My review of the OS Acoustics DB7 in the April issue of Sound On Sound included a section describing a low frequency analysis I carried out on the monitor. Well, not exactly on the monitor but on a similar SEAS bass/mid driver mounted in an enclosure of similar internal volume. The idea was to illustrate […]
Along with maestro drummer Andy Fraser, I was part of multi-instrumentalist, singer and songwriter Theresa Elflein’s band, Mouth, until spring 2017 when Theresa relocated back to her native Germany. Not long before Theresa left however, the band spent a productive couple of evening sessions in the studios at Sussex University recording three favourites of the […]
Looking through my archive of old magazine features to find something that illustrates a particular writing style, I happened upon a review of the original iPod that I wrote for a hi-fi magazine in the early 2000s. In the context of the technical and commercial developments that have come to pass since, and where we […]
My last blog post described a visit to KEF, however, I took a few more photographs on the day than I was able to include in the post, so I thought I’d put that right with a follow-up post majoring on, in no particular order, a few of the unused pictures. Click on each one […]
I’ve been involved in the UK speaker industry since the early 1980s and have visited more than my fair share of speaker companies and factories, but remarkably, until late December 2017, I’d never visited KEF.
A short muso post here. I’ve been listening to a particular couple of favourite Spotify tracks a bit recently: Kurt Elling’s cover of the Adrian Belew period King Crimson song, ‘Matte Kudasai’: (https://open.spotify.com/track/3eYxUakS4FvegXg8qUo8ro) and The Unthanks’ cover of another King Crimson track, ‘Starless’: (https://open.spotify.com/track/1SExxCS4BSeElY6bEZeADb). So I found myself thinking about other unlikely, cross-genre covers and remembered, for a […]
In the nearfield monitor reviews I write for Sound On Sound I sometimes find myself explaining that the monitors in question are frighteningly expensive and for the majority of readers will probably remain, “an aspiration rather than a realistic option”, or some other comfortable phrase intended to soften the sad news that most of us […]
File under naked self promotion. My Audio Icons hi-fi print website has had a couple of updates. Firstly, and as I mentioned in a blog post a little while ago (this one), I’ve been working on an illustration of the Naim NBL, a speaker I conceived and designed while at Naim in the late 1990s. Of […]
There’s a question that comes up regularly in music recording magazines and on pro-audio forums, usually asked by less experienced musicians or recording engineers. It goes, “can I use hi-fi speakers for monitoring?” Sometimes it takes a different form; “what’s the difference between a hi-fi speaker and a professional monitor?”, but that question is really a […]
I’ve been measuring speaker performance ever since I washed-up at Mordant-Short in the early 1980s as a raw design graduate. One of the first things I learned was how to use a set of classic Brüel & Kjær acoustic measurement equipment comprising a measuring microphone, a combined oscillator/preamp/analyser (one of these) and a paper chart recorder (like this). Once warmed-up, the […]
Music and Miscellany 