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In 1976 Swedish recording engineer, Gert Palmcrantz recorded live to analog tape a Swedish jazz group featuring Arne Domnérus, alto sax, clarinet; Bengt Hallberg, piano; Lars Erstrand, vibes; Georg Riedel, bass; and Egil Johansen, drums. That album, Jazz at The Pawnshop was released as a two-record set by Proprius Records on 180-gram vinyl in 1977 (Sony and Philip’s introduction […]
When you are watching a live show you can see the musicians and hear their individual instruments. The visuals add clarity to what you are hearing. Listening on your stereo system loses that visual element but in exchange adds a proximity advantage. You are now closer to the musicians than you could have ever been […]
Two of the most valuable tools we have at Octave Records are a pair of Audeze headphones and the FR30 loudspeakers. Putting the headphones on while setting up a recording mix is an incredibly important tool that allows us to hear deep into the music as if looking through a magnifying glass before switching to […]
Ever wonder why harmonic distortion figures include the word total? Surely we don’t benefit from knowing partial harmonic distortion. Or do we? Harmonic distortion happens when higher frequencies that are not part of the music are added to the signal when passing through our equipment chain. If we take a single tone, say 1kHz, then inevitably when we […]
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This is an interesting question. We’ve all experienced how different our systems sound when we first turn them on. Cold they sound like their temperature: stiff, sluggish, perhaps a bit sterile. Warmed up for an hour or so we become much more engaged. On the other side of the proverbial coin is the opposite: too […]
We learn from very early on to protect ourselves from pain and unpleasantness. If something is too loud we cover our ears and move away. On a more moderate scale, we do the same thing when listening to music. If something is too piercing, bright, screechy, or objectionable our ears tighten up as a form […]
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The more I get involved in the recording arts the more I become convinced simple is key. Yes, we can get a bit more intimate with close miking, and we can retrieve more detail but at what cost? Simple stereo miking done correctly has a magic to it. That magic I refer to seems to […]
It might not make much sense when we see an amplifier’s frequency range specified as 10Hz to 60kHz. After all, this kind of extreme frequency range is unusable to humans. Our hearing is limited to 20Hz and 20kHz (and that’s on a good day). But here’s what might be missing. To be flat at the […]
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Paul McGowan writes: When evaluating a new piece of gear—perhaps that new Power Plant, DAC, cable, or speaker—what’s the first track of music you turn to? Is it always the same? Does it vary from type to type of gear? In my experience we all have a few go-to pieces of music we rely upon […]
Paul McGowan writes: My post about Bi-wiring reminded me of an email I got from my friend Bill Low of Audioquest who corrected some of my statements about “wireless”. There really isn’t (and won’t be for a long while) a wireless anything in audio as we have to get AC power to the equipment – […]
If inventor Thomas Edison hopped in a way-forward time machine to see how his phonograph had been improved upon in the intervening 144 years, do you think he’d be surprised and delighted the turntable is still around? Just as a pure thought experiment I am always fascinated by what people might have expected vs. what […]
Without question, my obsession with symmetry and fears of getting things wrong has always prompted me to make sure my speaker cables were exactly the same length. Down to the inch. But does that make sense? Would a 1-foot difference between the two make a sonic difference? Technically speaking I do not believe so. As […]