BRILLIANT CORNERS - Come Hell or High Water

New Yorkers love to complain about the summers, with their wafting miasma of hot garbage and urine; about the superannuated subway system, which only sometimes resembles a psilocybin trip gone really wrong; about the purgatorial agony of finding an apartment; about the affronts of existing shoulder-to-shoulder with the stupendously rich.
New York will never make onto a "most livable cities" list, and it attracts a particular kind of person. Despite the influx of suburban corporate workers that has transformed it over the past three decades, the city remains a haven for the strange and those drawn to strangeness, for artists and obsessives, for people hooked on the pursuit of more than ample parking space and an affordable breakfast burrito.
This situation is alluded to in the title of Waylon Jennings's 1992 album Too Dumb for New York City, Too Ugly for L.A. and also by the odd fact that John Waters, the filmmaker responsible for underground art-trash classics like Pink Flamingos, once attended New York University. "I didn't go to class," Waters recalled. "I went to Times Square every day and saw movies. I stole books from their bookshop and sold them back the next day to make money. I took drugs. I probably should've been thrown out." Waters was eventually expelled, after getting arrested with a quantity of marijuana. I think about him every time I teach a class at NYU.
Denne historien er fra July 2023-utgaven av Stereophile.
Start din 7-dagers gratis prøveperiode på Magzter GOLD for å få tilgang til tusenvis av utvalgte premiumhistorier og 9500+ magasiner og aviser.
Allerede abonnent ? Logg på
Denne historien er fra July 2023-utgaven av Stereophile.
Start din 7-dagers gratis prøveperiode på Magzter GOLD for å få tilgang til tusenvis av utvalgte premiumhistorier og 9500+ magasiner og aviser.
Allerede abonnent? Logg på

Two things that don't suck
There are things that make me feel so unpleasantly lightheaded that some days I worry my cranium might float away like a helium balloon. Like baby animals generated by AI that I can no longer distinguish from real ones. Skin care for tweens. Headlines about American politics that read like headlines about Turkmenistan. The music of Charli XCX.
Pathos InPoL Legacy - INTEGRATED AMPLIFIER
Back when gasoline had lead in it and amplifiers came with circuit diagrams in the back of the manual, there was an unspoken understanding that power meant weight.

A Sorane TA-1 tonearm, the evolving tonearm marketplace, and the Ortofon MC 90X
A friend who sells high-end audio gear once pointed out that people who shop for separate tonearms are very different from those interested in phono cartridges or turntables in general.

RECORD REVIEWS
Ryan Truesdell launched his Gil Evans Project in 2012 with Centennial.

The iron-and-tube ethos
Woo Audio's 20th Anniversary WA24 headphone amplifier comes ina distinctive, low-slung chassis that welcomes the eye with gentle angular volumes and bright, frosty-surfaced, copper-toned controls.
A solo Gryphon showroom in L.A.
Often in these pages (and in Industry Update), we have reported ways various brands have experimented with the traditional hi-fi-retail formula. An example: the single-company dealership, adopted most recently by the Vervent Audio Group, parent company to Focal and Naim.¹

Canor Hyperion P1
PREAMPLIFIER

Quad 33/303
PREAMPLIFIER/POWER AMPLIFIER COMBO

MANUFACTURERS' COMMENTS
ANY CLOD CAN HAVE THE FACTS; HAVING OPINIONS IS AN ART

Staying true to the passion
Steve Jain, cofounder and managing director of Fidelity Imports, has been busy since launching the company six years ago in the Philadelphia area.