![]() Then, with a change of RIAA curve, came more smiles: psychedelic bubblegum music courtesy of The Alan Lorber Orchestra's The Lotus Palace, a Verve LP that Jeffrey found in (where else?) Vegas. Astaire, then in his early '50s, sounded a mite self-conscious, but sings wonderfully. Then came the most fun music I'd heard since Peter McGrath's German electronica perhaps four hours earlier: "Top Hat, White Tie, and Tales," on a single-disc issue from Fred Astaire's limited edition, four-disc The Astaire Story, a 1952 Norman Granz-conceived sojourn with Oscar Peterson, Alvin Stoller, Ray Brown, Charlie Shavers, Flip Phillips, and Barney Kessel. The soprano may not have been my favorite, but the way the system conveyed her voice and dynamics was quite wonderful. It's another to acknowledge that his occasionally idiosyncratic, off-the-beaten-path assemblage of equipment rarely fails to honor the intent of composers, artists, and engineers with truly beautiful, full-range sound.įirst up in this all-analog setup was an LP of songs by Rossini, Bellini, and Donizetti. It's one thing to say that Jeffrey loves music. Now, on to a consistent high point of any audio show, the mellifluous marriage of music and sound that distinguishes Jeffrey Catalano's High Water Sound room. Hence, I choose to do my best to stick to reality, and report what I actually hear. But the reality remains that people who exhibit at shows can only convince other people of the quality of their product by delivering good sound, and people who believe they hear substandard sound deserve to be acknowledged. And sometimes what is true on one day no longer applies the next, as has already been pointed out in a manufacturer's comment appended to the first of my reports. Rather than suggest to those listeners that they are all in desperate need of a trip to the audiologist, I choose to report what I hear. And many of those people share their experiences in comments and on forums. Those who stay long enough to listen to more than one track hear many of the same things, good and bad, as I. I on the other hand am aware that, during the course of a show, thousands of people visit the same rooms I do. Others tend to fudge or even inflate their reports with enough positive adjectives to convince someone that Donald Trump is Goldilocks incarnate. Some members of the audio press follow the rule, If you can't say something good about the sound in a room, stick to listing the equipment and, perhaps, throwing in a few descriptors of minimum consequence. That so many of the 19 rooms I entered on the second floor of Hotel Irvine sounded really good is nothing short of a miracle. The reality is that we are covering exhibits that, of necessity, were set up quickly in unfamiliar, challenging, and sometimes downright inhospitable surroundings. To pretend that a 10-minute listen is the equivalent of a mini-review is both absurd and irresponsible. These blogs are not reviews they are simply the verbal equivalent of an aural snapshot in time. Before singing the praises of High Water Sound, which was unquestionably the most fun room I visited in Irvineas well as one of the best soundingI feel the need to expound on my approach to covering shows.
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