I recently visited a friend — Nadia. She is a music lover, and her vinyl-based rig, consisting of some vintage components, is located in the kitchen. Unlike me, she listens to music while she is cooking, doing something else in the adjacent room, or simply relaxing on the veranda. In contrast, at my place I always listen intently and in front of the audio system. Nevertheless, I really enjoyed the evening we spent on the veranda, chatting about things, drinking and laughing with a couple of friends.
Category: Music
Good Vibrations
Recently, my attention has been focused more on artistic interpretation than on reproduction quality. I think this is a good sign. The decisions of when to hit the string and how long to let the tone ring, as well as how intense each stroke should be, are the aural expression of the artist’s interpretation of the music at the moment of transferring an idea into sound. As an amateur guitarist, I have been confronted with this matter throughout my own experience, and I realize that even a simple three-chord progression can be performed in many different ways by slightly varying the timing and intensity of the strokes.
Alexei Melnikov – Piano Works
This is some beautiful music I recently encountered, guys – Beethoven, Chopin & Liszt: Piano Works – performed by the talented young artist Alexei Melnikov. I don’t remember when was the last time I had such a toe-tapping experience with Beethoven’s music, but the fact is that this record brought the feeling back. It is simply stunning what Alexei achieves with the keyboard of the beautiful Shigeru Kawai EX grand piano.
Anette Maiburg – Classica Española
It does not happen very often, guys, that I am so moved by a record that I feel compelled to write about it and eventually share it with you. But this time, that is exactly the case—I stumbled upon an extraordinary piece of recorded music that I would like to tell you about and draw your attention to.
Enzo Pietropaoli on Fonè Records
I mentioned recently that installing the Fostex FE108-Sol drivers and removing the notch filters opened a new chapter in my audiophile journey. Yet without good recordings, this journey leads nowhere. In the context of my minimalist approach, based on crossover-less single-driver speakers, tube amplification, and a non-oversampling DAC, a good recording is one conceived through a process of utmost simplicity — using a single pair of microphones, with no electronic manipulation or artificial correction of the signal — as the only way to produce a natural-sounding recording.