Arche' SRA headshell from Germany

This headshell really intrigues me... like weird,  one-of-a-kind Bosoeum "Big Nose" and Kimura Labs RS-3 from Japan, this German-made micro-mechanical beauty is weird and seldom-seen enough and - as a BIG plus -  promises a perfect SRA fine-tuning and cartridge aligning, something which combined with my own massive 22 kilos bronze armbase using Fidelity Research B-60 VTA will allow (virtually) all my cartridges to fully express their potential.

I guess I'll also need an USB-microscope like these... as the way we look at our cartridge diamond would be like this!

So, at RS Components, Dino-Lite's best models, including software, costs much less than other "voodoo" audiophile paraphernalia:-))): to become SRA/cartridges/analog best friend... WOW!

New Elodis' Goto horns and drivers holder

My friend Franz Hinterlehner (of Elodis of Austria, the maker of my Gotorama speakers) just completed this AMAZING horns holder for a fellow Goto user, a customer from Far East.

... find it VERY amusing Franz always so humbly apologize about poor pixes quality:-)))

Hey, Franz... look at my Blog's iPhone pixes:-))))

Seriously, TRUE workmanship and materials SUPREME quality is pouring from ANY details of these amazing holders which - I trust and hope - will make the owner VERY satisfied.

Jean Hiraga's Disks Dept. - Mauricio Kagel's Nah und Fern

I finally got it!!!

It's the last disk I STRONGLY wished after listening to in Koln, last November, which Jean brought with him as a sonic test-disk for Klaus' system.

... and it's truly AMAZING, musically and sonically... a recording which I place among the very best I own and ever listened to...

The young Markus Stockhausen (Karlheinz's son) and his trumpet are so beautiful and the bells, THE BELLS, folks... and the old keys in the bells tower door, the steps... and the traffic noises, THAT truck...

ALL is so lively and life-like... it's an absolute masterpiece: your audio system will smile while playing this disk.

Thanking Jean for his GREAT musical tastes...

Armageddon

... so Hollywood (and Bible...) prepared us... it can happen... it HAPPENS!

No Bruce Willis involved... ordinary people in everyday life... meteors coming at 1.500 km per hour... like bombs...

We're soooooooooooo small and fragile...

Better enjoying every single day at our VERY best as Life is - really is - sooooooooooooo short and elusive.

Chris Mc Gregor's Brotherhood of Breath - Live at Willisau on Ogun

I FINALLY found it!!!


Searched for a nice copy for years... it's the first Ogun's disc.

WOW!

The Magic ID - "Till my breath gives out" - Erstwhile Records

Thanking Joe Perucki... I still often listen to this great, GREAT disc he suggested to yours truly years ago...

Thanks again, Joe... and well worth a listen, folks...

I love this disc.... also a VERY nice recording.

Headfall - Stars don't shine to noise (2003)

Last Sunday morning, while lazily browsing vinyl discs bins at a local flea-market, I got attracted by this disc: a quite dull cover art and this garage-looking liner notes... including the hinting to "recorded on reel-to-reel", always MUCH welcome;-)

It looked like lo-fi, post-rock artifact from some obscure band... but... BUT, hey, they came from Bristol... WOW... decided to give them a try, for a couple coffees price-tag.

Back home I found a sad string of song... a faaaar away female voice, like singing from a distant room...

Guitars, piano, clarinet, violin... it sounded slightly reminding to me the Dictaphone's disc which Thomas Schick recently gifted to me... well, less classy and "clever", yet intriguing.

Chamber-rock... and despite the lo-fi approach (poor studio miking technique, wanted or unwanted...) worth a listen.

The never-ending path... finely tuning Garrardzilla or...

... The Zen and the Art of Microcarving.

Yes, folks: sometimes I feel me like those "lunatics" - i.e. wise ultra-skilled and specialized visionary who give - literally - their lives to a single act - rice carving, for example.

Many masterpieces  were carved on the humble rice grains in the centuries and, also if this activity seems so uneseful and weird, I find it among the most innocent and peaceful human behaviours.

In the last few weeks I discovered that I'm able - after looong months of macro system tuning (cables, ground, platters and mats and the like) - to go further and further in my discerning and tuning skill of my analog rig, the mighty Garrardzilla I already annoyed you about;-)

While breaking-in the Allnic Puritas and the Decca SC4E on the Schick arm I found that, quite differently from my previous reference, the Lumiere DST cartridge, the two a.m. carts are very sensitive to VTA... my bronze armbase using a B-60 Fidelity Research's VTA-on-the-fly proved to be VERY useful in finding the best setting while playing a disc and less than a mm +/- was - musically speaking - giving shivers or not!

Yesterday evening I was playing some Eugen Muller-Dombois' disc on RCA Seon, S.L. Weiss' solo lute recorded in Germany in a natural acoustic space.

I know this musician and music intimately and when I (still) find some hidden detail in the grooves... well, my heart is singing!

Fingers slurs on the gut strings, ambient and a far away whispering voice... a bird outside... a soft door slamming noise... everything does and will do... I suspect I will dig and dig and dig these superb recordings 'til my last day.

When I say to fellow and friends... I'll never change anything in my system... well, KAPOOOW... it happens: also cheap, apparently silly fine tuning changes the resolution power of my system and my ears are splitting hair in four, six, eight... like a micro-carver I'm able to further and further improve my listening skill in a relaxed mode, quietly breathing and listening... becoming a Breathing Ear;-)

... not only details, of course... music reaches my soul so intensely that only one disc side is enough, sometimes... I get such a full load of music which makes me really lighthearted and happy... yesterday evening, after a very satisfying listening session, I took the long way back home, walking in the silent town streets, in the snow... nobody around... my ears were also glad to hear the different snow crackling under my boots and the snow woooshing falling from the trees!

I feel... I'm an humble hearing-microcarver, folks...

When I reached home, I prepared a bread breakfast for sparrows and pigeons, in the thick snow mantle, where I know they go.

Satori.

Game over!

Seriously said... I sincerely appreciated Josef Ratzinger's so human stroke: he - honestly - gave up to age, stress, huge pressures and power weight involved in his position...

Chapeau!

The ultimate remote control

Her Mistress Voice - the Singing Canary

The Canary Garrardzilla!

... "he" isn't Nipper... "she" is Happy, actually:-)

... yes, female audiophile (dogs and birds) exist... a rare, RARE breed, but they DO exist!

Musings?

A Sun Ra retrospective

Tri-fold digicase with 20-page booklet of liner-notes and photos by Kris Needs repositions the roots of Sonny Blount aka Sun Ra on three discs (60 tracks) spanning his earliest 1933 recordings of big band jazz and be-bop, thru the birth of Sun Ra and the "future shock" of his later visions. "CD1 (Pre-flight) features Sun Ra’s earliest recordings from the 1940s, playing piano for Wynonie Harris and Lil Green, jamming with Stuff Smith, and coaching or arranging for artists such as Andrew Tibbs, the Hambone Kids and the Dozier Boys with Red Saunders’ Orchestra.

Moonrise Kingdom - the movie, with a little help from Benjamin Britten

This moving, poetic and "time suspended" movie is so nicely blending with music...

... I was almost quitting from the cinema - i.e. - what's this crap... scouts... a summer camp... bleah!... or the like... but, maybe, the old Kodachrome-tinted photography or "something" stopped me...

I was right!

The story was creating in front of me, on the screen... when young Sam is searched by his fellows, . oh, oh...?!?!

That's Benjamin Britten's "Simple Symphony"... his "Playful Pizzicato", superb second movement with those so joyful and strings pizzicatos...

I calmed myself and get absorbed in the movie...

... again Benjamin Britten's "Noye's Fludde" rehearsed and played in a small theatre... the costumes, the kids voices...

I was captured!

The movie is a poetic tale of a fairy world dated 1965 or so... the island is mix between the Hamptons and Sea Cliff or Nantuket... but it seems penned by a XX Century Tolkien... or, better yet, Britten himself!

The several hinting to Britten are everywhere... music as original soundtrack, Penzance and a sea saga...

The music REALLY so nicely serves the story... and, let me say, the love story between yound Sam and young Suzy is so well "preserved", poetic and delicate as a wild flower which is only beautiful when left in the wild... when hand-picked... it's lost!

The scene of dating on the beach, the making of the fishining hooks earrings with the green insect... well, is pure beauty... so clever are the young Jared Gilman and Kara Hayward.

The rest of the cast is stellar: Edward Norton, Bill Munray, Bruce Willis, Tilda Swinton, Harvey Keitel... the best of the crop!

I loved... I LOVE this little humble movie!

Enjoying-music-like-a-teenager Dept. - Mark Eitzel's American Music Club - California

I recently got on Ebay this disc in minty conditions... it's another of the several cases of backward musical searches... Pentangle - Reflections in 1971 to dig and search and discovery, enjoying a lot Renbourn, Jansch... and Europe 73 by The Grateful Dead, first... to became a die-hard DeadHead scholar and Dick's Picks completist;-)

I got last Mark Eitzel's solo, only a few weeks ago - SUPERB! ... and... bang..... again... I'll be getting "Everclear", always by "American Music Club" soon; issued in 1991, is considered their highest peak.

California already is a new,  my own personal peak... sure I enjoyed listening to it A LOT!

Thanking Mario A. for suggesting this VERY disc.

WOW!

My N.O.S. Decca SC4E is breaking-in and giving such a freshness I REALLY felt myself, yesterday evening, a teenager... swinging on a newly purchased disc... on a Saturday afternoon... like when I was thirteen, eons ago.

Ludwig Streicher, H.P. Lovecraft, Decca SC4E, Schick arm and Bosoeum Acoustics "Big Nose" headshell

Decca!!!

Decca SC4E is among the most well kept secrets in audio... I must thanks a lot - I mean A LOT - a gentleman and a fellow Blogger and audio and music enthusiast, River Yu from Taipei... his hintings were precious as gold and he proved soooo right... this old Decca cartridge sounds like Music.

I mounted on the "Big Nose" exotic and seldom seen headshell using Yamamoto BT-1 titanium screws, pretty right and long enough for the Decca's and aligned and tuned on Schick's arm at 1,75 grams... the VERY lower weight limit - according Thomas Schick himself - for this awesome, so pure and transparent 12" arm.

The sound of the Decca is IMPRESSIVE... for the very first time I REALLY listened to the Thomas Mayer's LCR phono-stage... no MC trannies at all on signal path... only the truest spirit and soul of Western Electric 437A!

Decca's not an MC or MM: it's a Decca:-)...  it's very, VERY far from being a forgiving moving magnet or a fussy, razor-like MC... it's superbly transparent and sweet, tracks blissfully at 1,75 grams also the most tremendous tracks... on beloved Ludwig Streicher's Bottesini on Telefunken, on a piece,  "Grande Allegro di Concerto per Il Contrabbasso e il pianoforte" the left hand of maestro Streicher is so sublimely audible up and down the fretboard and looong neck in all the skill and art needed to master such a tour-de-force for double-bass... listening to this very pieces it reminds me an H.P. Lovecraft's short story, "The Music of Erich Zann", where a violin player plays in the night incredibly weird melodies, weirdest and weirdest as time goes by... obscure misteries... the Evil... Devils' possession... you know...

The above drawing also declined - by chance - the (original) violin into a double-bass!

Maestro Streicher was... is THE greatest double bassist of ALL the times and far from the above, yet his playing truly is "possessed" by the spirit of Bottesini, the greatest of all composers for double-bass... he's so strong, moving and unique to make the most difficult playing soooo easy to the ear... and the above mentioned gears aren't gears, anymore, as they allow such a nearness and integration with this sublime music.