Clik here to view.
Listening #146
During last September's Brooklyn Audio Show, a thoughtful and amiable hobbyist explained to me his views on the purpose of an audio system. It seems that, for a great many years, he was toldby the...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Listening #147
I'm old enough to remember Fizzies: tablets that were promised to transform mere water into an effervescent soft drink. They showed up on my radar when I was five, at a time when impatience stood...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Listening #148
"Too much Stokowski."Sergei Rachmaninoff in 1940, reacting to a demonstration of a stereo recording of Leopold Stokowski conducting the Philadelphia Orchestra I don't remember when, but at some point...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Listening #149
At home, I have two different ways of listening to musicjust as I have two different ways of cooking and washing the car and making coffee and getting dressed to go out. My first approach to listening...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Listening #150
"I don't know what I think on that one. I haven't written about it yet."Walter Lippmann (attributed) As sometimes happens, this started out to be a very different column. But by the time I was a...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Listening #151
Before hitting the Refresh key on last month's column, which was dedicated to the challenges one encounters when evaluating audio cables and other accessories, I'd like to share with you a true story:...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Listening #152
During our second trip to the UK, my wife and I drove from Heathrow Airport to Swindon, to visit an older couple we'd met on our first trip. We arrived around noon, and Vera and Ross made us a nice...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Listening #153
Our small hobby contains many even smaller subgroups, some of them openly hostile to one anotheritself a partial explanation for the whole small-hobby thing. I have been a card-carrying member of some...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Listening #154
To paraphrase the playwright Alan Bennett: When I started Listener magazine, my idea was to create a small, anarchist journal. But people wouldn't obey the rules. In 2003, when I began writing for...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Listening #155
Please don't tell her I said this, but lately, my wife has been getting twitchy about my records. Twitchy as in: She wants me to sell them. Or at least some of them. I have only myself to blame. For...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Listening #156
Just as John Atkinson has a special telephone on his desk, by means of which the late J. Gordon Holt expresses his displeasure at this magazine's continuing decline into latitudinarianism, my own desk...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Listening #157
In a typical phono cartridge, the stylus is at one end of an oversize cantilever (oversize in comparison with the cartridge's other moving parts), the fulcrum of which is nearer the cantilever's other...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Listening #158
In my sophomore year of high school, one of the greatest challenges my friends and I faced was the search for the perfect after-school hangout, perfect being defined as "having the least amount of...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Listening #159
No one likes to be fooled, least of all those of us whose job it is to sort the real from the imagined: a tightrope walk, the audience for which reliably contains one or two rustics who delight in the...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Listening #160
In November of 1990, my wife and I traveled to the UK for our honeymoon, much of which was spent in Scotland. But we also spent a few days in London, and it was during that time that I discovered, in...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Listening #161
Yet knowing how way leads on to way, I doubted if I should ever come back.Robert Frost Perhaps it was different for other audio hobbyists in other parts of the world, but to this American, the Naim...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Listening #162
Though Westchester County, New York, seems a likelier locale for Bikram yoga studios, pet psychologists, and pricey restaurants specializing in "grain bowls" and fermented vegetables, the idea of...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Listening #163
One Everything makes a difference. Everything. File that away. Two There are two kinds of good sound: good sound sound and good music sound. While I could describe the distinction in few words or many,...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Listening #164
I should have seen this coming: Less than a year after the last time I railed against the darkness of cable reviewingthe indignity of crawling around behind my equipment rack, the tedium of comparing...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Listening #165
Fifteen years ago, when I was the Editor of Listener, I wrote a response to a reader's letter in which I repaid unpleasantness with unpleasantness: something I justified by flattering myself that my...
View Article