Copper
Drive, He Said Part 5
In Part 4 of this series, the last turntable mentioned was the unusual Mag-Lev levitating turntable. It was first offered as a Kickstarter crowdfunding campaign, and has now joined the Crowdfunding Hall of Infamy as yet...
Drive, He Said Part 4
In previous installments of Vintage Whine, we’ve looked at belt-drive turntables, idler-drive turntables, and direct drive tables. This column deals with the unclassifiable, the weird, the mixed-genre, the “what the hell...
Drive, He Said Part 3
Part 1 of this series in Copper #92 covered idler-drive turntables; part 2 in issue #93 examined belt-drive tables. In this installment, we’ll look at direct drive turntables…and yes, they did exist before the Technics SP-10 was...
Drive, He Said Part 2
In Part 1, Copper #92, we looked at idler-wheel turntable mechanisms. In this article, we’ll look at belt-drive turntables. The original Edison phonographs—cylinder players, not disc players—were belt-driven. Oddly, the first belt-drive turntable...
Drive, He Said Part 1
Vintage Whine has previously looked at the micro-mechanics of record playback in the 9-part series, 50 Ways to Read a Record, which appeared in Copper issues #65-74 (and sorry, I’m not linking to all nine...
Paper
It’s everywhere. We take it for granted, blow our noses on it, wipe…. and yet, paper has been a vital part of sound reproduction from the earliest days. Despite the...
Quintessence
Sometimes you encounter stories where it turns out that the story you think you want to tell, is just a very small part of a much bigger story. This is one of those stories-within-stories....
Fairchild, Part 5
We’ve spent a fair amount of time and pixels on the brand Fairchild (part 1 in issue #75, part 2 in issue #76, part 3 in issue #77, and a sidebar/part 4 in issue #82), but there...
The Fire
I’m going to deviate from the standard Vintage Whine topics just this once—because just as important as the heritage of innovation and genius in the creation of audio gear is the heritage...
Empire, Part 3
[Previous installments on Empire were in Copper #84 and #86—Ed.] It’s ironic that I’ve ended up writing articles about audio history, as I always found school courses in history incredibly boring. The standard presentation was that...
Empire, Part 2
Our first installment on Empire mentioned the beginnings of the company in phono cartridges and tonearms, soon followed by turntables. The jump from record-playback gear to loudspeakers is not one that many audio...
Empire, Part 1
The primary reason I began writing these articles (and a similar blog on Audiogon, back in another lifetime) is that there are few cohesive sources of information about the history...
Fairchild: Sidebar
As I indicated in my first installment on Fairchild, back in Copper # 75, part of the enjoyment of researching these articles is ending up somewhere completely unexpected. As the series of articles went...
Vintage, Vintage Whine
There was a time in my life, not so long ago, when I spoke to longtime writers and editors who described the experience of cranking out an article in a...
New Old Stock
Newbies to the audio world encounter a lot of puzzling terminology, some of which seems oxymoronic. One such term that took me a while to understand is NOS—New Old Stock....
Fairchild, Part 4
The last three Vintage Whine columns have looked at the pro and consumer audio companies owned by Sherman Fairchild, with a side-look at his many other holdings. We began in Copper #75 with Part 1; Copper#76...
Fairchild, Part 3
As I’ve indicated in the previous installments of Vintage Whine in Copper #75 and #76, the story of Sherman Fairchild goes far beyond the realm of audio, and at some point really should be detailed in...
Fairchild, Part 2
In Copper #75, we began the story of the remarkable business empire created by Sherman Fairchild. Fairchild started over 75 companies, and as much as possible, we’ll focus on those directly involved in...
Fairchild, Part 1
I truly enjoy the research involved in these pieces, refreshing faded memories, absorbing facts overlooked or misunderstood in my youth, and especially—ending up somewhere completely unexpected. That’s how I came...
50 Ways to Read a Record Part 9
In Copper #73 we discussed an interesting but purely theoretical method of scanning phonograph records with a laser. We’re about to look at a real-world product—more or less— which plays records using a...
50 Ways to Read a Record Part 8
In earlier installments of this series, we’ve focused upon the various types of phono cartridges—pickup cartridges, if you prefer. Though wildly different in their internal construction, all these cartridges have...
50 Ways to Read a Record Part 7
We’ve looked at a variety of methods of making music—or at least generating a signal— from a record groove. We’ve seen phono cartridges that use coils and magnets, all kinds...
50 Ways to Read a Record Part 6
As we know from old issues of Popular Science and similar mags that were full of hovercraft “you can build in your basement!!”—once a technology becomes mature, adventurous experimenters try to side-step that...
50 Ways to Read a Record Part 5
In our last installment, we saw the beginning of the transition from monaural records to single-groove stereo records. Even today, software changes often require similar changes in hardware— we’ve discussed how the change...
50 Ways to Read a Record Part 4
In our last installment, we looked at the range of record groove sizes that were used through the years, and we jumped ahead a bit to the launch of Stereo. In...
50 Ways to Read a Record Part 3
It’s difficult to explain the basics of a highly-technical process like record playback without getting bogged down in eye-rolling minutiae. I’ll try to stick to the big-picture trends and details,...
50 Ways to Read a Record Part 2
In his last column, Jay Jay French mentioned the optical phono cartridge cartridge made by DS Audio in Japan. Ironically, “DS” stands for “Digital Stream”…go figure. When you hear of an optical method...
50 Ways to Read a Record Part 1
I’ve spent half a century immersing myself in the history of recorded sound. Recently I’ve had to go back to the very beginning and start over: I’m in the process...
What Will Be "Vintage" in 2068?
As I’ve discussed/ranted many times in this column, to me, “vintage audio” means, oh, 1968 and earlier. One hopes, much earlier. But I’m old. If you look at any craigslist...
"New Old"?
The first time I heard the word “oxymoron,” I thought it was a detergent for the intellectually challenged. No, really. For those unfamiliar with the term, it means a phrase...
Electric City
So: what does a professional audio nerd do on a day off? Check out an audio dealer, of course! I’d seen Craigslist ads for Electric City in Westminster, Colorado, for months–and finally...
What's a Speaker? And What's a Driver?
You know how annoying it is when you’re surrounded by a group of surgeons or securities traders or physicists or whatEVer and you realize that their conversation is filled with...
The More Things Change....
Oh, you think you’re so smart, Mr. 21st Century Hi-Tech Man. You know all there is to know about your fancy-schmancy stereo gear, you’re an expert at marketing it on...
Nagra
The history of Nagra begins, as is often the case in audio, with the tinkerings of one man. Stefan Kudelski was a Polish emigre’ whose family fled the Nazis and eventually landed...
Hadley Labs
At Axpona a few weeks ago, friend and mentor Richard Schram of Parasound suggested to me that, given my dual citizenship in the worlds of racing and audio, I should look at...
More Stuff About Old Stuff
Within the span of a couple weeks, I went from a vintage equipment show, Vintage Voltage, to Axpona, a show with a ton of brand-new gear where the only vintage items were...
Vintage Voltage: A Photo Feature
Researching and writing theoretical and historical pieces is a lot of work, and can get a little dry. As a change of pace, I present pics from Vintage Voltage, a local...
What's Past Is Prologue
The older I get—and at this point, I’m as old as dirt— the more I become aware that there is very little objective judgment in life. The one thing I...
Speakers Are Exhausting
“For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction.” For engineers, Newton’s Third Law of Motion is both blessing and curse. In audio, the law is primarily of concern...
A Serious Hobbyist
In Copper #52 we began poring through a collection of audio ephemera gathered by Dr. James McVay, the grandfather of fellow columnist Duncan Taylor. Dunc brought in a binder full of material from the...
The Mysterious Binder
I wrote about ephemera back in Copper #37. In that column I wrote (and I’m quoting myself because I don’t think I can say it any better now): “I also learned that there was...
15,000 Pages!
I started reading when I was 3. I say that not to evoke any particular reaction in the reader, but just to make clear the fact that I’ve been reading...
Editor’s Choice
No, not this Editor. Continuing from my last column, inspired by the arrival of a big batch of old issues of The Absolute Sound, The Editor referred to is TAS‘ founder, HP—Harry Pearson. For...
Equal Time
In Copper #48 I began the perusal of a hefty box of old issues of The Absolute Sound, kindly sent by Australian reader Ian Lobb (and again, goodonya, mate!). Last issue I focused on the influence of TAS‘ founder...
Fractured
While sight-seeing around the uncommonly-empty campus of the University of Wyoming in Laramie on Thanksgiving weekend, girlfriend Pat and I flipped around the meager offerings on FM radio. Between strident...
Is Older Always Better?
My daughter Emily has a habit of being brutally frank, direct, and unambiguous. I can’t imagine where she gets it. She recently said to me, “Dad, when something sucks, saying...
Materials Science
I’ve danced around this subject before, with my discussions of tone and wood. Back a million years ago in my college days, I majored in mechanical engineering, focusing on internal combustion engines and...
Tone Control (or lack of it)
I’ve previously mourned the death of tone in modern audio gear, and written about wood in audio gear. As far as I’m concerned, we’re talking about two sides of the same coin. There was...
Stereo at Sixty
We’ve heard a lot about anniversaries in 2017, with it being the 50th anniversary of Sgt. Pepper, the Summer of Love, the Stones’ Their Satanic Majesties Request, and much more. One anniversary that’s received...
Wood
Back in Copper #31, I wrote about the subject of Tone, and how it seems to have vanished as a topic of audio discussions—and really, from consideration as a vital element of audio design....