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Last you heard from me, husband-and-wife singing duo Delaney & Bonnie were working on their album Home, their first recording on the Memphis-based Stax label, between February and November of 1968. The general idea in the minds of the Stax executives was to create an album that would introduce the world to the “first white…
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After PMA Magazine posted its inaugural “No, I have the best system in the world!”, a few willing participants answered our call to talk about their own audio journeys and “Best” system, i.e. a system they felt had reached a certain level of performance they could live with for the long term. To do the series,…
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He was home making lunch for the kid when the call came. “I was a stay-at-home dad,” says Ivan Doroschuk, of the baritone voice and dwarven video. “I’m in Victoria, B.C. (where he’s lived for 20 years) and the phone rings and it’s (Montreal promoter) Rubin Fogel. I hadn’t spoken to him for 10 years.…
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If there’s a specialist audio company that better exemplifies the meeting point between high end audio performance and objet d’art aesthetic than Netherlands-based Metaxas & Sins, I don’t know about it.
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Downsizing. It’s not for everyone. While we’ve all been cocooning like hermits and stocking up on toilet paper to wait out the Great Endless Virus(es), our dear friends in The Billionaires Club have been killin’ it like villains. According to Fortune Magazine, while we were being furloughed and our fave bistro went broke, the world’s…
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In 1966, a gruff-voiced blues singer was looking to put a band together that might finally propel his straggling career to the next level. Joe Cocker—born John Robert Cocker in 1944— lived on Tasker Road in the English city of Sheffield. As early as 1960, at the age of sixteen, Cocker was already well under…
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While the Supremes, with the support of their writing and producing team of Lamont Dozier and brothers Brian and Eddie Holland, a.k.a. H-D-H, continued their winning streak with “I Hear a Symphony” in October, 1965, and “My World Is Empty Without You” in December of the same year, squeezed in between those two months, in…
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3-to-6-minute tunes? Sure, they can move us, or be fun to hum to or even do a little dance-step to, but the truth is, for many of us audio enthusiasts, they become just not good enough. Now wait. Before anyone gets up in arms about of my comment, let me say that I realize that…
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Simple copper wire, of sufficient gauge, would provide the same sound quality as premium-priced speaker cable. It all came down to resistance, capacitance, and inductance.
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Read Part 1 here “Once upon a time, there was a girl”… and once upon a time there was a singer named Donna Summer and a writer-producer duo by the name of Moroder-Bellotte who, working together, and having already pushed the boundaries of the disco genre, would do so again, this time with the album…
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The apocalypse was clearly at hand. Bob Dylan was dead and done. He had snapped and self-destructed. As the ‘80s dawned, even those who worshipped the man were having their doubts. The rebel, the doubter, the immensely skeptical, infinitely gifted oracle from Minnesota who predicted that the times they were a changin’ was suddenly, unexpectedly,…
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A 12-year-old kid is at a local Woolworth’s store on Ashland Avenue on the South Side of Chicago. It’s the early ‘70s, and he’s spending his few allowance dollars on cheap “cut-out” vinyl albums, shelved at the front end of the checkout counter, neatly tiered, four rows high and ten albums deep. That twelve-year-old was…
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Blues migrated towards the urban centres, along its way electrifying guitars and gigs, as black musicians fleeing southern racial segregation strived for more economic opportunities and a better life in places like Detroit, Chicago, and New York City.
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Barely in my teens, I listened to the very first albums I ever owned on a wide, floor-model stereo console placed prominently in the living room of my home on Chicago’s South Side. My oldest sister gave it to my mother as a birthday gift in September, 1971. It cost five hundred bucks and was…
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First impressions All prices listed in USD My wife is not an audiophile. But as a classically trained pianist and a professional musician, she has ears for sound quality. It’s why I sometimes seek her opinion after changing something in my audio system. This year’s T.H.E. Show, held in Long Beach, was her first audio…