Long and short pieces on music you should listen to; audio gear; and pop culture.
Come on, you just KNOW Trebek had a boatload of vinyl…
(h/t to REM for the title)
When you’re seriously into music, it’s easy to get obsessive about what you listen to it on. Some people simply spend their money on the best headphones they can afford, then connect it to their iPhone or laptop, and stream their music. Or maybe their system is a pair of great powered speakers like the Audioengine A5s connected to a preamp-equipped turntable. Still, many music lovers build a good, standalone, two-channel stereo with at least an integrated amplifier, a turntable, probably a CD player to play all those CDs you bought in the previous decade(s), and a pair of passive loudspeakers. Then, you listen. And maybe one day you’re listening to your latest find, and think: hey, I think my system should sound better. (this usually happens when you hear someone else’s audio setup and you go, hmmmmmm.) So you come into some money (tax refund, money from Granny) that’s enough to cover a new pair of speakers, and you shop around for a “better” pair. Or, you fry your amp and replace it or upgrade to something with more/better power. Eventually, you get to a place where your system really makes you go, “ahhhhhhh.”
Then, one day, you’re walking around town and you wander into the sound room of an audio store. Fool! There before you, someone is auditioning a pair of speakers; AND they’re listening to a record that you know and love, and so you draw closer. Your brain whispers to you things like “I’ve never heard those fingers on the bass strings before”, or “wow, this really sounds like you’re in the front row.” Excited, you look at the price tag of those beautiful speakers, and after you get over your shock, you smile, and head back out to the street. But, you know what kind of great sound is possible (albeit with probably more dollars than you have at your disposal.)
Really great and reputable audio stores are in the business of selling you the best gear that will work in your space, at a price that meets your budget. But they always have available no-holds-barred “dream” components that, even if they’re way out of your budget, you just have to hear. That was the case the other night when I was in Chestertown, MD, a really fun little college town on the eastern shore. I always visit The Listening Room when I’m there. It’s been in its current location for over two years now, having moved from its original location in suburban Baltimore. The owner, Mike, has done a great job of renovating his building over that time, and it’s a welcoming, no-pressure place to shop for gear and vinyl. The front of the store houses a great vinyl store, with reasonably priced new and very clean vintage vinyl, and the audio stuff is in the back. Well worth a visit if you’re visiting the Chesapeake Bay area!
I was there this past weekend to see what a top-shelf system sounds like. Magnepan is a US maker of highly-regarded planar speakers, and their rep was on hand to show off their top of the line speakers, the 30.7s. It’s an imposing, four piece, four-way speaker system (a “wall of sound” if there ever was one) that doesn’t always make the rounds or is even available to listen to in stores – most of the time you’ve got to visit their Minnesota factory to hear them. But Magnepan is on a tour right now showing off the 30.7, so: good timing!
I was lucky enough visit in the morning before the special event that night, and spend some a little one-on-one time with the Magnepans and the incredible electronics driving them: Oracle Delphi MkVI turntable fitted with an SME Series 5 tonearm and Dynavector TKR cartridge, a Rogue Ares Magnum phono preamplifier, an Aurender A10 network music player, Rogue RP-9 stereo preamplifier and Rogue Apollo Dark monoblock power amplifiers, and Straightwire cables. The Listening Room has a lot of great vinyl for testing, so I had to give the Mobile Fidelity Ultradisc One-Step pressing of Bill Evans’ Sunday At The Village Vanguard a try. This is a really well-engineered and warm recording of Evans’ legendary trio playing at the Vanguard in 1961, and the half-speed remastered MoFi version is peerless.
When the stylus dropped on the first track, Gloria’s Step (Take 2), I felt like I was actually at the Village Vanguard. (I saw Bill Frisell play there a couple of years ago, so I know what the room sounds like.) I picked this disc because the great Orrin Keepnews recording is really sympathetic to all of the players, especially bassist Scott LaFaro. Planar speakers characteristically have a “boxless” sound, and these Magnepans are the best examples of that sound. These speakers reproduced LaFaro’s bass so well you would swear that you were “in the room” in Greenwich Village. Next up was Analog Spark’s sparkling pressing of Ella Fitzgerald Sings The Cole Porter Songbook . Although this is a mono recording, it’s really well-mic’d, and the Magnepans reproduced Ella’s voice so well.
At the very well-attended event in the evening, there were smiles all around as people took turns listening to their favorite discs on the 30.7s. A fun event all around. If you ever get a chance to drop into a listening session like this with dream gear, whether it be at your local audio store or an event like Classic Album Sundays, satisfy your aural curiosity and go!
I was first exposed to the significant funkiness of the Dirty Dozen Brass Band on Elvis Costello’s Spike, a sprawling and diverse record where Elvis dips his toe into a lot of different styles, but most of the tracks are firmly rooted in the Crescent City. On the best tracks, Elvis is backed by New Orleans musicians like the late, great Allen Toussaint on piano, and the Dirty Dozen Brass Band, the latter of whom have been getting after it for 40+ years now. Maybe my favorite Elvis Costello track of all time (and there are so many to choose from!) is Deep Dark Truthful Mirror, on which the DDB just shine. It’s Elvis’ song, but the band owns it.
The band is on a 40th-ish anniversary tour and they rolled into town on Sunday night to play a “Mardi Gras” date at The Sinclair in Harvard Square with opener Cha Wa. Mardi Gras masks and beads for everyone! Both bands just smoked it last night. The DDB drew upon their deep catalog to keep the crowd moving, and played a couple of numbers that were almost jam-band length! Laissez les bons temps rouler, indeed.
But a few words about the opener, Cha Wa: these guys just brought it. Now, opening acts have a steady hill to climb. Nobody barely knows them, and often times people are looking at their watches or heading to the loo or the bar before the headliner comes on, so it’s hard to get the crowd’s attention. From the first downbeat, the band (a subset from the sprawling group that records in the studio) had the crowd up and dancing. They effortlessly moved from song to song from their great CD Spyboy, and by the end, everyone in the room knew who they were. I met them at the merch table after their set, and they clearly felt as good about their performance as we did. A bunch of nice and talented guys worth keeping an eye on (check out their CD Spyboy, which was nominated for a Grammy!)
I’m lucky enough to have a dedicated listening room. After I got married, my stereo bounced around to a bunch of different places, even (horrors!) getting boxed up for a couple of years. Most of those rooms weren’t optimal – usually a place where the TV was always on, hence little opportunity to really listen, so it was off to the iPod. Which wasn’t bad at all – certainly better than nothing, but not the same as having a space where you could settle in and just LISTEN. Then, about 15 years ago, we did the basement over so the kids (and their friends, TBH) could have a place to hang. Part of the plan included a room that was perfect for listening, where I could put my speakers exactly where they should be, and LOTS of wall space for vinyl. And yeah, you could crank it up without any complaints from everyone else.
Recently, though, I had a chance to do the same thing upstairs in a room off the kitchen. My kids are out of the house, and it became more convenient – and nicer – to walk down the hall rather than down to my underground lair. Basically. This room was a blank slate – it wasn’t as private as my old listening room downstairs, but I was able to turn it into a comfortable place that could double as my home office as well as a music room. However, as part of the deal with my wife, the bulk of my vinyl collection had to remain downstairs 🙁 but all of my vinyl has been digitized to my NAS drive, I can access that over my Sonos. 🙂
The whole experience has been a revival of my yearly back-to-college ritual – pack up the stereo at the end of the summer, set it up in the dorm room, get everything where you want it to be, tweak things here and there. There’s that sense of newness, the promise of an amazing year, and the social bonding around music (parties, late night listening) that never gets old. The vinyl revival taps into those very human feelings, which is why it’s lasted longer than the most jaded techies thought it would. It’s easy to just call up a Spotify playlist and listen, and that (still) is an amazing feat, but the ritual of putting on an LP, or even a CD, and sitting down to listen is something that, once experienced, never leaves you. Now, please excuse me as I slip into something more comfortable…
A great pair of headphones can
We’re only going to talk about ‘turntable cans’, headphones you plug in (for the best quality. Bluetooth is convenient, but it will never sound as good as a physical wire will) to your amp to listen at home (or work, if you’re lucky enough to have a fancy job where you can have an audio rig!)
There are two basic types of ‘phones: open and closed. Open ‘phones are generally acknowledged as better as approximating the soundstage of stereo speakers, while giving you all the advantages of headphones, namely, you get an AMAZING soundstage for far less moolah than you could for comparable loudspeakers. For example, a pair of Grado GS3000Es retails for about $1800; I’d challenge anyone to find a pair of speakers that sounds THAT good for the same price.
The only problem with open phones are, well, that they’re open, and you really need a quiet space to listen. Ambient noise WILL creep in, and your friends will hear everything you are hearing, too, so don’t plan on bringing these on the subway.
Closed ‘phones have seemed to lag behind, though the gap is closing. They offer better sound isolation and generally more lively bass response, but have been knocked as sounding too claustrophobic. There are some really great closed phones out there now, like the Shure SRH1540, which you can get for short money ($399 – not nothing, but way cheaper than the GS3000E!)
Like loudspeakers, EVERY headphone sounds different. You’ve just got to find which one is right for you. What’s most comfortable? Do you like to block out the world? Are you a bass fiend, or do you prefer more accuracy at the low end? (I do my private listening with a pair of AKG 702s, which are super comfortable and incredibly accurate.)
At the beginning of the most recent headphone boom, you’d have been hard pressed to find a place to compare headphones, even the fancy audio salons. Now, even the Apple Store has a headphone wall so you can listen for yourself. Which is essential! Honestly, would you buy a car without driving it? Listen to a bunch and buy what you like.
Lastly, if you’ve got a good audio rig, I’d strongly advise you to get yourself a headphone amp, ESPECIALLY if you have hard(er) to drive headphones like the AKGs. For many years, I thought, hey! My amp ALREADY HAS A HEADPHONE JACK, I’ll just use that. But even great amps can have crappy headphone amps inside. It wasn’t until I got my own headphone amp (the Schiit (yes, that’s their name) Asgard 2) that I realized what I was missing. Schiit makes great … stuff, and right here in the USA. They have a model priced as low as 99 bucks, the Magni – you should check it out.
I’m a runner. One of those obsessive runners that run marathons. I’m up to seven now, the most recent being the Dublin (Ireland, not Ohio) Marathon in October. We spent a couple of days in Dublin adjusting to the time difference, ran the race on the Sunday Bank Holiday, and spent the rest of the week in and around Galway. Good food, great beer, and: ohmygodsomanyplacestofindvinyl!
Dublin in particular has a lot to sift through – lots of small independent shops like the one across the street from our flat in the Liberties, and (surprisingly!) the many charitable thrift shops, which are actually well-curated to be more of a place to find classy, vintage stuff as opposed to, say, the Salvation Army, where they pretty much dump everything out on the floor indiscriminately. Anyway. The key here is to really drill down and find interesting stuff that’s either hard to find or non-existent here, or something weird that you just take a flyer on.
So, my fortuitously-located shop across the street from our flat, Blind Dog Vinyl, had just opened a month or two before. It was well-stocked with great British, Irish, reggae and indie music. I scored three great records: Cocaine, by Dillinger, and Kid Creole and the Coconuts’ Fresh Fruit in Foreign Places and Doppleganger. (Blind Dog Vinyl also has the distinct benefit of being located right next to the best coffee shop in the city, Two Pups Coffee, which I managed to visit a couple of times each day. But, I digress.)
Now, all I remember Dillinger for is Cocaine In My Brain, a pretty bonkers mid-70’s reggae hit that I remember hearing on WBCN (“Jeem! Jeeeem!”) so this disc, with at least a version of C.I.M.B. seemed like a keeper. The cover was far from perfect, but: a flyer.
Over the years, I’ve become more impressed with the genius of August Darnell, the mastermind of Kid Creole. They placed one song on the Against All Odds soundtrack that made that entire disc worth buying, My Male Curiosity. It’s a witty and catchy song that harkened back to dance hall music, but it was never, never derivative. My Male Curiosity has never left my iPod. So, I started scratching the Kid Creole itch recently. Stateside, I found a copy of Wise Guy, which features “Stool Pigeon” (famously sampled by The Avalanches in Close To You) and is uniformly great. The band was way more popular in the UK than the US (stupid us), so it didn’t surprise me to find a good copy of Fresh Fruit and Doppleganger here.
Later on in the week, we found ourselves in Cork. My kind of town: arty, hipstery, great food and great shops. We only had a few hours to spend there, but I quickly found an amazing second hand store called The Village Hall. Nicely curated, with a coffee bar inside, and a pretty respectable selection of vinyl. I quickly zeroed in on a copy of Pink Floyd’s Atom Heart Mother shown at the top of this blog post – an original German pressing and and AMAZING cover. Now, my Floyd love doesn’t go farther back than Meddle. I just don’t have the time or patience for Syd Barrett-era Floyd. But I’m a sucker for a Hipgnosis cover, and this one just called out to me. No text, nothing. Just that damn Holstein staring the viewer down. Music? We’ll find out. Artwork? Take my money, please!
Finally, on our last day in Galway, I hit up the thrift shops in the Latin Quarter and found Sing While You’re Winning by Robbie Williams (a MONSTER star in the UK, a footnote here (sadly), and Athlete’s Vehicles and Animals on CD. €1 each! The jewel cases were super beat up, and I had absolutely no idea how good (or bad) the music was, but did I mention they were only €1 each? Spoiler alert: the Robbie Williams disc is pretty great pop, and I’m warming to Athlete.
Not a bad haul, and I found just enough vinyl that it didn’t overload my carry-on on the trip back. So, when you’re planning your next trip, be it across the state, across the country, or another country entirely, check out the local record scene before you go. You’re probably not going to get one of those super-rare records you can retire off of, but I’ll bet you’ll find something that will expand your musical horizons.
The revival of vinyl records is nothing short of amazing. From the time the CD became ascendant, in the mid-1980s, vinyl was all but given up for dead. “It’s scratchy!” “You can’t play it in the car!” “CDs sound better!” Not coincidentally, the curve on the graph labelled “my vinyl buying” was the exact inverse of the “vinyl sales” curve, as LOTS of people unloaded their collections and you could pick up armloads of LPs for cheap. (More on that in another post.)
Anyway, vinyl is back for all the same reasons It does give people a tangible, meaningful connection to their music. With few exceptions, vinyl quality is WAY better now. A wider variety of quality-remastered audiophile quality repressings from places like Mobile Fidelity and Analog Spark is available, and great new and vintage vinyl sits side-by-side in many actual record stores. Plus, having a turntable in your crib is (still) undeniably cool.
But, people, people: you can’t just have any turntable. There are a slew of inexpensive decks out there, but I will tell you that the turntable is NOT the place to cheap out. At the very least, the low-end decks will not be kind to your vinyl, and they just are not up to the task of reproducing the sweet, sweet nectar contained within the grooves of your favorite records. (I won’t mention the “leading” brand, but the thought of it makes me “Cross.”) Years ago, Ivor Tiefenbrun, the creator of the Linn Sondek turntable, championed the idea that the turntable is the most important link in the music reproduction chain. You could have the most incredible speakers and amp, but you’ll never recover the information lost from using a crummy turntable, i.e.: garbage in, garbage out. He ain’t wrong.
So, let me help a brother/sister out here. If you’re on your way to building a starter system, do this: pick your speakers first. You must have an idea of where they’re going to go – Bookshelves? On stands? On the floor? Decide if you want self-powered speakers like the excellent AudioEngine A5, or “passive” speakers for which you’ll need an amplifier. In both cases, you’ll still need a standalone or built-in phono preamplifier to connect your turntable. You can get excellent and inexpensive external preamps from Pro-Ject, NAD and Parasound for under $200.
Now, at the lowest end of the turntable range, your best bets are from U-Turn and Audio-Technica. The AT-LP60 can be had for eighty-nine bucks, including a respectable A-T cartridge AND a built-in preamp – so you can connect it directly to your powered speakers. You just cannot get anything better at that price. It will be nice to your vinyl, and do its best to make you happy. But if you’ve got an extra hundred bucks or so, the U-Turn Orbit Basic (including an Audio-Technica cartridge, $179.00/$249.00 with preamp built in) is your choice. In fact, if you at all can, save up that extra hundred and spend it on the U-Turn. It’s superbly engineered to do everything a turntable should do, but with none of the ‘exotic’ materials seen in some other, supposedly better, turntables, without having to take out a second mortgage. AND, it’s made in the USA, in Woburn, MA!
If you’re really flush, higher up the price chain, you can find superb turntables for under $600, including the excellent Rega Planar 1, complete with cartridge and built-in preamp; and for about $900, the VPI Cliffwood – another US-made deck – with a Grado cartridge (made in Brooklyn!)
Those are a lot of great choices. You might ask yourself, though, what about pre-owned turntables? Can I get something great for a couple of hundred bucks? Well, it’s complicated. It’s true that you can find a real deal on a real quality pre-owned Thorens, AR or Dual – or even a vintage Technics. And the look of a vintage turntable on your shelf can’t be beat. Check out this beauty from Vinyl Nirvana:
The issue is that, as opposed to speakers or electronics, which tend to be more robust, turntables can be finicky beasts if they haven’t been cared for properly. They’re not hard to take care of, but even if you know how to check a turntable over, you can still find a lemon. That’s why I’d be very choosy about what you take home with you from the thrift shop – you might be surprised at what your little bargain might actually run you if it needs a new arm or suspension! The good news is that there are plenty of great audio shops selling used turntables that have been serviced to be good as new. I highly recommend Vinyl Nirvana – I’ve been a customer for a couple of years now, and Dave Archambault, the owner, carefully and reasonably services and restores Thorens and AR turntables. Some of those restorations are real works of art, with exotic wood bases.
But for you, dear vinyl novice, hold off on the zebrawood turntable bases for a while. Go find yourselves a starter turntable! Fly, my pretties!
Sharon Van Etten‘s newest release in almost five years, Remind Me Tomorrow, dropped about two weeks ago, and has been in heavy, heavy rotation at Wow and Flutter ever since. Van Etten had been on the edge of my radar about two years ago, until her appearance on Part 6 of Twin Peaks season 3 caused me to run out and get a copy of Are We There? so I could play “Tarifa” on repeat. Which I did, but Tarifa isn’t even the best song on that album. It’s a strong, polished effort but there’s an undertone of a much harder edge to come.
Remind Me Tomorrow is that harder, faster, and louder edge. Sharon, working with producer John Congleton, brought in lots of synthesizers, which haven’t exactly been plentiful in her previous efforts. But it works: it’s hard to imagine songs like “Seventeen” and “Comeback Kid” working as well as they do without all those synths dripping of those songs. She’s successfully taken her already genuine, thoughtful songs and grafted, like, five rock bands on top of them. Seriously: the single “Seventeen” is a legitimate cross between “Thunder Road” and Arcade Fire. Try not pumping your fist. It’s a great album.
And “Seventeen” was the emotional high point of her set at Royale tonight. I’d been hoping to catch her for a while, and this was a great time in the tour to see her. It was the third date in her tour supporting the album – Van Etten and her band play the Beacon Theater in NYC tomorrow (with Fred Armisen!) and they sounded GREAT. They’ve definitely hit their stride, and the band was tight. Big props to her sound crew and the Royale, too: it was one of the cleanest mixes (including for the up-and-coming Nilüfer Yanya, who opened) I’d ever heard.
Update 2/9/18: Setlist is up. The Sinead O’Connor cover was a nice addition to the set.
When I Was Born For The Seventh Time is one of those “place” records. You know: when you hear it, you can place yourself precisely where you were in your life (who/what/where you were doing.) Not so much that it “brings you back” – which is a tired old nostalgic trope – but that when you hear it now brings you back to the context of when you first listened to it. Sometimes it doesn’t work well; there are certain contexts I decidedly don’t want to revisit. But for great records like this, you kind of get to be in two places at once.
I’d gotten it within a couple years of its 1997 release. Brimful Of Asha was the monster hit, and the gateway into this intoxicating brew of hip hop scratching, straight out rock, Floyd-era synthesizers, and sitars, sitars, sitars. It found its way into steady rotation in my car for quite a while, then dropped back to one I’d revisit every once in a while.
The odd thing was the place wouldn’t happen until about six years ago. I was at Bar San Paolo in Siena with my wife and the little TV over the bar was playing music videos. (only in Italy.) And the video for the Norman Cook (Fat Boy Slim) remix of Brimful of Asha came on, and I pretty much stopped what I was doing for three minutes and fifty seven seconds.
So, here I am in Italy getting pulled into a version of one of my favorite songs that I’d (inexplicably) never heard before, as happy as the girl in the video listening to her 45s. The thing about the Cook remix is that it doesn’t deconstruct the song (like so many others) to “show off”. It takes it into a more exuberant orbit as the original, yes, but it still makes you want to listen to the original. Lots of other remixes shout “look how clever I am” in an attempt to “better” the original. This doesn’t. (You can find it on the highly recommended greatest hits comp Why Try Harder.) I seem to remember reading a couple of years ago that Cornershop leader Tjinder Singh kind of hated this after a while because it was the version more people listened to, but he needn’t worry.
And a week later, I’m pulling When I Was Born back out and rediscovering it. This is one of those discs that are great front-to-back, even the little interstitial numbers like “Butter The Soul.” There are, legit, six great songs on here beyond Brimful. The track that brings it all home (literally) is the closer, a cover/deconstruction of Norwegian Wood (This Bird Has Flown.) It’s easy/lazy/dangerous to cover a Lennon/McCartney song and try to put your “spin” on it. But Cornershop – in their own way – reclaim this as their own, Indian music.
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