Stereophile Feb-13

Music? Or Sound? The demo seemed simple enough. A distributor proposed a session for the Bay Area Audiophile Society (BAAS) that would pit his relatively low-cost speaker cable against an ultra-expensive competing model named for a Norse god. We would listen to the music first with the high-priced spread, then with his cable, then discuss the differences. When the first of two groups of BAAS members arrived, I played three complex selections that challenge a system far more than does the standard choice of female singer with small combo: the beginning of the first movement of Mahler’s Symphony 2, from Iván Fischer’s recording with the Budapest Festival Orchestra (SACD/CD, Channel Classics 23506; “R2D4,” February 2007); mezzo-soprano Lorraine Hunt Lieberson’s entire recording of Handel’s “As with Rosy Steps the Morn Advancing,” from her…

FEEDBACK TO THE EDITOR It’s 2013, People Editor: When my daughter decided to get a high-end system for her husband’s 50th birthday, she called for advice. Even though I’m in California, I was able to recommend a store near her in Boston that was a longtime Stereophile advertiser. My daughter is no neophyte to music and systems. One indelible memory was when she was a member of the band Never Never and the sound went off onstage. She crawled behind the equipment to fix the problem in a maze of wires while the boys in the band stood around, looking lost. She visited the store, armed with a decent budget and some music she and her husband enjoyed, and was treated . . . as a woman; ie, nonserious, unable to grasp the nuances of…

AUDIO NEWS & VIEWS BULGARIA: SOFIA Paul Messenger Despite having gotten a good grounding in geography, I had to look up Bulgaria on the map. The problem with the former Soviet states is that 40 years spent languishing behind the Iron Curtain has led to very little commercial communication with Western European economies for a couple of generations, which in turn has meant that traditionally formerly quite advanced cultures effectively disappeared. Bulgaria lies north of Greece and Turkey, south of Romania, and east of Serbia–Montenegro and Macedonia. You probably know little more than I did of a country that has had a very fraught history. But having spent much of the last 1000 years under one foreign empire or another, it’s perhaps Bulgaria’s turn to strut its independence on the world stage. The last decade…

ATTENTION ALL AUDIO SOCIETIES: We have a page on the Stereophile website devoted to you: www.stereophile.com/audiophile-societies. If you’d like to have your audio-society information posted on the site, e-mail Chris Vogel at info@vcable.us. Please note that it is inappropriate for a retailer to promote a new product line in “Calendar” unless this is associated with a seminar or similar event. CALIFORNIA • Sunday, January 27, 2–5pm: The Los Angeles and Orange County Audio Society will hold its monthly meeting at Definition Audio Video (2934 Wilshire Boulevard, Santa Monica). There will be a presentation on the latest in digital server technology, and Jeff Joseph of Joseph Audio will discuss his loudspeakers. A raffle is planned and lunch will be served. Guests, visitors, and new members are invited, and parking is free. For more info,…

Sam goes over the musical cliff Has jazz gone over the musical cliff? Consider an article by Benjamin Schwarz in the November 2012 issue of The Atlantic Monthly. With friends like Ben, jazz needs no enemies. Schwarz refers to “the so-called Great American Songbook—a notional catalogue of classic popular songs, a body of refined, complex work that stands at the apogee of this country’s civilization, mostly written for the musical theater from roughly the 1920s to the 1950s by such composers and lyricists as Porter, Rodgers and Hart, Jerome Kern and Dorothy Fields, Irving Berlin, George and Ira Gershwin, Harold Arlen and Yip Harburg, Vincent Youmans, and Arthur Schwartz and Howard Dietz.” Does only Tin Pan Alley count? What about Thelonious Monk? Duke Ellington? Gerry Mulligan? Dave Brubeck? (He still performs.) John…

Fremer on Tonearms Audiophiles who attend my seminars on turntable setup often ask the most basic questions about tonearms, including the meanings of terms with which I (incorrectly) assume everyone is familiar. This is a good thing—it indicates that new people are entering the ranks of vinyl enthusiasts. This column is for them. Here I don’t discuss so-called “tangential tracking” or “linear tracking” tonearms, or those that use magnets and monofilament instead of more typical bearings. I feel those are best discussed separately. I am not a mechanical engineer. I don’t even play one on TV. But over the years, I’ve learned a lot about tonearms and their mechanics from a number of tonearm designers, some of whom have degrees in mechanical engineering. “Understanding Tonearms,” by S.K. Pramanik, a research and development engineer at…