Issue 204

Tony Cordesman was a friend to me, and to so many in the industry. He wasn’t just one of the finest audio reviewers ever; I think he’s one of the few who could be said to have achieved legendary status. Tony, known as Anthony H. Cordesman to the rest of the world and AHC to readers of The Absolute Sound, was a respected national security analyst and a professor with a Ph.D. by day, but his avocation was reviewing high-end audio gear, which he did brilliantly over a long career that ended on January 29, 2024 at the age of 84.

When I began reading The Absolute Sound as a teenager in the late 1970s, AHC seemed to be an almost mythical larger-than-life figure. Since I had little money, TAS’s reviews were a glimpse into a fantastic world I had little hope of attaining entrance into. But, like editor-in-chief Harry Pearson, Robert E. Greene, John Nork, David Wilson, and others, Anthony H. Cordesman’s reviews made me feel like I was there in the listening room with him. His descriptions painted an almost tangible feeling of what the component under review sounded like, usually accompanied by incisive technical explanations of what the gear was actually doing and why. He wrote in a tone that defined the word authoritative.

For reasons unknown to me, Tony Cordesman stopped writing for The Absolute Sound a couple of years or so before I joined the magazine full time in 1987. (See my article, “My Life With Harry Pearson,” In Issue 102.) I soon became close to Harry and spent many nights just hanging out with him. Many an evening were spent in his second-floor kitchen having Jack Daniels and Coke, his preferred cocktail (not mine, but Harry could, as those who knew him can attest, be imperiously insistent about such things).

Harry would get endless phone calls. Usually, he’d reply with some silly greeting like, “science working for you at the Pearson Corporation!” or “my granny’s brassiere!,” and I’m fairly certain he did that the night he got a phone call from Tony Cordesman. But in an eyeblink, Harry’s demeanor got serious. He held the receiver away from his mouth, placed his hand over it, looked at me wide-eyed, and whispered, “Tony Cordesman! It’s Tony Cordesman on the phone!”

I could see Harry getting visibly more excited. From the part of the conversation I could hear, it was clear that Tony was offering to write for The Absolute Sound again. Harry started pacing around the room and was soon more worked up than I’d ever seen him. He kept putting his hand on the receiver and whispering to me, “Tony Cordesman! Tony Cordesman!”

After a few minutes he told Tony, “my setup man Zoid (meaning me) is here and he’s the guy who arranges all the equipment loans, so why don’t you two introduce yourselves to each other?” Then he handed me the phone.

I was taken aback. After all, Anthony H. Cordesman was a heavyweight in the world of national security. He was an expert on Middle Eastern affairs, held the Arleigh A. Burke Chair in Strategy for the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), worked as a civilian assistant to the Deputy Secretary of Defense, and was a professor of national security studies at Georgetown University, among many other positions. He was the author of more than 50 books. When Harry handed the phone to me I felt like I was about to talk to the President of the United States or General MacArthur or something.

I stood up straight (I distinctly remember this), said hello, and heard for the first time his deep yet friendly voice. I admit I was almost petrified at first, but eased up, thanks to his warm demeanor. I was soon coherent enough to take down his contact information and address and talk about a list of audio components he was interested in reviewing. We said we’d follow up with each other the next week.

No sooner did I hang up the phone than Harry started – literally – jumping up and down and yelling, “Tony Cordesman! We got Tony Cordesman! Tony Cordesman is back!” Harry was absolutely giddy. He knew what a boost of prestige this was going to give to the magazine.

I talked with Tony again a few days after, and quickly found out he was exactly the professional I’d thought he would be. This guy wasn’t going to miss a deadline! His copy was an editor’s dream, and the first time I saw something in a review I wanted to question and called him with trepidation – who was I to question Anthony H. Cordesman? – he paused briefly, then matter-of-factly agreed with my assessment. I soon began to feel at ease with him, he became a trusted colleague, and I looked forward to our regular talks.

The speculation among audiophile gossips was that he was connected to an intelligence service, but, having once had a security clearance working for a defense contractor, I wasn’t going to be crass enough to prod Anthony about it – as if he’d say anything sensitive anyway. The fact that he was an expert was unquestioned. During the Gulf War in 1990 and 1991, Anthony H. Cordesman was a go-to on-air analyst for ABC News, a role he held for many years. To this day, I can’t tell you how many times I’ve listened to some bloviating “expert” on the news and exclaimed out loud, “where’s Tony Cordesman when you need him?”

One time he sent Harry a copy of his then-latest book, The Gulf and the West: Strategic Relations and Military Realities. It was hundreds of pages long. Harry took one look at it, tossed it to me and said, “here, you read it!” I replied, “he sent it to you as a gift, not me!” I don’t know if Harry ever read the book but I’d go through passages of it from time to time when I was at Harry’s house. I remember thinking, “how many hours of work must have gone into this?”

Harry wasn’t easily intimidated but I saw Tony make him blink once. Tony had written a review and Harry, as was often the procedure in those days, decided he wanted to send it to another reviewer for comment. The other reviewer disagreed with Tony, and his comments were pretty nasty. Tony responded by sending a fax saying that he had no problem with differing opinions, but he would not tolerate serious personal attacks and that if Harry published the comment, Tony would take action. The fax came in on Senator John McCain’s letterhead. Harry pulled the comment.

I’d go to the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) every year, and whenever I got back from one, Tony would call and ask me what was new and hot. I probably gave him more thorough reports than anything I ever wrote in the pages of TAS. Then one year, probably the early 1990s, he told me he would be attending CES and wanted to meet. I wound up going to dinner with him and a few of the TAS staffers. Since we didn’t have much of a budget we ate at someplace modest, and here I was, thinking I was sitting down to dinner with a guy who had dined with senators and maybe literally royalty, yet he was down-to-earth and genuinely happy to be there.

Once, I got comfortable enough to ask him: “how the heck do you find the time to be a national security expert and also write such thorough reviews?” He told me that writing audio reviews was fun and relaxing for him. After a while I realized he wasn’t some super-serious guy but in fact had a subtle sense of humor, which you might have missed if you took him too seriously. After I knew him for a while, he’d end our conversations by saying, “OK, tiger!” It was a badge of honor.

After leaving TAS and working in public relations, I made it a point to keep him on my media lists, and informed him of any new products or news I thought he’d be interested in, although years would go by when we didn’t keep in touch. We reconnected more frequently when I started working with PS Audio and Copper, mostly via e-mail, but I did get to talk to him again about a year or so ago. He spoke at a more deliberate pace than before, but was as smart and incisive as ever, and we shared a few laughs about the good old days. At one point I asked him, “how did two normal people like us get involved in this crazy audio industry?” We both just laughed. Little did I know that would be our last conversation. I'm glad it ended on a high note.

I will always be grateful to Tony Cordesman for being one of my greatest teachers in the audio world.

Header image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons/Gage Skidmore.

Reason by Erik Deutsch, Theo Bleckmann and Sly5thAve makes jazz, pop and avant-garde flavors into a compelling musical adventure. Recorded live at Dazzle, one of Boulder, Colorado’s premier performance venues, Reason combines masterful instrumental playing and Bleckmann’s virtuoso singing with you-are-there Pure DSD sound.

Pianist Erik Deutsch is a world-class musician who tours with the Black Crowes and who has played with a wide range of artists including Norah Jones, Shelby Lynne, Don Byron, Warren Haynes, Levon Helm, Bill Kreutzmann and many others. He plays acoustic and Rhodes electric piano on Reason. Theo Bleckmann is a renowned vocalist, composer and GRAMMY-nominated artist and the recipient of a prestigious JAZZ ECHO award from Germany’s Deutsche Phono-Akademie. Multi-instrumentalist, producer, arranger and composer Sly5thAve has roots in hip-hop, soul, R&B and jazz. He plays bass clarinet, saxophone and flute on the album. His new solo record, Liberation, will be out on March 22.

Reason was recorded and mixed using Octave Records’ Pure DSD process, and the sound quality is exceptionally pure – richly textured, with depth, body and spaciousness, and dynamic nuance.

The song selection on Reason is as eclectic as the playing, from Theo Bleckmann originals like “Happiness,” with its compelling intervallic leaps and complex harmonies, to the band’s distinctively different take on Pink’s “God Is a DJ,” and “Nearer Suns,” based on a Franz Schubert composition. All the tracks were done in one take with no overdubs – all the more remarkable considering all three musicians manipulated their instruments and vocals in real-time using what seem like synthesizers and studio effects, but are part of the live performances. The band sounds utterly unique and the instruments are remarkably well-recorded, from the presence and overtones of the Yamaha grand piano to the distinctive character and resonance of Sly5thAve’s bass clarinet.

The album was recorded by Steven Vidaic with Giselle Collazo assisting, mixed by Jay Elliott, and mastered by Gus Skinas. The album features Octave’s premium gold disc formulation, and the disc is playable on any SACD, CD, DVD, or Blu-ray player. It also has a high-resolution DSD layer that is accessible by using any SACD player or a PS Audio SACD transport. In addition, the master DSD and PCM files are available for purchase and download, including DSD 256, DSD 128, DSD 64, and DSDDirect Mastered 352.8 kHz/24-bit, 176.2 kHz/24-bit, 88.2 kHz/24-bit, and 44.1 kHz/24-bit PCM. (SRP: $19 – $39, depending on format.)

I spoke with Erik Deutsch about how Reason came to be.

Frank Doris: How did you hook up with the guys in the band and get it together? I mean, the music is absolutely fantastic.

Erik Deutsch: Theo is a very well established, very well-known singer in New York City, and so I heard about him from my first days in New York. There are not that many male jazz singers that are working, especially in the creative jazz side of the business, or doing what he does or [are] even in his genre. I got a call from him around 2011, 2012 for a gig.

We hit it off, and he then asked me to go on tour with him in Europe. The tour was amazing. We realized we liked to hang out and liked playing together, and so, fast forward a number of years, we try to find ways to collaborate and work together when we can.

I think that's how this show [the live dates for the Reason album] came to be, because as the pandemic took a little tiny break, I guess this is 2021, we had the opportunity to book Dazzle in Denver. Well, none of us had worked much that year, so it was a real opportunity to get out there with some folks coming to see us. I invited my buddy Sly, who I had been working with in Mexico City.

Erik Deutsch. Courtesy of the artist.

FD: I’m really impressed by the blend of the instruments and the musical interplay. Did you guys rehearse this stuff or was it all spontaneous, or a combination of both?

ED: Theo has a lot of repertoire, and we had written a little bit together during the pandemic. He is very organized, he's always got some music, [and] everything's put together. I worked on it and gave it to Sly but then the three of us didn’t get together until the day of the show.

FD: Sounds about right!

ED: It's pretty hard music.

So, we rehearsed that afternoon of the first show and did four sets.

ED: We set up [the recording] with Paul [McGowan] and the crew because I had been working with them [on previous Octave recordings] and they were interested in a live record. I pitched it to Dazzle and they liked the idea.

FD: The recording quality is so good that I actually didn't even realize it was a live album at first. Did they multi-mike everything?

ED: Yeah.

FD: What about the synthesizer sounds? What kind of synths did you use, and were they going through amps or straight into the mixing board or what?

ED: I don't use a synthesizer. I only use a Fender Rhodes electric piano, and the [grand] piano.

FD: But all the musicians are credited with playing “live electronics.”

ED: No synthesizers. Theo has effects on his voice, and he's processing his voice live on stage. He has a table [full] of stuff. I had some pedals for that Fender Rhodes, and Sly had some effects pedals for his horns.

FD: I stand corrected!

Theo Bleckmann. Courtesy of Lynne Harty.

ED: Theo is a fantastic musician and an adventurous musician. With him, the music is always challenging and adventurous, and I love that about him, and I think that's why we get along, because I'm not afraid to tackle that kind of stuff to put in some work and get after it.

FD: I don't know if the average musician could pull that stuff off.

ED: I'm going to say no.

There are all kinds of musicians and we all do different things. I think [our material] just takes a mix of being able to read, being able to count, being able to technically attack some tricky things, and also being open, being sonically creative and being open to that, and being able to read what's on the page and then depart [from it]. There's a jazz mentality, but there's also a classical mentality to it. You’ve got to find the right cast. I do think that it can be a little challenging for certain audiences, and I'm not sure everybody was totally with us in Colorado those nights, but you take what you can get.

FD: The recording quality is gorgeous. Do you know what kind of piano was in the venue? I'm assuming it's a grand piano.

ED: Yeah, it's a Yamaha nine-foot, maybe seven-foot. It's a huge one, but a great one. And well, Steve Vidaic was the engineer, and then Jay [Elliott] did the mix and he just worked really hard on it and did a great, great job.

FD: How'd you pick the material?

ED: Again, it was mostly Theo's choices. Some of that stuff Theo and I had worked out in advance or on a duo tour [we had done], and we had written a couple of things during the pandemic. Other than that, Theo just filled it in with some things he thought would be nice.

One thing I've learned over the years is that when you are working with a singer, they're generally going to pick the material, because they don't just sing anything. They sing what makes sense to them, [whereas], as instrumentalists, we can kind of more or less take a shot at anything. In the end, it's going to come down to what they're feeling and what they're wanting to sing. What they're feeling in their bones and what makes sense to them musically and emotionally.

Sly5thAve. Courtesy of Gigi Nettles.

FD: Every music has its influences, but, and I’m sure I said this about your other Octave Records album Decades, but Reason is also its own thing, which to me is the best kind of music there is.

ED: Totally. Thank you, man. Appreciate that.

FD: Also just literally the sound of it. Boy, you had me fooled. I could have sworn there were synthesizers in there.

ED: Part of the fun about playing keyboards is kind of disguising them, making people guess. There was a distortion pedal, and a delay pedal. Usually. That's kind of always been my go-to, for that psychedelic Rhodes thing. I'd probably use a volume pedal to get a kind of swelling [sound], so [with] the volume pedal with the distortion and the delay you can kind of swell that distortion into the delay and make it echo into itself. I was playing through a Fender Deluxe Reverb, a beautiful amp that we rent.

FD: Really? That’s usually used for guitar. Interesting that you’d play keyboards through it.

ED: Oh, it sounds good. Those tubes [in the amp] make the Rhodes.

FD: Anything else you want to say?

ED: In the end, this kind of music is not for everybody, and I really appreciate the opportunity for Octave Records to let us make the record. We're so happy to have it documented, and it's a beautiful thing to play four sets in two nights and then have them recorded, because by the fourth set, you're going to get it. You know what I mean?

While Munich’s High-End Show still dominates the European hi-fi show circuit, the Audio Video Show in Warsaw, which took place from October 27th to 29th, 2023, is a serious rival. Like Munich, AXPONA or others which attract international exhibitors, Warsaw is rich with familiar names, but what’s most interesting for those who attend multiple shows are the myriad Polish manufacturers and those from other Eastern European countries.

It’s their presence which adds to the show’s main appeal, which is that of being so brilliantly organized. The event occupies two hotels, the Radisson Blu Sobieski Hotel and the Golden Tulip across the street, and the hospitality suites of the nearby Olympic Stadium, and it caters to vinyl vendors and headphone makers en masse, along with home cinema, extreme audio and everything else. This results in attendees unmatched by any other show: all ages and two (or maybe more given the current climate) genders.

Given the plethora of original, unconventional hardware, a crowd that doesn’t look like an AARP gathering, and restaurants which don’t charge $30 just for appetizers, it’s almost enough to change my glass from half-empty to half-full. Here’s just a sip, which should inspire you to consider a holiday in Poland this autumn.

Audio Reveal

Junior is Audio Reveal’s rather interesting integrated amplifier in that it uses 6550 power tubes in single-ended mode. It accepts two line level sources and delivers 10 watts per channel. If you need more power, the company also offers amplifiers with KT88s, KT150s and KT170s with respectively higher wattages.

The elegant Audio Reveal Junior integrated amplifier.

Bona Watt

While I worry about naked tubes sans cages (and which I suspect wouldn't pass Europe’s draconian consumer electronics safety rules), I was impressed by the nicely-made Bona Watt Tamesis integrated amplifier. Exposed to the elements, adventurous cats and inquisitive children are two of my favorite tubes – KT77s – plus two 6N9S and a U77. They operate in what the company calls Parabolic Power Bias, with levels controlled by resistor ladder attenuators +/-0.5 % with 128 steps. Power is 11.5W per channel, which should mean long life spans for the KT77s. I wonder how they sound compared to original M-O Valve Co. Gold Lions.

Bona Watt's Tamesis integrated amp.

Fezz Audio

One of the longer-established Polish brands, Fezz Audio produces wonderful tube amps with embarrassingly low prices (by US standards). The Titania integrated amplifier, offered in seven colors, contains four KT88 output tubes with two ECC83 (12AX7) for the preamp stages for a generous 2 x 45W. It has three line inputs, weighs a chunky 38 lbs. features auto-bias and is yours for (sigh) around $3,000.

More integrated amp goodness: Fezz Audio's beautiful and sanely-priced Titania.

Muarah Audio

Muarah, a Polish brand which makes both turntables and tube amplifiers, showed the new MT-3 turntable which departs from their previous designs of acrylic plinth construction by moving to thick MDF board, finished in satin black. The platter, as with other Muarah Audio decks, is made of black acrylic, with a thickness of 30 mm and a weight of approximately 5.5 lbs. This stood out because of its original integrated turntable mat design, which recalls their MT-2 Special Edition. The MT-3 is compatible with tonearms with an effective length of 9 inches, including the MY-1/9 seen here. Sit down for this: the deck as seen here sells for €3,536. That’s $3,900, of which $2,100 is for the arm if purchased on its own!

The striking new Muarah MT-3 turntable.

Cube Audio

This rather Lowther-like speaker, the Lotus, hails from Cube Audio. They describe it as a “one-and-a-half-way set based on a new generation of 8-inch wideband transducers supplemented with the company's woofers.” The neat feature is the side-firing woofer, and the speakers boast 90 dB-plus sensitivity. The price is $17,200.

Cube Audio's Lotus loudspeaker.

Benny Audio

For those who love thick platters and turntables with serious heft, the belt-drive Benny Audio Odyssey weighs a considerable 50 kg, or 110 lbs., despite a relatively compact footprint of only 440 x 440 mm/17 x 17 inches. Its DC motor resides in a housing separated from the plinth, the latter a 3-layer construct of plywood, aluminum and Delrin. The bearing is an inverted “hydrodynamic” type.

Benny Audio's substantial Odyssey turntable.

Tentogra

Fitted with a Kuzma tonearm, the Tentogra Wowo turntable is the smallest of the company’s turntables, following the Tentogra Oscar and Tentogra Gramy VTA, with a footprint of 20 x 18 inches. Its designer says, “The inspiration for this model was simplicity and a reference to vintage turntables, if only because of the quick access to all adjustments.” It certainly looks like a breeze to set up, but it’s no lightweight at 77 lbs. without arm or accessories. It can handle two arms of 9 inch – 14-inch lengths, the Kuzma seen here being a 12-inch. The deck provides speeds of 33, 45 and 78 RPM selected by a knob on the front of the turntable; the speed is indicated by an LED. Wowo is available in two basic colors – black or silver – while various user-changeable natural wood veneers are used for the turntable housing.

Tentogra's Wowo turntable is available in a choice of natural wood veneers.

Audio Phonique

It’s hard to find any tube devotees who aren’t fascinated by the use of less-common or vintage valves. As much as I adore the usual suspects, I, too, am a sucker for an unfamiliar designation. Related to the PX25, Emission Labs’ 1605 triode powers Audio Phonique’s PSE1605 monoblocks, good for 40W each. That’s substantial for a single-ended triode when one considers how many SET followers get by with less than 10 watts. Beautifully made, the PSE 1605 reads like a brand fetishist’s dream: Lundahl’s custom-made amorphous speaker and interstage transformers, Mundorf MCap SUPREME Classic SilverGold Oil, TubeCap and MLytic AG capacitors for power supplies, Caddock and Vishay-Dale precision low-noise resistors, WBT terminals, and a gold-plated 3 mm printed circuit board with thick OFC copper layer. Everything is soldered with Cardas’ eutectic tin. Which helps to explain the price of $87,000 per pair.

The Audio Phonique PSE1605 mono power amplifier, featuring 1605 output tubes.

Avatar Audio

Avatar Audio’s Holophony Number Two loudspeaker intrigued me because its double-body cabinet is made of solid bamboo. Constructed of 5-layer ply with a thickness of just over 1 inch, Number Two has sensitivity of 92 dB, making it ideal for single-ended triode amplifiers. The tweeter has a black felt surround to prevent reflections and the cabinets include two types of isolation feet: balls on the bottom and magnetic isolators under the upper cabinet.

Avatar Audio's distinctive Holophony Number Two loudspeaker.

Closer Acoustics

Delightfully named the 300B Provocateur, Closer Acoustics’ amp is a perfect match for all of the super-high-sensitivity speakers so popular in Poland. It delivers only 8W per channel in Class A from a tube complement of two 300Bs, plus 5U4G and 6SN7 tubes. The amplifier accommodates four line sources via gold-plated, pure copper RCA inputs and the motorized, remote-controlled volume control is a 48-position stepped attenuator.

The 300B Provocateur integrated amp from Closer Acoustics.

Hornsolutions

Although I am not a horn devotee – I have a soft spot for certain Lowthers, and covet a number of vintage Klipsch models such as the Heresy and La Scala – I love seeing these massive types designed to challenge domestic harmony. This is German manufacturer Hornsolutions’ Master Series “The Reference” and it did, indeed, sound impressive in one of the biggest rooms at the show. (See the header image for this article.) Their systems hark back to Western Electric designs of yore, the company favors compression drivers (including one appropriately called the 666), and the construction is modular to suit various needs and room sizes.

Destination Audio

Called “Nika,” Destination Audio’s 3-way horn system reminded me of Sonus Faber and Franco Serblin speakers thanks to the stringed grille. This 50-inch-tall monitor has a footprint of only 25 x 25 inches, so it’s relatively manageable for a horn system. Sensitivity is 99 dB, which places it smack in the middle of modern horn efficiency and is high enough for even the reborn Leak Stereo 20s, which seem to be proliferating on this side of the Pond. At 254 lbs. per speaker, though, one can imagine the construction is substantial. Frequency response is claimed to be 25 Hz – 20kHz.

Meet Nika, the 3-way horn loudspeaker from Destination Audio.

Aretai

Not all the speakers in the high-end rooms were massive, and it was a relief to find these gems from Latvian manufacturer Aretai. The Contra 100S is described as a 2.5-way, and it houses two 6-inch woofers, one firing at the back. This stand-mount is only 16 inches tall, but is claimed to deliver a frequency response of 32 Hz – 30 kHz. Impedance is 4 ohms and sensitivity only 85 dB, but it can handle 100 watts.

The compact Aretai Contra 100S speakers.

Sisound

Woofers on top reminds me of a certain British loudspeaker which always had me running from the room, but Sisound’s Kolumny Fortis S – being a floorstander – focused its tweeter at just below ear level and it sounded just fine. The 50-inch-tall speaker can pump out 114 dB, but then, its sensitivity is 102 dB. The horn tweeter and 12-inch woofer cover 25 Hz – 30 kHz.

Making inverted driver placement work: the Sisound Kolumny Fortis S loudspeaker.

Header image: The Reference loudspeaker from Hornsolutions. All images courtesy of Ken Kessler.

The Youngbloods – Elephant Mountain (RCA IMP6051)

Released April 1969 by RCA Records
Re-mastered 2023 by Kevin Gray at Cohearent Audio
Sourced from original master tapes
Pressed on 180-gram vinyl at Record Technology, Inc.

My first-ever concert at the Fillmore East in New York City was on November 23, 1968.

The headliner was Iron Butterfly, Canned Heat was the middle act and the Youngbloods opened the show.

I was so excited, 16 years old and everything about the concert experience was shiny and new. Everything was great. I hadn't gotten to the point where something “sucked.”

No. It was all exciting and fresh.

I liked Iron Butterfly and already bought the mega-hit album In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida. According to Atlantic Records executives I spoke with at one time, it was the first RIAA Gold-certified rock album. That album was given Gold record status in 1968, and eventually went double-platinum.

Anyway, having taken LSD for the first time in April 1968, I will surmise that I was high on acid at this concert.

What an occasion!

The opening band was the Youngbloods and I was blown away. They were riding high off their super-hippie anthem “Get Together,” which had been an FM staple for the past year.

The Youngbloods in 1968. Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons/public domain.

They played a song called “Darkness, Darkness” that wasn't released yet and I remember that it was haunting and beautiful.

That's about all I remember except that I also loved Canned Heat and Iron Butterfly. The night was memorable because it was my introduction to the whole new world of live shows. 

Over the next 12 months I was able to see dozens of the world's most famous artists like the Stones. Hendrix, Blind Faith, Free, Spooky Tooth, Procol Harum, the Grateful Dead, Jefferson Airplane, B.B. King, Johnny Winter, Terry Reid, Ten Years After, the Jeff Beck Group, Eric Clapton, Delaney and Bonnie, Mountain, Traffic, Led Zeppelin, the Woody Herman Orchestra, Chicago (when they were still called the Chicago Transit Authority/CTA), Pacific Gas & Electric, Lee Michaels, Janis Joplin, the Nice, Family, the Paul Butterfield Blues Band, Joe Cocker, NRBQ, Jethro Tull, Blues Image, Man, and the Who.

The point of listing all these artists and shows is because I feel it's important to give atmospheric context to this review.

My memory was that the three bands at my first Fillmore East concert, the Youngbloods, Canned Heat, and Butterfly, were important to me at the time.

My memory of this moment is such that I wanted to go back to a time.

I bought the Youngbloods album Elephant Mountain when it was first released in 1969, and when I saw that it had just been re-released in an audiophile 180-gram vinyl version, I had to find out where this album stood in my emotional memory bank.

I went into my record collection and found my original 1968 copy of Iron Butterfly’s In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida and my original 1968 copy of Canned Heat’s Boogie with Canned Heat.

Back in those days, if you didn't have the latest release of a band you had just seen, you bought it the next day.

What did not survive my many moves between girlfriends and band relocation was Elephant Mountain.

The original Elephant Mountain album came out a good six months after I saw that first show, and I couldn't wait for the re-release copy to arrive from Acoustic Sounds.

I hadn't thought about the Youngbloods for many years.

I could have downloaded or streamed the album but I wanted to create the entire experience again (if that was possible).

The new vinyl package came with a great six-page insert with photos and lots of historical information.

First off, I learned that Charlie Daniels – yes, that Charlie Daniels – was the producer known as Charles E. Daniels at that time. Then I learned the album's seemingly free-form style was due to the band's insistence (and subsequent acquiescence by their record label RCA) that music should be a wondrous spontaneous creation full of experimental instruments and sounds never (or rarely) heard before. The Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band was used as the example to the record label that the band should be left to record whatever they felt was right.

I read all of this before I played the album.

Elephant Mountain refers to the geographical area where the band was situated – Marin County. This is important to know as the band was surrounded by the newly-explosive effect of the Grateful Dead, the Airplane and all the San Francisco jam bands of the era.

In the liner notes, the one band member quoted the most extensively, known as Banana (how ’60s) said that this kind of meandering jam style had no effect on the band. In fact, he went on to say that the band was part of and an extension of bands like the Lovin’ Spoonful, Buffalo Springfield, and the folk-rock scene.

OK, I finally put the album on and the opening track “Darkness, Darkness” immediately took me back to 1968 and 1969.

On the plus side, lead vocalist Jesse Colin Young has a voice that sounds of the times – in the best sense. Like listening to Bob Lind’s voice on the song “Elusive Butterfly” or Scott McKenzie’s “San Francisco (Be Sure to Wear Some Flowers in Your Hair).” Trust me, if you lived through those times the vocal vibes from these voices have a lot of meaning.

Jesse’s vocals, at certain times, actually recall Janis Joplin’s at her most sincere and non-histrionic.

After that opener, the band plays it all soft, however, and the recording, while very clean, lies fairly flat. For a band that says they were not part of that San Francisco jam scene, there seems to be plenty of that on this album. The liner notes tell a story that the band wrote the songs prior to recording, but as the album progresses what they may call rehearsed songs sound to me like they don't know when to stop. It is very strange that an album can contain some tightly-written material and then veer off where jamming fills a lot of space. It makes for nice background music, but I'm trying to remember if I used to play the entire album or just a track or two.

To put this in perspective, I played all the Buffalo Springfield albums in their entirety over and over, as I did with the Dead, Airplane, Love, Iron Butterfly, Canned Heat, the Incredible String Band, Pink Floyd, The Doors, etc.

Bands like the Lovin’ Spoonful, the Turtles, and The Mamas & the Papas had many huge radio hits, so the albums they released were not that important to me, but all those bands had a very tight focus.

The Youngbloods’ Elephant Mountain, however, came at a time where you were supposed to sit around stoned out of your mind and you were supposed to groove on it.

Apparently I did but got bored with it. Now, listening to it is an interesting exercise in memory retention and musical context.

The legendary Kevin Gray did the pure analog LP transfer and the sonics, given the times, are what you would expect, meaning the more you like the songs the more you will like this album. The vinyl transfer is dead quiet, but then again, so is the music, so there are not a lot of dynamics going on.

My consumption of LSD, beginning in 1968 and peaking into 1970, however, made many marginal things extremely acceptable. It is in this contact that I will say that the next time I want to hear “Darkness, Darkness,” I probably will stream that song, as there is little in the musical noodling here on the rest of the album to hold my interest. Some musicians may really like the quasi-jazz leanings, as it seems that the band is trying to make a point. I'm not enough of a musician, however, to care about this as a “cool” factor.

Our editor, Frank Doris, though, tells me he thinks “Ride the Wind,” which he first heard about 15 years ago, is one of the most marvelous songs he’s ever listened to.

Yes, listening to the entire Youngbloods Elephant Mountain was a fun snapshot in time and fairly enjoyable, but only proves the old cliché:

You can't go home again.

There are certain artists who just define what a New York City rock song should sound like. These songs have attitude and grit, but find a way to sparkle and soar like skyscrapers. It’s a rare blend, and when the concrete, steel, and vibe come together the impact they make is unmistakable, and usually lasting. Lou Reed, the Ramones, Living Colour, Yeah Yeah Yeahs, and Patti Smith present an authenticity that in many ways could only have been birthed in the five boroughs.

Add Steve Conte to that list. Known for his work with the New York Dolls and Michael Monroe, Conte has spent his entire career honing his craft collaborating with a diverse range of artists, including Peter Wolf, Eric Burdon of the Animals, Willy DeVille, Billy Squier, Maceo Parker, Willie Nile, Jim Jones and Hubert Sumlin, and he even served as the rehearsal vocalist for Paul Simon during solo and Simon and Garfunkel tours. That has all come together on his forthcoming album, The Concrete Jangle, the successor to his critically-acclaimed 2021 release Bronx Cheer.

Steve Conte, The Concrete Jangle, album cover.

Scheduled for launch on Record Store Day (April 20), this 10-track album features collaborations with XTC's Andy Partridge, who co-wrote five of the songs with Conte, including the newly-released single "Shoot Out The Stars." This is the perfect summer spin, with songs suited for long stretches of highway when you are headed to the beach, and late-night party fist pumps. The record breaks open like an early 1980s Saturday night dance party hosted on air by your favorite metro market FM radio station, commercial free, and filled with non-stop hits.

Conte is supported on the record by his brother on bass, and Prairie Prince (Todd Rundgren, XTC, the Tubes) on drums. But the multiple layers of sound Conte and Partridge assemble makes this all seem like a much larger affair.

Steve Conte fittingly, is on Steve van Zandt’s Wicked Cool Records, and like labelmate Jesse Malin, perhaps best represents what the vision for the company has always been built around. This music may not be intended to save rock and roll, but to anyone who decides to hit “play,” it will be a gateway back to a moment when rock really did rule the world, and every one of us wished we could play guitar; maybe still do.

Ray Chelstowski: This sounds like the ultimate Wicked Cool Record.

Steve Conte: I’d like to think so. I’m not sure if they play any XTC on Little Steven’s Underground Garage [Steve van Zandt’s SiriusXM radio program] or how aware the listeners are of Andy Partridge, but he certainly is my personal songwriting hero and has millions of fans around the world.

RC: In terms of the writing process with Andy, did you arrive with any specific themes?

SC: Yes. I had the hook and the chorus for my first single, “Fourth of July.” I’d been sitting on that hook for 20 years. I’d never finished it and it was one of the ones I’d brought to him. You don’t want to go into a writing session with someone as genius as Andy Partridge without being armed already with a few good ideas. So I brought him the “Fourth of July” chorus and he added the instrumental bit and helped me finish that off. With “Shoot Out the Stars,” I had the title and that was really it. He started playing a verse and from that I heard where the chorus should go. I fed off of him. When I work with really good writers I become better.

RC: What is it specifically about XTC’s songwriting that you admire most?

SC: Everything; concepts, the melodies, the rhythms. He writes like no one else. What I’ve come to learn is that Andy writes visually. He hears a musical idea and it reminds him of “fill in the blank.” He has these little formulas for helping people when they get stuck, like asking which songs you wish you wrote. In this case I told him “King Midas In Reverse” by the Hollies. I knew he’d like that one and he did. He started jamming around on this chord and stopped, saying it sounded like a bell, that there was ringing, and we built the song “One Last Bell” from there.

RC: How did you know on that song that it needed a trumpet part? It adds just the right touch.

SC: I kind of went off on his visuals, and I started picturing old Europe [and] the trumpeters with flags hanging from their horns. I put a sample of a trumpet in, a loop, just as a placeholder. After a while I got so attached to it I realized that I had to have something like that in there. So, I got a real trumpet player to come in and play something similar.

RC: How did you get Prairie Prince to play on this record?

SC: It was easy: after I told him that I’d written half of the album with Andy Partridge. He’d played on XTC’s albums Skylarking and Apple Venus [Volume 1]. I knew that I had to up my game in a number of areas. It started with writing with Andy. And, drummers have always been important to me. I’ve always had great drummers on my records. I had Charlie Drayton from Keith Richards’ band on my last record. But Prairie just made sense given Andy’s involvement.

RC: Did Steve van Zandt get involved at all with this record?

SC: I actually wanted him to produce it. He’s just such a busy guy that we couldn’t arrange it. So, I produced it myself. He didn’t hear anything until I was done and he weighed in on a couple of the mixes and had some thoughts on certain effects on specific songs. But he was pretty much hands off, although if he didn’t like something I would have heard about it. He always says, “just give me four Coolest Songs in the World.” [Steve van Zandt’s radio show does a regular segment called “Little Steven’s Coolest Songs in the World – Ed.] I told him that I had given him six and so far I’ve delivered three. So, I have one more to go.

RC: This really feels to me like a classic New York City rock record. Where do you think the rock scene is at right now in New York?

SC: Kinda nowhere. It kind of happened to the whole world. There are little pockets where that’s not the case but when I was growing up rock ruled the world. I was too young to be a hippie but I wanted to be one. From the mid-60s up until the grunge era it was about rock. Grunge kind of put the nail in the coffin of regular rock and roll and then everything just got a bit dark and then it just went away. Hip-hop and boy bands and all that stuff started to rule. Thing come in waves and cycles, and the cycle of rock ended with the death of Kurt Cobain. And radio completely changed. Clear Channel took over and there were no independent people who were able to just play what they liked. I grew up listening to WNEW-FM where the DJs like Scott “The Professor” Muni were as big as the bands they played. It’s all different now.

Header image courtesy of Rob Armstrong.

In our fast-paced world, the simple act of taking some quality time to immerse oneself in music has increasingly become a rare luxury. Yet, it is within this very act that the soul of music is discovered, felt, and understood. That's the magic our systems have to offer us – but only if we're willing to dedicate an hour – even 15 minutes – of listening without the distractions that constantly vie for our attention.

Carving out that time is a ritual that nurtures the soul and sharpens the senses.

Imagine setting aside an evening dedicated solely to the act of listening. You turn off your phone and dim the lights to create a sanctuary from the outside world. As you settle in, the high-fidelity system disappears, no longer a cool assembly of electronic components; it's an instrument in its own right, finely tuned to bring forth the essence of the music it channels.

When we listen to music on a cheesy system or perhaps via car audio, we can certainly enjoy the music, but listening – really listening – on a world-class stereo system adds an entirely new dimension. Suddenly, it's about perceiving the layers of the music, understanding the placement of each instrument within the soundstage, and feeling the texture of the vocals as if the singer is performing just for you. The interplay of rhythms becomes a language, evoking memories, and stirring emotions.

This form of listening transcends the everyday.

The setting in which this takes place plays a vital role in the listening experience: the dimensions of the room, the placement of speakers, and certainly where you choose to sit can dramatically alter how you interact with music. The pursuit of the perfect sound environment is as much about understanding and manipulating these physical spaces as it is about the technology that fills them. It's about creating a space where music can breathe, resonate, and ultimately, touch your soul.

The choice of equipment is, of course, at the heart of building a truly high-performance resolving system. The right combination of properly set up audio gear can make magic that is unobtainable even in a live performance.

Great music, rendered through a system capable of capturing its full spectrum of expression, can evoke a kaleidoscope of emotions. From inspiring tears to joy, music has the power to move us, to change us. This emotional engagement transforms passive ho-hum listening into an active, immersive experience, creating moments that imprint themselves on our hearts, lingering long after the final note has faded into silence.

Courtesy of Pexels.com/Andrea Piacquadio.

In our relentless pursuit to fill every waking moment with content, the power of pausing to truly listen – to engage with music on a level that nourishes our emotional and intellectual being – should not be underestimated. High-end audio is not merely about the sophistication of the equipment; it's a gateway to a richer, more meaningful musical experience. It invites us to dust off our favorite records, to temporarily set aside the hassles of the day, and to rediscover the art of listening.

Let's commit to making time for music, to approaching it with the reverence it deserves. Let's listen as if each time were the first, allowing the beauty of each note, each harmony, to wash over us anew. For in the end, the true essence of music lies not in the melody alone, but in our capacity to lose ourselves within its embrace, one note at a time, rediscovering not just the art of listening, but the art of being truly alive.

Header image courtesy of Pixabay.com/pixalanart.

It was late 1968 when my friend, the late Barry Byrens, said to me, “Linc,” (he loved calling me that, because I looked like Linc in the TV show The Mod Squad), “you need to get rid of that motorcycle and get a car, a convertible.” At the time I was subletting a cabin in Laurel Canyon and in fact had not thought about a car. I liked my motorcycle, but it was winter in LA and riding the bike at night was chilly.

Two days later I was at his house in West Hollywood up in the hills at 8929 St. Ives, just above Gil Turner’s liquor store at Doheny and Sunset Blvd. Barry had the newspaper open and said, “I found you a car at this car lot on Sunset Blvd. in Hollywood.” He drove me down there in his Lincoln, a hardtop convertible.

We got there and it was a 1964 copper-colored Chevy Corvair convertible. Barry, me, and the salesman took it for a test drive. On a side street south of Sunset I tried to turn the car around and stalled it. It had a stick shift, so I pushed in the clutch and brake. I turned the key to restart it and the Corvair rolled backwards a foot or so and hit a fire hydrant. I don’t think I pressed the brake hard enough. Getting out, we saw a small ding put in the trunk just above the license plate. I was horrified at what I had done, but the salesman said “no sweat” and we continued the test drive, then left.

Two days later Barry found another Corvair convertible but this one was a light blue 1966. We went down and after the test drive, I was sold. It was $999. I plunked down $250 down and the payments would be $48 a month. I drove it back to Barry’s house. Later that day the salesman from the first car lot called and said, “your car is ready to be picked up.” I looked at Barry (I did not know what to say) and he took the phone from me. Barry said, “he doesn’t want the car!” “Why not?” the salesman asked. “He just doesn’t want it,” and then the salesman started getting pushy. Finally, after a back-and-forth Barry says, “he doesn’t want it because it has a dent in the trunk!” The salesman was speechless, and Barry told him to fu*k off and hung up.

My best new toy ever, it is my first car, and driving with the top down is a beautiful thing. Barry was right. One night I am driving up Doheny Drive going to Barry’s house to hang out and I see a hitchhiker. He has long hair and looks like one of us, so I pull over and pick him up. He introduces himself as “Alice Cooper.” Interesting, I think to myself; there must be a story here. “Unusual name,” I say to Alice, and he explains that it is his stage persona and the name of his band. “This is not a sexual identity thing either,” he quickly adds. He goes on to explain that he had recently formed the band and they were in rehearsal here in Hollywood.

I tell him I am from New York City and he says he is from Phoenix. I say that is not far from Los Angeles, and Alice answers that in fact it is very far from LA We both have a laugh at that one. They are getting ready for their debut. I had met more than a few musicians in Los Angeles who had told me that they were forming a band and rehearsing – and never heard of them again. But I got the feeling that this Alice Cooper guy was more realistic and solid, so I thought it might happen with for him. We got to Alice’s destination and he asked me to stop and drop him off.

Alice Cooper. Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons/Hunter Desportes.

I loved this Hollywood life; so friendly with everyone just hanging out. Whenever I had no plans for the evening, I would go to Ben Frank’s on Sunset to hang out. the parking lot was always packed with girls and long-haired guys, a couple of hundred young folks just milling around and getting to know each other. In New York we had something similar to that at the Bethesda fountain in Central Park, where the hippies, freaks and musicians would hang out, but the scene would only be happening on Sunday afternoons.

One night I am at Ben Frank’s with Jon Lane, my (late) friend from New York City who was visiting me, and these two girls I had seen around came up to us and asked if we wanted to go party with them. Tempting, but we were hungry and were planning to go inside to Ben Frank’s and have dinner, so we passed. A couple of nights later we were back in the parking lot and this kid I kind of knew came over to us and said, “you know Audrey and her friend, right?” The guy tells me they had died. What? Yeah, he says, they overdosed on heroin; the police found them. Jonny turned to me and said, “that could have been us.” Even though we didn’t do smack, they might have convinced us to try it.

That, I was beginning to find out, was the other side of Hollywood life. As open and friendly as things were, there was another side that was dangerous, with quick turns and sudden deaths. All kinds of different people come to Southern California. New York City is the melting pot of the world, and Los Angeles is the melting pot for young Americans.

Maybe a couple of weeks or so later I see Alice Cooper hitching again. He jumps in my car and I told him I was going to a friend’s house to hang out and if he wanted, he could come too. It wouldn’t quite be a party but there would be people there listening to music and most would be smoking. Alice says, “I don’t smoke pot.” I replied, “really?” He answered, “I don’t have a problem with it but I personally do not like it.” “Oh, so what do you do? “I love beer, Budweiser in fact.” I am not sure if they will have beer and Alice says, “let’s stop somewhere so I can pick up some Bud.”

I think we stopped at Gil Turner’s and he ran in and bought a six pack of Bud. Then we drove to my friend’s house and joined the scene. That was the thing about LA – you could just drop in on anyone you knew, and it was okay. You would show up they would invite you in and ask if you wanted to smoke.

After about a half an hour I look over and see Alice on the floor sitting with his back leaning against the wall and drinking a can of beer. He had two empties on the floor and was working on his third. No one was drinking with him; it was a pot crowd, but he looked comfortable, fit in and seemed like he was enjoying himself. The evening went on and after a couple of hours I left with a girl and we went to my cabin in Laurel Canyon.

One afternoon the rock group Love showed up to the cabin and we all hung out and partied. Love, led by the brilliant but eccentric Arthur Lee, were one of the leading bands on the LA scene during the mid to late 1960s. However, Arthur Lee wasn’t with them when they showed up. I asked about it and the band said that they had parted ways. The often-unruly Lee was quick to fire musicians.

I have been told that Roger Daltrey said that Arthur Lee was on the spectrum. In their earlier days, the members of Love lived in a decrepit Hollywood mansion once owned by Bela Lugosi. Arthur Lee and Love evolved from the group formerly known as Grass Roots (not the Grass Roots that had many hit singles) and were known in LA for their spirited and entertaining live performances. Arthur was immensely proud of his racially-mixed band, one of the first in rock and roll. In late 1966 the three hottest bands in Los Angeles were The Byrds, The Doors and Love.

Love’s Forever Changes was released in 1967 and was and still is considered a masterpiece. The name of the album comes from a story Arthur had heard. This guy had broken up with his girlfriend. She exclaimed, “You said you would love me forever!” and the guy replied, “Well, forever changes.” The album was brilliant but did not sell as well as expected. Arthur, being very volatile, changed band personnel frequently. (In 1995 he was wrongfully convicted of a gun charge and, being his third strike, his career was interrupted by a prison sentence until 2001. After prison, Arthur formed a new band and toured and made some records. However, even though he was much more disciplined, he never again achieved his earlier promise. Sadly, he passed away from leukemia in 2006 at the age of 61.)

Some weeks later I am driving my Corvair with the top down and see Alice Cooper walking up on Sunset. I yelled to him asking if he needed a ride. With a friendly wave he said no and kept on walking east towards the Old World restaurant. The next time I saw Alice was when I was in Chicago on tour with Nektar in 1974. By this time he had become a huge star with songs like “I’m Eighteen” and “School’s Out.” We said a quick hello to each other in the lobby of the upscale Chicago Holiday Inn on Lake Shore Drive.

In 1994 I was an on-air technology correspondent and host for The Cable Doctor Show, and was covering the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas. I saw that Alice Cooper was making a celebrity appearance. “Meet Alice Cooper and his Mother.” An unusual scenario, but there he was in an exhibitor’s booth, posing for Polaroid pictures with his mother. I went over and he introduced me to his mom and said, “you look different with short hair! And what is with the jacket and tie?” In response I told him I was a technology journalist on television, but that he looked exactly the same, and as you can see, that made him smile. That smile reminded me of when I first met him. He certainly has come a long way for a kid named Vince from Phoenix. I think this is pretty much the way he planned it.

Header image: Alice Cooper 1972 promotional photo. Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons/public domain.

This article was first published in Issue 132.

The Crypto.com Arena (or the Staples Center, if you’re old school in downtown Los Angeles), is an imposing structure, appearing even more starkly colossal when devoid of Lakers, Clippers, or Kings fans. Replace the people with infrastructure like vans, satellite dishes, and generators, and you can imagine what it looks like to stage the GRAMMY Awards. This year’s GRAMMY Awards brought an audience of approximately 16.9 million, who tuned in to watch a program showcasing numerous prominent performances and unexpected once-in-a-lifetime moments. This signifies a notable 34 percent increase compared to the viewership of last year's broadcast.

Putting on an awards show is a Herculean effort, and the GRAMMYS is one of the most taxing. The number and scale of moving parts – including staging, instruments, audio gear, performers, stagehands and many other aspects – demands months of preparation, knowledge, and attention to detail. With the help of the Recording Academy Producers and Engineers Wing technical PR representatives Robbie Clyne and Corey Walthall on site, journalists received a private backstage tour of the Crypto.com Arena that gave us a glimpse into the inner workings of “Music’s Biggest Night,” and how the sound heard in the arena also makes its way to your device of choice. And don’t forget, the floor seating area for the GRAMMY Awards is positioned above a basketball court of the Crypto.com Arena, which in turn is situated atop an ice rink!

The Crypto.com Arena. Photo by Thomas Fogel. 

An overview photo of the Crypto.Com Arena during Grammy rehearsals. Photo by Kevin Winter/Getty Images for The Recording Academy.

First, the music has to get captured from the show’s stages. Before any audio feed makes its way out of Los Angeles, it has to sound good for the artists performing on stage, attendees in house, and to the various broadcast trucks that will eventually get the audio and video out to the world. During rehearsals, each artist performing at the ceremony receives roughly an hour soundcheck to get everything right. The house mix is worked on by front of house (FOH) music mixer Jamie Pollock through a DiGiCo Quantum 7 digital mixing console, while FOH production mixer Jeff Peterson adds production elements (hosts/announcers’ mics, video packages, etc.) from his DiGiCo Quantum 338 digital mixing console. The audio is fine-tuned to get the best mix in the cavernous arena, with steep walls and other less-than-optimum acoustical attributes.

The main GRAMMY stage is split into two halves, the A Stage and B Stage. Like every other live performance, the performers’ monitor mixes are handled separately. The entire setup of instruments for each artist is stationed backstage on individual risers, fully wired and prepared. This allows for seamless transitions onto the stage, where the setups can be swiftly rolled into place and plugged in, facilitating rapid changeovers between performances.

Front-of-house music mixer Jamie Pollock at the DiGiCo Quantum 7 digital mixing console. Photo by Kevin Winter/Getty Images for The Recording Academy.

Dua Lipa performs onstage during the 66th GRAMMY Awards. Photo by Kevin Winter/Getty Images for The Recording Academy.

The tympani riser ready to go on stage for the Billy Joel segment of the show. Photo by Kevin Winter/Getty Images for The Recording Academy.

Billy Joel premieres his new song, "Turn the Lights Back On." Photo by Kevin Winter/Getty Images for The Recording Academy.

Jeff Peterson, who is also the system designer at audio vendor ATK Audiotek (now owned by Lititz, PA-based Clair Global), pointed out that the design of the PA system is affected by the stage and the set design, which also impacts the placement and number of speaker cabinets. “We need to have clear sight lines so my speakers can’t be in front of anything pretty, so that will determine how high I have to [place them], but I also don’t want [them] to be too low, because then you end up with a lot of energy close to the ground.” Peterson also noted that even though the home audience does not hear exactly what the arena crowd hears, it has to sound good in the house first so the performing artists have a great experience, or else viewers will not have any chance of having a good experience at home. “That’s really my job, to make it intelligible out here. You [have to be able to] hear everything the [presenters and performers are] saying, but not so loud and booming that you hear it on TV and go ‘oh, wow, they’re in an arena.’”

Next we got to chat with Steve Anderson (A2 lead/rack room) who oversees the technical area from where all the audio signals are routed as they come off the stage.  We also got to talk with Michael Abbott, whose official title is Audio Producer (who has worked on the show for the past three decades) and views his role as a coordinator very seriously: “I work a month and a half, two months, sometimes more with The Recording Academy and members from the Producer and Engineers Wing [and] the vendors, and we come up with a plan that we [execute].” [The Producers and Engineers Wing (P&E) is the technical wing of the Recording Academy, which presents the annual Grammy awards – Ed.]

Anderson patches in all of the live audio signals from the stage and converts them to digital as part of the preparation for broadcast. In “Patch Land,” as Anderson calls it, all of the audio signals being used out on the stage come in and go out through hundreds of cables, configured according to the plan that Abbott and his team have developed. Each cable represents a distinct audio channel, whether a single hi-hat on a drum kit or the vocals from a backup singer, so Anderson was relieved when the show transitioned to digital after years of analog cables.

"Patch Land" is where all of the live audio signals from the stage get converted to digital as part of the preparation for broadcast. Photo by Thomas Fogel.

Steve Anderson standing among the cables and hardware in Patch Land. Photo by Thomas Fogel.

All of the signals from the onstage microphones are converted from analog to digital, which typically cuts down on the number of cables needed, but because there are so many channels, there are still a ton of cables to work with. However, going to digital enables the audio engineers to use fewer recording machines than with analog, and the hardware takes up much less space. Anderson does not miss his years of having to put channel labeling tape on 10 monitor consoles!

After the audio from the stage leaves Patch Land, it heads to the two M3 (Music Mix Mobile) remote music production trucks located outside at the top of the load-in ramp of the Crypto.com arena. A prominent member of the P&E Wing, engineer/producer Glenn Lorbecki, whose title on the show is GRAMMY Broadcast Music Mix Audio Advisor, has been working on this part of the show for years, and knows the trucks inside and out. One remote truck handles the A Stage and the other covers the B Stage. The trucks are identical and can do each other’s jobs. “These two trucks are redundant,” says Lorbecki, “so that if something happens – if one truck loses power – everything [can] immediately [move] over to the second truck and be mixed from there – it’s a live broadcast and you only have one shot to do it so redundancy is the insurance policy.”

Tracy Chapman and Luke Combs duet on "Fast Car." Photo by Kevin Winter/Getty Images for The Recording Academy.

Joni Mitchell and Brandi Carlile performing "Both Sides Now." Photo by Kevin Winter/Getty Images for The Recording Academy.

Both trucks are outfitted with identical LAWO MC562 48-fader surface mixing boards, M&K speakers, and Waves Extreme Server and associated Waves software. Lorbecki continued, “We send a 5.1 music mix to the Denali live production truck positioned beneath the arena downstairs where GRAMMY A-1 production mixer Tom Holmes sends a 5.1 production mix to CBS, which then gets distributed to the world. Any stereo conversion happens locally via downmix.”

The last stop on the A/V journey, the Denali truck serves as the hub for consolidating video and audio elements. I got to talk to Tom Holmes about his 5.1 production mix which includes the 5.1 music mix, combined with other audio production elements such as host/announcer mics, audience ambience/reaction mics, and pre-recorded walk-on/walk-off music, etc. It includes all of the award announce elements and any audio that accompanies video.

GRAMMY A-1 production mixer Tom Holmes at a Calrec audio mixing console. He sends a 5.1 production mix to CBS, which then gets distributed to the world. Photo by Kevin Winter/Getty Images for The Recording Academy.

I also spoke with audio technician/playback mixer Eric Johnson, who is in charge of the walk-on/walk-off music. Holmes casually reminds us that Johnson also has the ability to wield the dreaded “hook” for award winners who talk too long, with “noodle music” to cue them to get off the stage. “Johnson has the power to get anyone off the stage, no matter how big the star is. The show has to run according to schedule. “Why, he could noodle Adele off the stage!” Holmes told me, laughing. “I’ll noodle anyone!” replied Johnson. All of these audio components (the 5.1 production mix) are then integrated with all aspects of the video tech including the multiple camera feeds, graphics, etc., and routed to another trailer for broadcast, eventually reaching millions of viewers globally.

A fundamental part of the Crypto.com Arena’s bones – the infrastructure – includes the patch room located right behind the Denali truck. Looking like an old school telephone operator’s room, the patch room can connect people working in both the arena and in remote locations, including the Los Angeles Convention Center, and the Peacock Theatre. Depending on the segment of the show, these remote locations can have audio/video routed to and from them as part of the GRAMMY broadcast. Stepping inside that room really illustrates how much the building has been through and how many incredible events it has hosted.

The rack of cables that connects the buildings across the L.A. Live complex. Photo by Thomas Fogel.

After chatting with these behind-the-scenes individuals and viewing the technology necessary to make it happen, it became clear just how much effort and dedication goes into staging the GRAMMYS each year. It’s no wonder it's the most complicated awards show production. Every person running their post is a pro at the top of their game; people like Anderson and Abbott have each been at it for over 40 years, while Peterson has 15 years of experience.

This was the 66th annual GRAMMY Awards – their talent and dedication keep the show running smoothly, year after year.

Lana Del Rey, Phoebe Bridgers and Taylor Swift attend the 66th GRAMMY Awards. Photo by Monica Schipper/Getty Images for The Recording Academy.

SZA accepts the Best R&B Song award for "Snooze." Photo by Kevin Mazur/Getty Images for The Recording Academy.

Kylie Minogue and Ed Sheeran enjoying the GRAMMY Awards celebration. Photo by Kevin Mazur/Getty Images for The Recording Academy.

Header image: Fantasia Barrino performs onstage during the 66th GRAMMY Awards. Photo by Kevin Winter/Getty Images for The Recording Academy.

Steely Dan is Served with Mushed Yams

For the last seven months I've been scheming how to shape my grandson Ezra's musical tastes.

First, I'd like to say, when people ask me if I've seen The Greatest Night in Pop, about the making of "We Are the World," I ask them: "Have you seen my grandson watch 'Monster in the Mirror'"?

"Monster in the Mirror" is a Sesame Street classic. The easily frightened Grover keeps seeing a monster, until he is reassured that what's happening is that he gets spooked every time he sees himself in a mirror. There is an all-star video filmed in 1991 with a cast that, for its time, was the kid celebrity equivalent of any 1980s pop charity event.

The singers featured on the "wubba-wubba-wubba-wubba-whoo-whoo-whoo" chorus include Robin Williams, Candice Bergen, Julia Roberts, Bo Jackson, Lou Diamond Phillips, Geena Davis, Jeff Goldblum, Whoopi Goldberg and about 20 other performers. Though Bart Simpson kind of steals the finale with his "wubba man!" bratness, the real star is Ray Charles, whose verse, as always, rises over everyone. Ezra really digs the Ray Charles part: his eyes, glued to the screen, light up.

I tried to get Ezra more interested in Brother Ray with a YouTube video of "What'd I Say" from The Ed Sullivan Show, but at seven months he isn't ready for Charles outside of the context of "Monster in the Mirror."

I didn't want to start him off on the Ramones – too intense – even though he is very verbal for his age, and his hour-long monologues sound like he's saying "gabba gabba hey." Actually, he's not quite up to "gabba gabba hey" yet. We spend hours reading and re-reading his favorite book, Moo, Bah, La La La! or more precisely "Moo, Bah, La La La! by Sandra Boynton," since I want him to learn that behind all good writing and drawing there is an author, an artist, or a byline, and it is always good manners to recognize them. Yesterday, both Maureen and I were sure he said "la la la" after the 17th consecutive reading, and we were preparing his application for the debate team at Oxford.

I recalled that the first music he responded to was traditional jazz, on WWOZ's "Jazz from the French Market." Then I remembered the child that it soothed was my daughter Jackie's black Labrador, Napa, one afternoon over the extended 2023 Thanksgiving (like, 12 days extended). We were baby-sitting Napa while Jackie and her husband Joe were traipsing around Lausanne and Florence.

I believe all children can benefit from early exposure to more modern New Orleans piano and dance music. By modern I mean late 1950s or later. So yesterday afternoon, I pulled out my cherished mono vinyl copy of Chris Kenner's Atlantic album Land of 1,000 Dances. Kenner wrote the classic, which was a hit for Cannibal and the Headhunters" in 1965 and Wilson Pickett a year later. Ezra needs to be held up to move his feet: as I said, he's seven months old, and is a championship babbler, though he does not yet walk or stand or crawl. I showed him some moves from dance names Kenner dropped: The Watusi, the Fly, the Mashed Potatoes, the Slop...but he was distracted by one of his toys. My moves might not be as slick as they used to be.

Anyhoo, after we bopped to Kenner's R&B, we went to the dining table to eat our pizzas (frozen) from Roberta's in Brooklyn (found at one Met Food in my Queens neighborhood) and Ezra drank his ba-ba (bottle, of his mother's milk) and snacked on soft carrots and yams at his highchair. I put on Pretzel Logic, a strategic move designed to get Ezra to associate Steely Dan with the sybaritic pleasures of mushing soft food into his mouth, chin, cheeks, lips, throat, his shirt, pants, and the floor. Even if he missed actually swallowing 90 per cent of the food, he is learning to eat as our human ancestors did, without cutlery or plates. He does have a spoon, but he prefers to gum-out on the thick end, as he is likely teething.

Back in the living room, I put on the second Raffi album, Singable Songs for the Very Young. Each of my three daughters was raised to Raffi music, and that of his Canadian compatriots. When A&M Records in the mid-1980s was smart enough to enter a distribution agreement to release the music of Raffi, Ken Whiteley, Fred Penner, and possibly Sharon, Lois & Bram (who also had a TV show in the US), my first daughter, Alexandra, aka Sasha, was about four. My editor at Newsday had a daughter of a similar age, and we were both delighted to have children's music that did not insult the intelligence of any child, or the parents of those children. Both my editor and I were fed up with The Smurfs, which dominated children's entertainment.

I went to Toronto, where I had lunch with Raffi and a dinner with Sharon, Lois, & Bram. It was January 28, 1986, and I'll always remember the date because it was the day the Challenger space shuttle, the first to attempt to bring civilians into space, blew up shortly after blast-off. The first thing Raffi said to me when I met him at the luncheonette downstairs from his office was, "I'm sorry, it's a very sad day for your country." Since I was in flight to Toronto when the explosion happened, it was the first I had heard. I got up at looked at the luncheonette's small TV to get a grip on what had occurred.

In between the loathsome Smurfs (a Belgian franchise that was popular in the US throughout the 1980s) and the emergence of Barney the Dinosaur, there was a moment of air and life that Raffi and company delivered to children's music. This is because these musicians had all played folk music for adults in Toronto and the rest of the Canadian music scene, and did not find it beneath themselves to use the same effort in singing, picking, production, and songwriting or song curating talents to find good stuff for kids and parents to enjoy together. Raffi was an environmentalist long before it was fashionable, as heard in songs such as "Baby Beluga," an amusing and singable tune about keeping our oceans clean and preserving endangered species such as whales.

After lunch and the interview in his office with Raffi, I returned to the Windsor Arms, before dinner with Sharon, Lois, and Bram, at a chic restaurant near the hotel. Murray Kempton, New York Newsday's great columnist, probably recommended the hotel, because the well-traveled Murray the K, whose desk was next to mine for a time, always suggested hotels with understated elegance whenever I went on the road.

I was still drinking in those days, so when the waiter arrived to take our drink order, I asked for a dry vodka martini. "I'll have one," Sharon, Lois, and Bram said in sequence, almost in harmony. It was so refreshing, the Canadian children's music scene, in that it was played by adults who had no reason not to drink adult cocktails during a dinner interview with a visiting reporter. It wasn't exactly comparable to smoking a j and knocking back a bottle of Thunderbird with Mister Rogers, but you get the idea.

After Raffi, I decided to bring on some Bob Dylan, but I didn’t want to shock him with Blood on the Tracks, for example. Instead I pulled out a compilation disc, I Shall Be Unreleased, a 1991 release by Rhino Records and Sony Music of covers of then lesser-known Bob Dylan songs by an assortment of excellent artists. This was before the widespread issuing of the extraordinary Dylan Bootleg Series by Sony Music and Dylan's office, so it remains one of the great collections of Dylan covers.

Consider Joan Baez's "Love is a Four Letter Word," an uptempo rendition by a woman who understood and experienced better than anyone alive exactly what the composer meant. I'm more an admirer than fan of Baez's distinctive and exemplary artistic gifts, but this performance breaks my heart in so many ways that I don't know whether to break down sobbing or laugh my butt off every time I hear it. Which is not often, because I don't want to drain this experience of its mojo. Let it be said that Vanguard released the Baez track as a single in 1967, a little bit of a rocking wink at her former boyfriend, now a rock star.

The liner notes were written by Dylan friend Sharon, Lois & Bram, who provides detailed information on each recording. The A&R coordination was done by Rhino's astute and much-missed Gary Stewart. The tracks are spectacular, from the opener, Rod Stewart's "Only a Hobo" from his Gasoline Alley album, to the Dream Syndicate's closer, a live radio performance for KCRW, of the then little-known "Blind Willie McTell." In between are such gems as "Wanted Man," the title of a Johnny Cash album I once found in a cut-out bin, whose title song is so intrinsically Johnny Cash that I didn't notice Dylan wrote it. Manfred Mann, always an outstanding Dylan interpreter ("Quinn the Eskimo" aka "The Mighty Quinn") delivers "If You Gotta Go, Go Now" from the British Invasion era. Two surprises: Paul Revere & the Raiders (performing as the Raiders), doing "(If I Had to Do It All Over Again, I'd Do It) All Over You," a 1973 Columbia single; and "Dusty Old Fairgrounds," a 1973 Mercury release by early power poppers Blue Ash. (This had to be Paul Nelson's idea.)

By this time, though, all that listening and dancing and bopping had taken its toll on Ezra and his grandpa. He began to snooze in my arms; the stereo was turned down to subliminal, and I'm guessing Ezra had his first of what I hope will be many Bob Dylan dreams. I know I had one.

This article originally appeared in Wayne Robins’ Substack and is used here by permission. Wayne’s Words columnist Wayne Robins teaches at St. John’s University in Queens, and writes the Critical Conditions Substack, https://waynerobins.substack.com/.

Header image: Raffi, 2020 publicity photo.

The show attracted 1,600+ exhibitors representing 3,500+ brands from around the globe, and 62,000 attendees, including 10,000+ international attendees from 125 countries.

They filled four large exhibition halls and both levels in the north halls. It was a huge show.

The day started off dark and cloudy, but that didn’t hinder attendance as people lined up all the way down the street to get in. They were entertained by the sounds of the band in the foreground.

The roller coaster in the background is situated in Disneyland, which is located across the street.

The first live music Jayvee and I encountered on the Yamaha stage was this enthusiastic steel drum band from one of the local high schools. I was amazed at the sophisticated tunes these simple instruments can produce, and how well these kids played them. Although the day was still gray when they started, their exuberant music drew in the sunshine.

The largest ones assaulted the senses with the hip-hop music they were spewing.

Celestion brought their own RV, which they used as a business office.

There were lots of headphones available for audition. The best of these AKGs had a natural, non-fatiguing sound, even at high volumes.

I don’t know anything about microphones, but these looked stunning.

There were lots of pro cables presented at the show, but none of them carried stratospheric prices. When I mentioned the cost of some audiophile cables to these two British attendees, one of them commented, “That’s rather like over-eggin' the puddin', in’t it?”

There were lectures and demonstrations available everywhere to help engineers keep up with the latest technical advances and opportunities.

This lecture was presented by Sony’s pro audio division.



Mixing engineer Dave Pensado has mastered music for such diverse artists as Elton John, Paula Abdul, Christina Aguilera, Pink, Justin Timberlake, Brandi, Kelly Clarkson, the Neville Brothers, Boyz II Men, Beyonce, Celine Dion, LL Cool J, Whitney Houston, Kenny G, and Michael Jackson. His council was keenly sought out by other professionals in the industry.

My photographer Jayvee insisted on taking this photo because, “Next to that guy, you look good.”

It’s nice to have friends.



No NAMM show is complete without light shows, and this was one of the most interesting.



Musicians were auditioning instruments throughout the show.



Most were professionals, as evidenced by their playing.

Others were demonstrating product.



These interesting guitars are manufactured by Timberline.

This guy’s fingers were faster on the keyboard than a speeding bullet. He impressed everyone.



To a visual artist, the most interesting part of the show might have been the brass instruments. I have no idea how this horn was treated to produce these vibrant colors.

Even saxophones have become more colorful in the last few years.

The workmanship evident in these products is breathtaking.

What a feast for the eyes!

Covering a show like this is stressful and exhausting work.

Fortunately, I’d remembered to bring a single-malt energy drink to lift the spirits.

There is a refreshing feeling of enthusiasm and optimism at the NAMM show that I find very appealing. Those involved in the production of music in any way ought to make an effort to attend and benefit from the education, entertainment, and networking available here.

Many thanks to photographer Jayvee Volanski for his contributions to this report. 

For many of us, our first exposure to hi-fi was via our parents’ music systems, more often than not one of those big consoles that had a tuner, turntable, speakers and maybe even a TV and space for record and other storage. They were the centerpiece of the living room or family room. However, as the trend towards smaller audio products prevailed among the general public, and to the component-based systems seen in most audiophile installations, the large-console audio furniture fell out of favor.

But it hasn’t disappeared. In fact, Steve Morris of Truckee, California-based Streamline HiFi today offers custom audio consoles that are absolutely striking in their retro-modern design, and combine serious audio technology with high-end craftsmanship. Who are the customers for such things? How do they measure up sonically? Why did Steve decide to give up a career as a successful contractor to pursue such a singular venture? Let’s find out.

Frank Doris: What gave you the idea to build these consoles? They’re not your typical hi-fi system with a bunch of gear on a rack and the speakers far apart.

Steve Morris: I have a profound love for music; that’s how it started. When I was a child, my father was in Vietnam and when he was there, he spent all the money he made in the Army because they could get Hi-Fi [components] from Japan [at good prices]. He said most guys came home [from the Vietnam War] and put down a down payment on a house or bought a muscle car. But not him. He spent all of his money, 5,000-plus dollars, on a stereo, and shipped it home piece by piece to my grandpa. If you think about that, with inflation that'd be like the equivalent of spending [around] $40,000 today.

So I grew up as a little boy with this cool system. People my dad didn't even know would knock on his door to hear his system. I got to play my own records [on it] and I just went on from then and always had a passion for music, which evolved into several other things. I went to school for recording, went to school for business, and then I worked at a radio station, which is where I learned about the blues. I did a blues show, and I fell in love with [the music], which is why my consoles are named after blues terms: the Mojo, the Rambler, and the Crossroads. Then I started playing music later in life, guitar and a little bit of drums.

I was in construction for the last decade-plus and was around a lot of really high-end custom homes. I started playing around with wood and teaching myself, and asking questions to the right guys when I would get stuck. That just kind of got my passion for woodworking going crazy too.

Steve Morris with a Streamline HiFi Rambler console.

A Streamline Mojo console in walnut.

The year before I turned 40 (I’m 45 now), I went to visit my [old] home in Michigan. My stepbrother had bought this cool old house on the river, and was gutting it. And he was getting rid of all this old stuff, including this amazing old Fifties German stereo console. Beautiful inlays, curved wood. My mom had put it in her garage, not knowing really what she was going to do with it, but knew that she had to save it. I saw it and thought it was beautiful. Six or eight months later when I turned 40, she and her husband had it crated up and shipped it out to California for me.

And that's what really started my love and passion for those old Fifties and Sixties consoles. I started buying some up and fixing 'em up, but it’s really hard to find the really good ones.

FD: I have to think that 95 percent of these things were thrown out decades ago.

SM: You don't see many of the kind of crappy solid-state ones; [they’re] not the cool style. But I think the nice mid-century modern ones are still out there, but now hard to find now because people know about them and want to seek them out. So if you do find one, it's on eBay and they want four grand for it.

FD: So, I got that wrong. So that means there are enough people who want them, where you felt OK to risk quitting a steady job and figuring you could make a go of this.

SM: I haven't proven that since I am still just getting off the ground. I really got off the ground a month and a half ago, after almost a year and a half after I quit my job in construction and started developing Streamline HiFi full time in November 2022. I knew that [the consoles] had to be super-high-end, super-custom, super-quality woodworking. It's definitely a niche, and I think there are more and more people now that are really getting into quality of sound, because we've just kind of gone downhill with the quality of audio.

FD: Most people are listening on their phones and cheap earbuds and so on. But I’ve always refused to believe that the desire for good sound is just going to age out. This is a belief based on no research whatsoever!

SM: Well, if you look at, there's some ways to see [the desire for good sound] is coming [back] and it has been coming slowly. Look at [vinyl] record sales. It’s crazy.

A Crossroads console in walnut.

FD: Tell us about the electronics and speakers in the consoles. They’re not strictly “retro” in that they combine tube and Class D electronics and handle streaming audio.

SM: When I decided that Streamline HiFi was going to happen, I did a bunch of research. What do audiophiles think are the best amps? I kept reading over and over – Class A is the kind of purest sound. So I said, OK, I'm going to build a Class A amp. And I'm not afraid to say I’m not an electrical engineer, but I paid an electrical engineer to design me a Class A tube amp. He made me a schematic and a wiring diagram and a bill of materials. I basically taught myself how to build this Class A amp. And it was hard. Luckily I had a couple of buddies who were electrical engineers who answered a lot of my questions. But hand wiring a point-to-point amp was a crazy learning curve for me and took a ridiculous amount of time.

But I finally did it and it sounded beautiful. But it did not have the power and the bass that I felt someone who was going to spend this kind of money needed to have. The trouble with Class A amps is…

FD: They’re inefficient.

SM: It's tough to get 'em really high in wattage. And if you do, they're a little bit more dangerous, with a ton of voltage going through them.

So I regrouped and found this other electrical engineer who I've been working with ever since, who is an amazing person. He came out of retirement because he loved what I was doing. He helped me design a hybrid Class A tube amplifier with a Class D output for the best of both worlds. I also have a good buddy who I've known forever who is an audio engineer who used to work for Meyer Sound. He used to develop speakers, and he's helped me tune and port each one of the cabinets.

Detail shot of the tubes used in the amplifier.

Like the exterior, the interior of a Streamline console features striking woods.

These consoles also come with either a WiiM (AirPlay) or Sonos port for streaming any of your favorite platforms. There’s no FM tuner, but you can stream stations.

FD: I have to ask: almost all audiophiles have systems with loudspeakers spaced apart. You can’t do that in your consoles. Is there anything that you’ve done to try to accommodate that for stereo imaging?

SM: We've done rigorous microphone testing when we tuned the [speakers]. We don't have the luxury of having eight feet of space in a room, but we do have 'em so dialed in that I honestly think you could put [the consoles] damn near anywhere in your house, and it’s going to sound really good. And you're not fighting [sidewall reflections].

I use Beyma TPL-75 [pleated diaphragm] tweeters that I think are just mind blowing, in my two larger Streamline models. [Keep in mind that] the speaker technology in the old Fifties cabinets just wasn’t there. Because the speakers are down low by your [legs], I created this adapter for the tweeters that kicks it back at a 20-degree angle shooting up. It's basically like a horn adapter for these specific tweeters I can't believe how much of a difference it makes.

The woofers are Italian Ciare drivers. The consoles, especially the Mojo which has two 12-inch woofers, sound like they have a sub in them, and they don’t, they’re just tuned and ported perfectly. [The enclosures] are padded [with damping material], so there are no standing waves inside. The amplifier has 200 watts.

The Streamline HiFi consoles don’t have a typical audiophile approach but they do have an audiophile sound. My clients are people who want high-quality sound in a piece of art.

A Mojo console in white oak.

FD: What about turntable isolation?

SM: I had some trouble with that at the beginning, but I've eliminated it. I use Fluance RT85N turntables, and they have rubber feet that have a little give. And then, really padding the inside of the speaker cabinet.

FD: Where can people go to hear the consoles?

SM: For now, I’m selling direct, but I’m working on [wider distribution]. I have a console in a showroom in Truckee, California with Alpine Electric, a company that sells high-end audio, lighting and home theater gear.

FD: Do you keep any inventory or is everything made-to-order?

SM: Made to order, and they're about four-month builds. They're semi customizable; you can pick your color of your speaker cloth, and you can change out the wood species. Right now, I offer walnut and white oak [finishes], but if you want something outside of that, we can do that too.

I was building everything myself, but have realized that I need to have a local cabinet shop build some of the cabinets so that I can have time to do marketing, advertising, and attend shows and promote.

I'm not trying to be huge. The draw for this business is that it's handmade, really good craftmanship, and [has] amazing sound. People are willing to spend more money for that.

The Mojo has plenty of interior storage space.

FD: I hear time and again that younger people don't want a lot of possessions and furniture. But if they are going to buy something, maybe they'll want something that's higher-quality or more permanent.

SM: I agree. I think people are going towards that minimalist lifestyle a little bit more. And so for the few items that they do want, they're willing to spend more and have better-quality stuff.

******

Streamline Hi-Fi
Truckee, California 96181
530-608-0880
Streamlinehifi@gmail.com
streamlinehifi.com

Header image: the Streamline HiFi Rambler console. All images courtesy of Streamline HiFi.

Fisher made 500 Series receivers, but who knew they made 500 Series tube radios also? This gorgeous specimen is courtesy of Wikimedia Commons/Gregory F. Maxwell.

What branch of electronics interests you, asks this 1961 ad? I think we know the answer to that one...

This Heathkit Model AA-191 mono tube amplifier makes us long for simpler times. Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons/Joe Haupt. 

And we thought wireless mics were a recent invention. Electronics Illustrated, March 1961. Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons/public domain.

A number of PS Audio products won 2024 Editors’ Choice Awards from The Absolute Sound. The products that received this accolade include the Stellar S300 stereo power amplifier, Stellar M1200 mono power amp, BHK Signature 300 mono power amp, Sprout100 integrated amp, PerfectWave DirectStream DAC MK2, aspen FR30 loudspeakers, and the Bridge II network card.

The StellarGold DAC earned an Outstanding Product accolade from Hi-Fi News. Reviewer Mark Craven noted, “PS Audio…deliver[s] a performance that's all about the music – whatever the genre. Of obvious appeal to Stellar Series owners, the StellarGold also warrants the attention of anyone looking to upgrade their system with a no frills, all thrills DAC.” The complete review is online here.

I’d been in something of a musical rut. I’d listen to friends’ musical recommendations and halfheartedly poke around for new music on streaming services, but nothing was really doing it for me over the last year. Adding to the ennui was the fact that nothing much on TV streaming services was capturing my interest either. (How many times have you scrolled through dozens of Netflix or whatever previews, only to give up after about 10 minutes because it all looked like crap?)

So, after being delighted by seeing Extraordinary Attorney Woo in 2022 (starring the extraordinarily talented Park Eun-bin), and when a friend had recommended that my wife and I check out the 2023 Korean romance TV series King the Land, we were ready to give the latter a try. The teaser looked interesting: “Amid a tense inheritance fight, a charming heir clashes with his hardworking employee who’s known for her irresistible smile – which he cannot stand.”

The show got off to a little bit of a slow start, but, as we were to find out later, this is the case with many Korean series, where the main characters and the premise are introduced slowly and deliberately in the first episodes, and then things build and go down many paths, often unexpected.

King the Land stars Lee Jun-ho as Gu Won, who is set to inherit The King Group, a conglomerate of the King Hotel where much of the story takes place, and Im Yoon-ah as Cheon Sa-rang, a hotel worker who is unstoppably cheerful until she encounters Gu Won under comically awkward circumstances. Let’s just say they don’t get off to a good start. Gu Won’s path to becoming head of The King Group is blocked at every turn by his ruthless older half-sister Gu Hwa-ran (Kim Seon-young), and complicated by Gu Won and Cheon Sa-Rang’s families.

About halfway into the first episode, we were hooked.

King the Land blends laugh-out-loud humor (often silly and bordering on slapstick), with drama, family conflict, friendship, and naturally, romance. The acting is superb. The relationship between Gu Won and Cheon Sa-Rang evolves slowly and improbably. The supporting cast are outstanding. (There was a controversy involving the portrayal of a briefly-appearing character, which I won't go into here.) There are too many fun characters to list, but I have to single out Noh Sang-sik (Ahn Se-ha) as Gu Won’s friend and assistant/sidekick (and there’s almost always a sidekick to the main character in these shows, often in a humorous role), Gu Il-hoon (Son Byong-ho), Gu Won’s father and larger-than-life chairman of King Group, and Han Mi-so (Nam Gi-ae) as Gu Won’s mother.

The music is pretty much inseparable from the acting and cinematography in setting the overall mood and feel of the shows; much more so, I think, than in American and British TV series. King the Land, like so many of the other Korean shows we’ve watched, has a charm and refreshing lightness about it, even when the situations and family drama get intense. We watch the shows with the dialog in Korean, with English subtitles. That way you get to hear and enjoy the full intention of the actors and the subtleties of their vocal inflections. (We don't speak Korean.) Here was literally a whole different world than the overworn cliches, overplayed acting and unfunny humor of most American TV. And it was a world of touching warmth and fun.

And a major part of the fun factor was the soundtrack. In not only King the Land but in other Korean original TV soundtracks (often abbreviated as OST), there’s a lot of singing, with an emphasis on sweet, airy, high-pitched vocals from both male and female singers. The songs lean towards the soaring ballads, though there’s a healthy helping of K-pop stylings, and the background music can range from somber synth pads to bouncy snippets like the mallet percussion of “Woo Young-woo, Backwards and Forwards,” the theme from Extraordinary Attorney Woo.” There’s also a noticeable prevalence of piano music. I don’t know if this is a thing in Korean TV soundtracks but it seems to be. Most of the music is contemporary-sounding, rather than utilizing traditional Korean musical instruments and styles.

The lyrics tend to be full of imagery and metaphor, reflecting hopeful longing, dreams, and love both unrequited and fulfilled. For example, in “Confess to You” from the King the Land soundtrack (warning: this song is an irresistible earworm), Lim Kim sings, “Like a star shining brightly/illuminating the dark night/your appearance dazzles me/smiling like a warm spring.” The sheer talent level of some of the singers is phenomenal. They have range, tone and emotional expression and can absolutely nail the high notes with thrilling confidence.

I gradually came to realize that the sound quality of some of the music is excellent. The orchestral scoring of “The Song for My Brother” from the Crash Landing on You soundtrack sounds simply gorgeous, with beautiful clarity, depth and instrumental detail. Ballads like Park Eun-bin’s “Someday” are warm and inviting. The dance-pop songs like GRASS’s “It’s Sunny Today” are lessons in state-of-the-art contemporary music production.

My wife and I have become completely enamored with Korean TV shows. Besides King the Land, we’ve watched Crash Landing on You, Crash Course in Romance, Business Proposal, Doctor Cha, Divorce Attorney Shin, Once Upon a Small Town, Forecasting Love and Weather, Castaway Diva, Welcome to Samdal-Ri, Romance is a Bonus Book (which, appropriately enough, is beautifully written), Thirty-Nine, Little Women, D.P., You Are My Spring, and Law School. The last five are darker than the others, but they’re still laced with plenty of very funny moments. Some of the characters are downright lovable. And one of the best things about Korean TV comedies is that there’s no laugh track. You won’t realize how wonderful this is and how irritating laugh tracks are until you watch a show without one.

It’s hard to pick a favorite, but I’ll go with Crash Landing on You, about a rich South Korean woman (Son Ye-jin, with Hyun Bin playing romantic lead Ri Jeong-hyeok) who accidentally winds up in a very different militaristic world in North Korea. It’s an unstoppable combination of drama, heart, and humor. The most vocal-centric soundtrack is Castaway Diva, about a young talented singer who was stranded on an island for 15 years, played by the incredible Park Eun-bin. And not that it was bad per se, but we thought You Are My Spring left too many loose ends unresolved.

As a result of my months-long immersion in Korean TV, I’ve branched out into listening to the music when not watching the shows. I love the bright feel of the pop stuff, the sumptuous sonic envelopment of the orchestral scoring, and the literal sound of the sweetness of the singing, though some of the high-pitched vocalizing may not be for everyone. In addition to the original soundtrack music, I’ve been listening to K-pop hits, K-pop classics, and other Korean music, from BTS to ballad singers.

Consider my previous musical rut demolished. I’m more enthusiastic about music now than I have been in a long time.

I don’t need to do a musicological thesis on it to figure out why.

This music makes me happy.

******

20 favorite Korean TV soundtrack songs

“Confess to You” – Lim Kim (King the Land)
“Get to You” – Jung Seung Hwan (King the Land)
“Dream Us” – Park Eun-bin (Castaway Diva)
“Yellow Light” – Gaho (King the Land)
“The Song for My Brother” – Nam Hye Seung, Park Sang Hee (Crash Landing on You)
“It’s Sunny Today” – GRASS (Crash Course in Romance)
“Woo Young-woo, the Same Backwards and Forwards” – Roh Young Sim (Extraordinary Attorney Woo)
“Fly Away” – Park Eun-bin (Castaway Diva)
“Thirty-Nine Opening Title Version” – 서른, 아홉 (Thirty-Nine)
“A Peony Orchestra Version” – 작약 (Thirty-Nine)
“The Witches” – ULUV (Castaway Diva)
“Everyday With You” – KyoungSeo (King the Land)
“Someday” – Park Eun-bin (Castaway Diva)
“Missing You” – Hong Dae Kwang (Once Upon a Small Town)
“Better Than Birthday” – O3ohn (Extraordinary Attorney Woo)
“Love Hurts a Little More” – Kim Na Young (Forecasting Love and Weather)
“Rich Life” – Yoo Hee Hyun, Park Se Joon (Little Women)
“A Butterfly Flew Away” – Kim Min Seok (You Are my Spring)
“Love Time” – Lily (Castaway Diva)
“A Day for Me” – Shinae An (Doctor Cha)

Header image: Park Eun-bin as Seo Mok-ha of Castaway Diva. Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons/티비텐.

Octave Records has released Audiophile Masters Volume IX, the latest in its series of reference-quality music-sampler recordings. This collection is focused on acoustic-based performances, ranging from the solo acoustic guitar rendition of “While My Guitar Gently Weeps” by Alexios Anest to the swinging jazz of the Seth Lewis Quintet and the all-out percussion workout “The Big Groove,” featuring drummers Michael Wooten and Billy Hoke.

Audiophile Masters Volume IX includes 10 tracks recorded in the familiar environs of Animal Lane and Octave Studios in high-resolution DSD audio. The selections were recorded and produced by Steven Vidaic and Paul McGowan, and mixed by Paul and Jessica Carson, who also served as executive producer. Gus Skinas did the mastering. Paul McGowan noted, “For Audiophile Masters Volume IX, we focused on acoustic music to showcase the ability of today’s best recording technology to convey every nuance of unamplified instruments and the purity of the vocalists.”

The album leads off with Alexios Anest and his captivating take on the Beatles’ “While My Guitar Gently Weeps,” showcasing his mastery of solo acoustic guitar with astonishing detail. Anest also closes Audiophile Masters Volume IX with Francisco Tárrega’s “Capricho árabe.” Kyle Donovan’s vocal-and-guitar “Jupiter” has a live-in-one-take immediacy. Vocals are up-front and personal on this album, from the pure singing of Monica Marie LaBonte’s “The Haunt” and Joe D’Esposito’s “Solitary Cottonwood,” to Tyler Thompson’s grittier “Feather in the Wind” (featuring some gorgeous marimba playing by Jonathan Sadler).

Bonnie and Taylor Sims blaze through an intense bluegrass workout on “Deal Me In.” Jazz aficionados will revel in the incisive playing and lush sonics of the Seth Lewis Quintet on two original compositions, “Cagey” and “Sweet Leaf,” which hearken back to a timeless classic jazz sound with the quintet’s instrumentation of bass, trumpet, piano, electric guitar, and drums, all captured with startling realism.

Bonnie and Taylor Sims.

The disc is made using Octave’s premium gold disc formulation, and is playable on any SACD, CD, DVD, or Blu-ray player. The disc also has a high-resolution DSD layer that is accessible by using any SACD player or a PS Audio SACD transport. In addition, the master DSD and PCM files are available for purchase and download, including DSD 256, DSD 128, DSD 64, and DSDDirect Mastered 352.8 kHz/24-bit, 176.2 kHz/24-bit, 88.2 kHz/24-bit, and 44.1 kHz/24-bit PCM. (SRP: $19 – $39, depending on format.)

Perhaps that’s an odd title for a magazine that caters primarily to an audience of audiophiles and music collectors. So let me offer a bit of background.

I fell in love with music as a small child. There was an old-fashioned portable record player in my childhood bedroom and I’m sure I wore out many records, playing them over and over again. I’ve been an audiophile for almost as long (although I probably didn’t hear that term until I was well into my 20s). My father was a physician and he had a number of colleagues who loved music and could afford the best of the time (I’m talking about the late 1960s). I clearly remember being overwhelmed by the sound coming out of those little boxes.

Alas, as a teenager and into my early 20s, I lacked the income to indulge in such luxuries and so I made do, first with homebrew speakers and a small integrated tube amp, and then, eventually moving on to a variety of Japanese receivers and – my very first “real” speakers – the original Advent, which were a sonic revelation to my young ears.

Today, I have audio systems in my city condo and my lake house, as well as at our friends’ home in Mexico and in my office. The most basic of these is at my office, consisting of a PS Audio Sprout100, driven by a Raspberry Pi running Volumio, and connected to a pair of Dali Spektor 2 monitors. Still, that system produces sound that is very likely better than anything I owned 45 years ago. The systems at my condo and lake house are considerably more sophisticated, including components from McIntosh, Denafrips, Eversolo, PS Audio, Pro-Ject, Ars Acoustica and B&W, among others. Few things give me as much pleasure as listening to an hour of music on one of my high-resolution systems.

But there’s one exception: listening to live music. I was reminded of this last week. My wife and I spend our winters in a small town in central Mexico, where there is an excellent series of concerts of chamber music and soloist performances offered by a local concert organization. Typically, they bring in young artists from the US and Canada. The concerts take place in a local church and the Pro Musica is lucky enough to own a modern Steinway Model D concert grand. A few days ago, I attended a wonderful recital by a young American piano virtuoso named Llewellyn Sanchez-Werner.

Sitting in the second row, the sound of the piano – in excellent tune – reminded me that I have yet to hear an audio system that was capable of reproducing that sound convincingly. There is always something missing, at least to my ears. I’ve heard systems costing upwards of $500,000 and while they certainly produce breathtaking sound, it nevertheless still feels a generation removed from the real thing.

Let me venture another example. For many years, I sang in a large symphonic choir and had the privilege of working with a professional orchestra (the Toronto Symphony) and internationally-renowned conductors. Sitting in the choir loft, being enveloped in the music of Handel, Brahms, Verdi, Bach and many others was an experience of visceral excitement. I remember, particularly, a performance of Berlioz’ La Damnation de Faust, led by Charles Dutoit. In the final scenes, the brass during the chorus of demons seemed to almost lift us up off our feet. I’ve never had anything like that experience with recorded music.

One final example. I’ve been lucky enough to see and hear Wagner’s monumental Ring Cycle in its entirety twice. (And yes, I know, it’s definitely not for everyone.) I own many recordings of that music but the experience of sitting and experiencing it in an opera house (in my case, my first cycle was at Wagner’s own theater in Bayreuth) is an undefinably greater experience than listening to a recording. Recordings may be more technically accurate, with greater singers, but they lack the immediacy and drama of a live performance. Frankly, the same can be said for any opera.

But it’s not just classical music. The sounds produced by an acoustic guitar, a stand-up bass, or a vocalist have a three dimensionality that I just find lacking in recordings. And even the very best audiophile recordings played on six-figure systems still seem to be just shy of reality.

Don’t get me wrong. I have an extensive collection of vinyl records, CDs, SACDs and digital music. I also subscribe to Tidal. So I’m certainly not a Luddite when it comes to recorded music. My music library offers me the ability to listen to whatever music I choose, at the time of my choosing. There’s no question that recorded music offers a great deal of convenience and choice. I’m certainly more comfortable sitting in a soft armchair in my listening room, as compared to a hard bench in a church.

But that doesn’t make the two experiences even remotely equivalent. I think that we would be infinitely poorer without access to live music, without the excitement of direct interaction between audience and performers and without the unique sound of live instruments and voices.

In this small Mexican town of 75,000 souls where I spend my winters there are multiple opportunities to hear live music every single day, ranging from jazz to Latin, from classical to rock and roll. If you live in or near a city, you will likely have even more choices.

So by all means, keep building up your library of great recordings. Subscribe to high-res streaming services. And keep on upgrading your audio systems, if that gives you pleasure. But don’t pass on opportunities to hear live music. It will inspire you in ways that recordings simply can’t touch.

Header image courtesy of Pixabay.com/TravelCoffeeBook.