 3, right now, and there is something strange: a series of noises; very soft, grainy sounding, in rhythm with the music on the second movement of symphony 2. Have i blown the drivers again? No! It's someone fucking humming with the music. I think it's a percussionist, due to the position to the left and rear. I've listened to this disc many times, and I've never before heard humming.

This is happening over and over. On one a favorite CD of Satie piano music, I was getting strange rattlings and graininess. After careful listening, I realizeed that it's not the drivers (I'm a little paranoid, now, after the driver blowout in December), but instead it's some strange reverb in the piano itself (it's easy to get reverb recording a piano, but this is totally different, almost like an echo of the strings moving against the pegs, ever so slightly). This level of detail is really rather distracting. It's too detailed. I always thought the Etymotic ER-4S was a sonic microscope, but it's a decidedly blunt object compared to the Thiels.

This is liking watching a move in HD and seeing every pore on the faces of the actors, but going even farther. There are sounds on some of these albums that are so low in the mix that I would never have thought they would be audible from a Redbook CD, as surely the noise floor would be too high. Did you know that on Grace, Jeff Buckley's nose whistles ever so slightly on the first couple songs, and the back of his throat makes tiny little squelching noises (not to be confused with his lip smacking, it's completely different, and much softer)? I think a lot of it is audible simply because the soundstage is so 3D, and there isn't the obfuscation of stacked, muddied, notes.

I'm going to put on some super well recorded (ed meitner DSD converted to 44.1 PCM) albums later to see if i can hear any of the performer's thoughts. I'm morbidly curious, and now I kind of want to get another SACD source, just to hear what I can hear.

Despite this mental setback, the sound I'm getting is delightful. Putting on Wynton Marsalis' classic recording of Haydn, Hummel and Leopold Mozart, which has no issues with distracting sounds, as it's masterfully recorded, I really feel like I'm sitting in the balcony, tapping my fingers in time, against my thigh, and humming slightly, with my eyes closed. The fact that it's raining slightly, outside, doesn't detract from this experience. On the contrary, it helps cast a slight blur on the music, making it seem that much more like a live session. Delicacy, thy name is synergetic component matching.

This system can really crash, though, it's not all silk and lace. The Toadie's album Rubberneck, which is one of my favorite albums of the 90's, really kicks ass at 110 db, the walls shaking, the neighbors wondering what is going on just through that ceiling. 160,000 uF of capacitance and 1000 va of transformers paired with high capacity transistors means you can really rock out with your cock out.

I've had to reposition the speakers a bit, as the soundstage with the North Stars can really be milked out a lot, compared to the Anthem I was using, and I still haven't received my custom XLR cables, but other than that (and the niggling heat issue), I'm extremely pleased. Expect a review of the system as a whole and the individual components, fairly soon.

Well, I guess I lied

But here is my speaker rig, for posterity's sake.

Ok, I haven't posted here in a while, I know.

But much has happened (including abandoning headphones for a TRULY BAD ASS speaker rig), so I'll probably be posting again. For my <0 readers.

The music of the moment

ohGr - Welt

The music of the moment

The music of the moment

The Limited Edition.

The music of the moment

I do believe that MoFi is coming out with a version of this soon. I can't wait. While I love Surfer Rosa, it definitely sounds muddy.

A cliched start, part 2

3. Robert Fripp



Utter precision. Flawless technique. Polished. Perhaps the only guitarist who could go up to Eric Clapton, rap his fingers with a ruler, and say "bad." You know how most players wrap their thumb over the top of the neck? At Robert Fripp's guitar camp (he has one, and Porcupine Tree is just a single result of it), that gets you yelled at. Fripp is consummate in his attention to detail. This doesn't necessarily produce amazingly engrossing music, however.

What creates engrossing music is playing with engrossing musicians. Fripp has an uncanny knack at choosing the perfect musicians. Whether it's Tony Levin or (the motherfucking amazing) Bill Bruford, Fripp has chosen musicians that allow his strengths to be highlighted and his weaknesses to be covered. Fripp founded King Crimson, but he has never pretended to be the leader. A leader requires a certain panache, a charisma. Fripp lacks this. He makes up for it by not caring, by being a cog in an amazing machine. Even his solo works, like the fantastic Exposure, have been less about highlighting Fripp's amazing technique and more about producing great music. Fripp is not the point of the spear, he's the hand that holds the haft (heh). I must admit I was a bit disappointed the first time I realized that Robert Fripp wasn't the one playing the fantastic solos on Discipline. Fortunately, this realization led me to appreciate the next man on the list.

4. Adrian Belew



Adrian belew is a nut. A complete nut. He was one of those aforementioned people that Fripp surrounded himself with, the people who allow Fripp's strengths to show through. In this case, Belew found himself not a fellow cog, but a front man, a fearless experimenter, a Twang Bar King. You know that part in Elephant Talk that's all metallic screeches and whamy bar effects? Remember how crazy it is? That is Adrian Belew in a nutshell.

His playing is so outrageous that he is a walking musical menagerie. Belew has had a smattering of hits from his solo albums (Oh Daddy probably being his biggest), but he has always been too far out there to really find a mainstream audience. He toured with The Talking Heads and has done some session and production work, but despite the industry success he has had, he has never had that break out. Except with King Crimson. In the same way that Fripp needs to be led, Belew needs to be restrained. In that environment, he is amazing, and his presence allows fantastically complex, musically interesting tunes to be made. Outside of that environment, he's merely a lot of fun, if unpredictable.

To Be Continued...

The music of the moment

Four Tet - Rounds

Sometimes it's fun to be frightened.

Tilt is a truly inspired album. Scott Walker has produced an work that makes you feel nervous, sometimes titilated, always uncomfortable. Moments of it are even scary. The musical ambience is difficult to describe, like something out of the Id. The lyrics chosen not for coherence, necessarily, but for the effect that the sounds and the indvidual meanings will have on the listern. 5 stars, certainly, but in the same way that Giger is. The Drift goes even further in this direction, but it loses some of Tilt's tautness in the dark noisescapes that Walker created. It's great too, but I prefer Tilt

Another competitor for my list

Al Di Meola

Post Mott

You can't lose when you combine Ian Hunter and Mick Ronson (who may be making my cliched list, tune in later to find out).

Queued up, another Hunter/Ronson collaboration.



This album includes the famous "Once Bitten, Twice Shy," which is an idiom I should take to heart.

The music of the moment

Xavier Rudd - Solace

Kinda like the Blues, but not quite. Whatever it is, it's good.

A cliched start, part 1

Every music blog on the planet probably starts with a list of favorite guitarists. I normally buck trends, but just this once I'm going to travel with the popular kids.

1. Duane Allman.



He didn't live very long, snuffed out by a truck stopped in an intersection, but Duane Allman's influence on Rock and Roll is hard to deny. A superb session musician, Allman contributed to such classic albums as Boz Scaggs. The Allman Brothers recorded some fantastic Southern rock, a genre which I can generally take or leave, but where Duane really shone was on Layla and Other Assorted Love Songs. His slide playing was plaintive, wistful, sad, and this sound added the final element that allowed the Derek and the Dominoes album to come together as a cohesive, magical whole. That's a lot of amazing work for someone who died at 24.

Allman never fell into the trap that many otherwise great guitarists did: his solos never took the show. His playing wasn't about showing off, or producing Malmsteenesque superstrings of boredom, he was about adding to the song, creating works that were coherent, articulate wholes. It must be tempting for any fine player to try to carry the work, but Allman never made the mistake. Whipping Post is a good example: it has an amazing guitar solo, but the solo helps make the song an amazing song. This is why, in my opinion, The Allman Brothers Band is known as a great band, not as a vehicle for a guitar superstar.


2. Jeff Beck



Beck's work is very different from most. First off, despite being in The Yardbirds, a stepping stone to superstardom for every other guitarist who played lead, Beck never really found fame. He jumped around from group to group (really launching the career of Rod Stewart, in the process), alternating between being a solo artist and a band member too much to achieve any real following outside of the hard core guitarsters.

Upon first listening, Beck might not even sound that good. His playing doesn't often "steal the show," even in his solo acts, it's "merely" another voice. Really start listening to Beck's playing, however, and you'll hear something very interesting: you'll hear genius. Listen to Scatterbrain (on Blow by Blow), or Blue Wind (on Wired), to any of the other hit level songs that never quite made it, and you'll know why Beck is so good. His technique is almost invisible, it just is, you don't think of him as a guitarist, you think of him as a melody maker. You listen to his music, not his instrument. Sure, there are some flashy solos, but even then it's almost always the melody that's created, not the number of notes, that matters. Brilliant musician.

To Be Continued...

The new Snark and Reverb

Welcome to my blog. It's about music, mostly. The music I love, the music I hate, and, sometimes, things that get in the way. I'll try not to be too pretentious or didactic. Enjoy.