Analog Corner

First, let's throw egg on a few faces. Due to a communications screw-up, I passed on to you some wrong and incomplete information about the workings of the Lyra Helikon cartridge in my August 2000 "Analog Corner." Without assessing percentages of blame, let's just say that the three likely suspects (manufacturer Scan-Tech, American importer Immedia, and yours truly) accept full responsibility for the misinformation and miscommunication. I'm being generous here by including myself, but hey, you know me. (Actually, you don't, which is why I can claim to be generous.)

What's June without a hi-fi show? With Stereophile's exhibition put on hold for 2000 while emapUSA sorts out future possibilities—Manhattan in May 2001 is the most probable place and date—I flashed on High End 1996 in Frankfurt, Germany, a June show I'd attended and reported on in this column. German audiophiles were still heavily into vinyl back then, so why not hit High End 2000?

A pleasant surprise arrived at my door the other day: the 180gm vinyl edition of Companion, the Patricia Barber album released last year on Premonition/Blue Note. According to the jacket, the six-track set, impeccably recorded live in Chicago last July by Jim Anderson, was mastered from a 24-bit transfer of an analog recording. You can bet the vinyl sounds better than the 16-bit CD—at less than 20 minutes a side, there's plenty of room for the recording's full dynamics.

Guaranted, it's no Casino Royale, but with Muddy Waters, Howlin' Wolf, Bonnie Raitt, Dr. John, Sun Ra, Otis Rush, Johnny Shines, Bobby "Blue" Bland, Freddie King, and Luther Allison among the participants, the 2-LP Ann Arbor Blues & Jazz Festival 1972 isn't half bad. The Atlantic Records original (SD 2-502) was one of my "Records To Die For" a few years ago. Unfortunately, the only copy I've ever seen is mine.

The ad for the tag sale read "Former member of '60s rock group selling LP collection and vintage instruments," so of course I took the bait. I arrived early, or so I thought---there were already 30 folks ahead of me. I stayed anyway: You never can tell what sloppy seconds will yield---and perhaps they were all there for the other stuff.

It took a trip to the Hi-Fi News and Record Review Hi-Fi Show at the Novotel London West this past September to remind me that hi-fi is, above all else, a hobby. We're music lovers (hopefully!), but what separates us from the rest of the music-loving pack is our passion for the visceral pleasure of sound---something that has never translated to the average consumer, and probably never will. And that's fine; most are happy to hear just the bare outlines of the music. As Joni Mitchell sang, "Some get the gravy and some get the gristle."

It was big. It was ugly. It looked unfinished. It resembled some kind of industrial mistake, which is pretty much what it was: a prototype CD player rolled out by Sony at the 1982 AES Convention in Los Angeles. The inventors didn't care what it looked like, they just wanted you to hear it. Why, I don't know; it sounded awful.

I'd just spent a week's worth of tweak time optimizing my turntable using a Japanese pressing of Roxy Music's Avalon, squeezing every last cymbal rivet of musical detail from my Dynavector Ruby/Lustre GST-1 combo, and they're trying to pass off this flaccid noodle as Avalon? Oh, headless chickens!