Copper

Terri and I were vacationing in France a few years ago and had stopped at a roadside vineyard for lunch. I spied this great art of old vines creeping up... Read more...

Welcome to the lucky thirteenth edition of Copper!

As is probably clear by now, we’ve decided to shake things up a bit. Our new format is designed to be more readable and more manageable. It will also allow... Read more...

Stan White: An Overlooked Visionary/Part 2

A fundamental principle of scientific enquiry was stated most famously by Carl Sagan: “Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.” And no, he wasn’t talking about the O.J. Simpson trial. In writing pieces about dead folks, based largely upon material from third- and fourth-party sources, I am constantly aware of the possibility of being horribly, horribly wrong. I liken it to what is generally called “the fossil record”: as an aspiring paleontologist at age 6, I learned one set of suppositions and conclusions about the prehistoric world, based upon... Read more...

Points Of Pickup

The point of contact between the cartridge’s generator system and the actual moving vinyl record is of course the stylus, mounted on to the cantilever. The stylus has to cope... Read more...

Diving into Opera, and Surfacing with Joy (Part I)

Perhaps I am one of those increasingly rare birds who never had to learn to love opera. When I was all of 11, my father brought home a deluxe, faux... Read more...

Jerry Garcia

If you were born on August 9, 1995, you’re turning 21 today. You have earned the right to go out and get fractured with all the same friends you’ve been hammering with for years. But tonight, dagnabit, you can puke anywhere and pull the birthday card. If you died on August 9 1995, you might be Jerry Garcia. When Jerry was 4 he was holding a piece of firewood for his older brother wielding an axe. Older bro cut off little Jerry’s right hand middle finger. My favorite part of... Read more...

How I Spent My Summer Vacation

I freely admit that I am a nerd. Aside from music and audio, I omnivorously absorb architecture, antiquarian books, cars, and all manner of mechanical devices. When traveling alone, I have no problem indulging and pursuing those interests. Traveling to San Francisco recently with my long-suffering Significant Other on an allegedly romantic vacation, I was still able to carve out a fair amount of time to indulge my interests, and yet managed to keep her happy. Mostly.I think.South of the city, we visited the Burwells, father and son. They build... Read more...

Flutes

It’s not that complicated. Lauren Bacall said it best, in To Have and Have Not: “You know how to whistle, don’t you, Steve? You just put your lips together . . . and blow.” Which may be why the flute is the oldest musical instrument known to humanity. Flutes going back 40,000 years or so have been unearthed in Germany. They were carved from smallish animal bones, hollowed out and given fingerholes. Players simply blew across an opening at either end of the bone. Such “edge-blown aerophones,” common to many cultures, evolved... Read more...

The Mystery Of The Making

I never think about how mysterious the process of contemporary record making is, or was, to the people who buy those records. Which, when you think about it, is really naïve — since I devour stories about the making of records I love like a good meal. In the early days of recording with Bill Bottrell, his studio, Toad Hall, was new, and we experimented with the spaces. There are some outtakes from the early weeks of Triage (David Baerwald’s bleak and angry rant about America in the era of grunge was released... Read more...

Letting Facts Get in the Way of a Good Story

If the internet is good for nothing else, it’s great at destroying a good story by providing factual evidence to the contrary. The flip side is that by widely and... Read more...

Issue 13

Conversion Conversation

Today’s DACs, with a few very rare (and expensive) exceptions, all use a process called Sigma Delta Modulation (SDM, sometimes also written DSM) to generate their output signal. A simplistic... Read more...

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