Music

Music


  • Music streaming โ€” are we at the beginning of the end?

    The shifting of the Earthโ€™s tectonic plates often causes disturbances or, in worse case scenarios, natural disasters like tsunamis or volcanic eruptions. In my first column, I mentioned that the digital world is changing rapidly, well, until now I didnโ€™t know to what extent. Apple Music, Spotify, and Amazon recently announced their commitment to gradually…

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  • When was your audio awakening?

    A recent article by PMA Magazine editor Robert Schryer got me wondering about when I began to think of music and audio โ€” and, specifically, of myself as an audio hobbyist. The answer to โ€œwhenโ€ canโ€™t be clearly defined by a single moment; itโ€™s scattered across a handful of events that took place over a…

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  • Digitizing our music? โ€œIt is useless to resist!โ€

    As music lovers, we strive for the best possible sound quality.ย  They say all roads lead to Rome, but we still need to contend with our needs, our path, our budget, and the time available to us to get there.ย Across my next columns, like a travel guide, I will try to recommend memorable places for…

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  • Uncensored secrets of my audio feet fetish

    Iโ€™ve been pursuing good sound quality for decades. Along the journey, I learned about various elements that make up a good audio system. And one important lesson I learned is this: Sometimes, those small, seemingly less important elements turn out to be game changers. In an audio system, we pay most of our attention to…

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  • Honey, weโ€™re building a basement studio!

    With our trip canceled due to the pandemic, what to do at home with the money we saved?ย  Build a basement studio, of course! We have two rooms that were storage spaces, recently emptied, because we had time to clean them!ย  We also made a playroom for the little one. He got the big room,…

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  • Nearfield listening โ€” what you hear may surprise you

    If youโ€™ve ever had the chance to spend time in a large recording studio, the sort of venue too expensive to put on a credit card, your eyes were probably first drawn to the mixing console, wide enough that it might take five engineers to operate. Next, you no doubt noticed the main speakers, those…

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  • Jazz isnโ€™t noise. Itโ€™s special. Hereโ€™s why.

    I have a friend who listened only to classical music. One day I had him listen to the music of John Coltrane, a jazz giant. And in honor of the saxophonistโ€™s Giant status, the track I had my friend listen to was โ€œGiant Stepsโ€. As he was listening, I was trying to decide what I…

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  • Pimping your system (on the cheap)

    Whoever said โ€œthe best things in life are freeโ€ obviously never dabbled in high end audio. Thatโ€™s not to say you canโ€™t improve the sound of the system you already have with some judicious tweaking.

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  • The listener โ€” creative artist?

    The High-Fidelity Scene Recording technology revolutionized how music is produced, played, and experienced. From the perspective of experiencing it, to the old model of attending a live concert was added the option of listening to a recorded performance. In this new model, the listenerโ€™s role and situation were profoundly transformed; with recordings, listening has been…

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  • Are you a Believer?

    Listening to music is akin to a religious ceremony. For one, it invokes the spirits of the past, and every recording ever made is about the past. Secondly, it involves rituals. This is especially true when it comes to listening to music on my big rig downstairs. When I say big, I donโ€™t mean too…

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  • Will you commit to being artist-friendly?

    More than 30 years ago, the tabling of the Brundtland report introduced the concept of sustainable development, of which there are three pillars: economic, social, and environmental. This begat fair trade, at the time considered avant-garde, which instituted a set of policies that spanned the world and forever altered the standards we use to buy…

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  • Hitting the right (audio) balance

    The human voice is an amazing thing. I can think of no other instrument that moves our emotions and soul as powerfully. The examples are endless: Freddie Mercury, Beyoncรฉ, Ella Fitzgerald, Bobby McFerrin, Luciano Pavarotti, Ariana Grandeโ€ฆ Just take your pick. And itโ€™s not just singersโ€™ voices that we respond strongly to. How about the…

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  • Measurements can suck

    ย ย ย ย  As a youngster in the late sixties, I was keenly interested in music. Virtually every day, I came home from school, and after doing my homework, spent my afternoons hanging out at the familyโ€™s Philco stereo console spinning LPs. My familyโ€™s relatively meager collection of albums consisted mainly of Momโ€™s selection of easy listening…

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  • I am not an audiophile

    I am not an audiophile, or an expert on music. I donโ€™t like being labelled. But I do love most musical genres. I fell in love with music when I was nine. โ€œThatโ€™s a young age to fall in love for the first time!โ€ I hear some of you saying. It is. But by nine…

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  • Can music actually save a life?

    We all know about musicโ€™s power to change a life, but can it literally save one, to make the difference between life and death? According to a Nashville FOX 17 report, thatโ€™s exactly what Johnny Cashโ€™s grandson, Thomas Gabriel, says music was for him โ€” a determining factor in keeping him alive. After spending eight…

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