I saw Cross Eyed Cat Thursday night at
The Trane Studio. They keep getting tighter, and gave a fabulous performance. The club's excellent sound guy, TQ, recorded, the whole thing in analogue, and one of the band's guitarists recorded it digitally. I will soon have copies of both, and look forward to hearing them. Audiophiles talk about detail, transparency & imaging, but when I close my eyes at a live performance, that's not what I hear. I don't have words to desribe what I
do hear, but I hope that having good recordings will help me evaluate audio equipment in reference to a live performance I attended.
That was the goal of
The Absolute Sound magazine, and it's intrepid editor Harry Pearson, who attempted to compare components to live music (and developed a vocabulary to try to describe what he heard), rather than evaluating their performance in a lab. I will spend some time in the near future explaining that publication's importance and value to all of us who love music. I learned about the NAD 3020 (one of the only components the magazine wrote up that I could afford) and many other fantastic components from The Absolute Sound, and many excellent records. Where High Fidelity and Stereo Review (and the british audio press) fetishized equipment and specifications, Harry Pearson and his volunteer staff cut through the crap and focused on the reason we bother, the music.
I was hoping to make some sort of wacky graphic commemorating the unavoidable royal wedding that has many normally sane people setting their alarm clocks early, but realized that I don't have a single british audio product in the house at the moment. I think that here will be another Rega turntable here soon, but life is unpredictable.
The
Sansui G-6700 is leaving tomorrow, and I expect to pick up a pair of DCM Timeframes, successors to the uniquely talented Timewindows that I enjoyed at the end of 2010. I'll keep you posted.
