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Standing: John Quick of dCS, Peter McGrath & Jerron Marchant of Wilson Audio, Foreground: Brian Berdan
Luke Manley and Bea Lam of VTL
Three days of fun & Music… and nothing BUT fun & music!
Monaco turntable and Silverstone rack by Grand Prix
Bass virtuoso and store favorite, Dean Peer, performed on the patio.
Cool photo of The Benz LP cartridge taken by Joe Wessling of Musical Surroundings
T.H.E. SHOW
June 4-6, 2011, Newport Beach Hilton, CA
Stereophile Magazine, June 2011 – Michael Lavorgna
Monrovia, CA-based retailer Brooks Berdan had one of the larger suites on the 2nd floor filled with top-of-line gear, including Wilson Audio W/P Sasha ($27,900/pair), VTL TL7.5 Series III preamp ($23,000), VTL TP6.5 phono preamp ($8500), VTL MB-450 Series III monoblock amplifiers ($18,000), dCS Puccini CD/SACD player ($18,000), dCS Puccini U-Clock ($5000), dCS Debussy DAC ($11,500), Grand Prix Audio Monaco 1.5 Turntable ($23,000), Grand Prix Audio Silverstone Isolation Component System ($22,000), and the Grand Prix Audio with cables from Cardas.
This was one of my favorite rooms but I’m not talking about sound quality in and of itself. John Quick of Tempo Sales & Marketing, dCS’s US distributor, was spinning the tunes while I was in the room and between Ella and Louie, The Beatles in all their high-res glory, and let me just say you haven’t lived until you’ve heard Black Sabbath’s classic “Fairies Wear Boots” blasting through a pair of Wilson Sashas. For me, the difference between good and great hi-fi resides in, and is 100% dependent upon, the music. And there a number of people in the industry who seem to really get that and John Quick is one of ‘em. One hint that this may be the case is a big smile on their face as opposed to a pensivethis is very serious businessfrown. I left the Brooks Berdan room energized and ready for more.
The Absolute Sound – Robert Harley
The Wilson Sasha sounded terrific in two rooms. Retailer Brooks Berdan showed the Sasha driven by a VTL TP-6.5 phonostage, TL-7.5 Series III preamp, and MB-450 monoblocks. The front ends were a dCS Puccini/U-Clock/Debussy for digital and a Grand Prix turntable fitted with a Benz LP cartridge spinning vinyl. Cable was Cardas Clear Beyond. The system was very musical and engaging, with a tremendous presence and palpability to voices. The Sasha also sounded superb, but in a different way, in the room of retailer Sunny Components driven by an all-Boulder system. The Boulder gear brought out the Sasha’s dynamics, but was not as liquid as the VTL gear.
Best Sound
The Audio Salon: Spectral/Magico/MIT/ASC
Brooks Berdan: VTL/Wilson/dCS/Grand Prix/Cardas
E.A.R. USA: EAR/Townshend/Marten
YG Acoustics/Kubala-Sosna
Hi5 Stereo: Magnepan/ARC
I started in Brooks Berdan’s suite, where Wilson Sashas were powered by VTL. This sound showed me Wilsons in their top form. The room was heavily treated with deadening boxes and various particulars, and Wilson seemed to benefit greatly from it. Most of these rooms were not big, and the sound suffered a bit from their proportions. I don’t know how to analyze a room as effectively as I’d like (but perhaps I can learn to…), however I did hear a good amount of buzz during the show by various folks regarding the horrific room-problems that led to an in-room response from the speakers that was far from neutral.
Despite this, Brooks Berdan knew just what to do to minimize the problem, and accordingly I must say it was one of the best sounding rooms. Some of the male and female vocals had profound richness and liveliness, which is what I’ve come to expect from Wilsons. The bass was quite well extended and taut, without sounding bloated or weak, just right. Things were certainly off to a good start.
Brooks-Berdan room; never heard the Sasha’s sound so good; powered by VTL tubed amp and pre amp; better than I heard them in their show room.
Brent Butterworth – Soundvision – “Hi-Fi Returns to L.A.”
A more traditional but no less compelling demo took place in the room of L.A. dealer Brooks Berdan Ltd. (above), where I heard Wilson Audio’s Sasha W/P speakers driven by VTL MB-450 Series III tube amplifiers, dCS digital audio electronics and a Grand Prix Audio Monaco turntable. The bassline of Madeline Peyroux’s “Don’t Wait Too Long,” played from the Careless Love LP, sounded so organic and tasty I completely forgot I was supposed to be covering a hi-fi show and sat through tune after tune, hogging the sweet spot.
Chris Connaker – Founder, Computer Audiophile
photo: Computer Audiophile
Dealer Brooks Berdan Ltd. put together a very good sounding room featuring VTL electronics, Wilson Sasha loudspeakers, a dCS digital front end, and Cardas cable. Feeding the dCS Debussy was a MacBook Pro running the newest version of Sonic Studio’s Amarra 2.2 in playlist and cache mode without iTunes. Hats off to those who setup the room with acoustic panels and other elements that proved a recipe for success under harsh show conditions.
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
MAY 1, 2011
The Los Angeles, Orange County Audio Society are delighted to announce that Saturday, May 21st, 4-8 PM, we will all enjoy the biggest May Society event ever at Brooks Berdan Ltd. in Monrovia!!
Hear all about the latest trends in audio from none other than John Atkinson, Editor in Chief of Stereophile Magazine and Lifetime Member of the LAOC Audio Society. He will speak and personally answer all of your audio questions. This is John’s first visit to the LA area in over 18 months!
Richard Beers of T.H.E. Show will have cool and amazing details about the Live Jazz Festival, the amazing Seminars and Panels, and the astounding audio Show Stopping Showcases planned for Newport on June 3 – 5. He’ll reveal the latest list of audio and reviewer luminaries to attend!!!!! www.theshownewport.com
Win big at the 6th Annual Greatest Software Raffle Ever! Over 200 brand new CDs, LPs, SACDs, and more to win!! Visit the incredible new Brooks Berdan Audio Museum, the BEST in the entire world! Audition 20 turntables, fabulous Wilson Speakers, Quad Speakers, VTL amps and preamps and much more! Brooks Berdan is a cornucopia of audio treasures!
GRAND PRIZE ANNOUNCEMENT: Win a VPI Scout Turntable and JMW9 Tonearm with a wood body Benz L2 Phono Cartridge….MSRP $3500!!! WOW! Win a custom pair of interconnects from WyWires MSRP $800-1000!!! And, of course, fabulous software, too! From Stereophile, their 12 best CDs personally selected by JA!! From Eastwind Import, 10 hot new titles. From Yarlung Records, 14 of their finest productions! The latest series from HBO and Lifetime! 12 of Ray Kimber’s favorite Isomike Hybrids! And much much more…
From terrific Acoustic Sounds, win three BlueNote LP Test Pressings or three Impulse LP Test Pressings!!
Win an original 6 eye Columbia LP: Take 5 and Time Further Out!!!!! Both are in the raffle!
Win a great new CD from Reference Recordings who are sending their 12 Best Titles!!!
Delicious dinner served! Plenty of free parking. Great shopping, too!
Please bring a folding chair for your max comfort. Please note the special day, Saturday, and start time, 4pm-8pm….May 21! Plenty of room for everyone! Visitors most welcome!
It’s all at www.brooksberdanltd.com
110 West Olive Avenue
Monrovia, CA 91016
(626) 359-9131
Lester Bangs’ Basement
NOT the author of this piece!
(Continued… Page 4)
So the Internet today is very much like Lester Bangs’ basement. In its vastness, cacophony, and inaccuracy, it’s also very reminiscent of Borges’ Library of Babel. Just as that library contained books made up of every possible combination of letters, in the corners of the Internet I’m concerned with here you can find similar chaos: The song “Let It Be” by the Beatles, sure, but also mislabeled as by the Stones, by the Kinks, by the Hollies, by the “Battles” … and also with, of course, those same labels attached to entirely different songs (like “Let It Bleed”).
Anyway, is it enough?
For some, the enjoyment of art or culture has fetishistic aspects. To them, being a fan is about something more than just experiencing the art. There will always be collectors, fixating on the physical objects, like the great LP jackets from the 1960s and 1970s. In the 1990s, in the underground and alternative-rock worlds, labels like Sub Pop, exploiting their brand, played to this side of their fans’ nature with innovations like the singles club, convincing people to shell out serious money for nonalbum Nirvana and Mudhoney 45s. (Their descendants today are coughing up for old-fashioned LPs of hep new releases.) And there will always be people who can’t be happy unless they have something regular fans don’t. Indeed, a friend of Bangs’, long after he died, said to me that the unspoken corollary in Bangs’ mind to his fantasy was that no one else would have access to it.
Still, it’s all fun, and back in the day it could, sometimes, give one a thrill, like when a band in concert, say, played a song you knew but the rest of the crowd didn’t. Those days are probably over. But I also know what fans don’t always admit: That the vast majority of the rare stuff wasn’t all that good. It was rare for a reason, however much the collectors and completists talked it up. A good rule of thumb is that if the fans (or the PR person) are talking about how you’re hearing the music rather than the music itself, the music might not be that good.
It’s probably still theoretically still possible for something to become rare—if only a few fans have digital copes of this or that movie, a few years could go by with no calls for it on the torrent networks and it might fall out of sight again. It might take just a few discarded hard drives for it to be come inaccessible. But again, with many terabytes of storage easily available to fans—and now with cloud storage becoming the norm—that’s pretty unlikely.
In a recent issue of the New York Review of Books, the poet Dan Chiasson wrote at length about Keith Richards’ autobiography and made an interesting point near the end, about how scarcity and rarity, long ago, actually fueled artistic endeavor:
The experience of making and taking in culture is now, for the first time in human history, a condition of almost paralyzing overabundance. For millennia it was a condition of scarcity; and all the ways we regard things we want but cannot have, in those faraway days, stood between people and the art or music they needed to have: yearning, craving, imagining the absent object so fully that when the real thing appears in your hands, it almost doesn’t match up. Nobody will ever again experience what Keith Richards and Mick Jagger experienced in Dartford, scrounging for blues records.
Point taken—but let’s remember it’s a small sacrifice. I have this or that fetish object—the White Album on two 8-tracks in a black custom case, for example, or a rare Elvis Costello picture disc. And I remember the joy of the find. But it’s hard to feel bad about the end of rarity; didn’t a lot of the thrill come from feeling superior when you had something others didn’t? You really want to get nostalgic about that? We’re finally approaching that nirvana for fans, scholars, and critics: Everything available, all the time. (Certainly Richards and Jagger would approve.) It’s not an ideal state of affairs for a rights holder, of course. But for the rest of us, what is there to complain about?
For more on how the Internet has corrupted the thrill of the hunt, read Matthew J.X. Malady’s Slate essay “Eureka Lost!”
Lester Bangs’ Basement
NOT the author of this piece!
(Continued… Page 3)
Consider that the industries are beginning to recognize that a danger greater than torrenting is represented by the so-called cyberlocker sites—places like Megaupload and Hotfile. (These sites conveniently don’t leave the swappers legally exposed the way torrenting does.) Their growth is extreme even by Internet standards; according to the Alexa rankings, several of these are creeping up a list of the most popular sites on the Internet worldwide—a sobering indication of the amount of media being moved around. These sites allow users to put up anything—from a song to, say, a pristine HD version of a new movie—and tell their friends (or the world) that it’s there for the downloading.
Personal websites, like the MP3 blogs, do the same thing. Here’s one known as Never Get Out of the Boat. (The title’s an Apocalypse Now reference.) NGOOTB Redux, as it’s called now, after having been kicked out of its previous blogging home, specializes in uploads of and links to big collections of out-of-print and obscure rock and film nuggets, from unreleased early Stones blues material to an unreleased Jim Morrison-directed movie short to, um, a long unheard-of Hudson Bros. album.
The patron of the site goes by the name of (what else?) Capt. Willard. “Nothing’s rare anymore,” he responded flatly when I queried him. “If someone’s got it, or done it, it’s likely online somewhere.” Willard has a mutual admiration society with the site And Your Bird Can Swing, which purveys the same sort of stuff, with an emphasis on fairly large archives of material, like this five-CD compendium of Peter Townsend’s Who demos. A lot of these places allow immediate streaming as well. That creates a new, insanely broad game of Whac-a-Mole for the companies fighting illegal use of their intellectual property.
That’s one way in which new online developments are creating previously unimaginable tsunamis of media. Another is more insular: Invitation-only archives, the private tracker sites, that share content, often with a thematic bent. These are basically no-trespassing media sandboxes in which members swap films and torrents (or just pass around cyberlocker links). They have sophisticated setups that reward you for uploading new product—and punish you if you’re just grabbing stuff and not bringing anything to the table. They often have well-defined spheres of interest. One called Cinemageddon, for example, says it specializes in “the finest (ahem) rare, obscure and of course trashy horror, martial arts, gore, exploitation and action flicks.”
The company Big Champagne has found an ever-more-influential niche tracking modern media usage on the Internet. (It’s sort of like the Billboard charts of the dark side of media consumption.) John Robinson is a Senior Media Analyst at the company; he watches the flood of media professionally from his office in Atlanta. “Scarcity doesn’t exist in the way it used to,” he agreed, when I asked him about my interest. “There’s still scarcity of a version of it, that is, a product a consumer would want to own in the physical world. But there’s generally a way to find something.”
I asked Robinson whether he had noticed previously unobtainable nuggets coming to the surface. “Visconti adapted The Stranger, starring Marcello Mastroianni,” he responded. “If you hear about it in film school it’s, ‘Forget about it, you’re never going to see this film. He hates it, his wife hates it, everyone hates it. It’s completely buried. Forget about it.’ ” Citing online discussions, he said the film emerged in 1999 at a meeting of a group of cinematographers. One showed the film on VHS, and a copy eventually made its way to a private tracker site.
Robinson said some fans take a stab at restoration by running poor copies through programs to better their quality. “You can read whole threads going down about correcting the timing of the subtitles or running [the movie] through Avidemux,” he said. “It gets incredibly technical.” (Avidemux is an open-source video processing program.) Others annotate the files and create synopses. “All of this technical and academic-level stuff is happening totally behind a wall,” he said. “You can’t Google it, but it exists.” But fans can’t keep their digital creations behind a wall any more than the movie studios can. Luchino Visconti’s The Stranger is now easily findable on any of the open-torrent networks.
The tracker sites’ memberships self-select for obsessiveness and an interest in the unusual, so it’s not surprising that they are at the forefront of this de-rarefication process. Poke around, and you can see some serious movie fans getting their geek on, keening for foreign obscurities, cult titles from the 1960s or ’70s, C- and D-grade U.S. releases, ancient soft-porn films, and elaborate combinations thereof, like The Sinful Dwarf, a Danish adult-horror drugs ‘n’ sexploitation flick made in 1973. One site works at collective subtitling of foreign films that haven’t seen an English release.
Given smaller file sizes and a decade’s head start into digitization, the music world, by contrast, has seen an enormous percentage of its product made available. Genre is a consideration; jazz fans, I assume, aren’t as Internet-minded as rock fans, so there’s a lot of things that aren’t online. On the other hand, perhaps because fans in that world are more likely than emo-loving college kids to pay for their music, a lot of material is available through legitimate channels. I don’t know if this is representative, but I’ve noticed that the iTunes Store has the entire discography of one of my faves, the nutty Hungarian guitarist Gabor Szabo, while he’s virtually nonexistent on the public file-sharing sites.
You can see the holes, slowly, being filled in the holdings of the legitimate online music services. I’ve always liked the ersatz novelty number “Fowl Owl on the Prowl,” from the soundtrack to In the Heat of the Night. I used to troll the Internet for a copy of it, but always unsuccessfully. Now the Quincy Jones soundtrack album, complete with “Fowl Owl” and the soulful title track by Ray Charles, is in the iTunes Store. Similarly, I collect versions of certain songs—”Walk Away Renee,” “Wichita Lineman,” “Stardust,” “Don’t Fear the Reaper,” “Ain’t Misbehavin’,” etc.—and have always had many more than the iTunes Store has traditionally offered. Now its selection is pretty good, and I occasionally can find versions I wasn’t aware of.
But once in a while I still stumble across something that, to me at least, still qualifies as rare. I’ve always collected live albums, but I’ve never been able to find a digital copy Rod Stewart and the Faces’ 1974 live effort, Coast to Coast: Overture and Beginners, for example. It was a fairly noted album at the time, as major-act live sets often were in the ’70s, and was apparently released on CD out of Japan at some point, but interest in it seems to be absent on the file-sharing networks. It’s available on CD or LP on eBay, for a price. I asked Capt. Willard if he’d ever seen it; he told me I just hadn’t been searching for it correctly, and pointed to a cyberlocker site that had it.
Lester Bangs’ Basement
NOT the author of this piece!
(Continued… Page 2)
I like the director Richard Rush—he did The Stunt Man. Long ago, Rush did a buddy cop movie—arguably the ur buddy cop movie, Freebie and the Bean. I don’t think it was ever released on DVD, is entirely absent from Netflix, and was only recently put up on Amazon in a printed on-demand format. That’s been on the torrent networks for a while.
Occasionally, you see major finds appear and then vanish. One of these for me was Hard Rain, an hour-long Rolling Thunder-era Bob Dylan concert broadcast on NBC in 1976. Like the infamous Star Wars Holiday Special, it was broadcast only once in the pre-VCR era and never released commercially in any form. A couple of versions, one from Japanese TV, appear on the torrent networks intermittently—as does Dylan’s other important TV appearance of that era, a 1975 PBS special on the work of producer John Hammond, released on VHS but long out of print. (That’s a great example of the way fans’ abilities to see their icons has changed as well: Through the bulk of the 1970s, Bob Dylan appeared on TV in any substantive way twice.)
You’ve heard of the Concert for Bangladesh, certainly, and maybe The Last Waltz; what about the San Francisco all-star benefit concert called S.N.A.C.K., which featured, among others things, a rockin’ Bob Dylan/Neil Young set? The audio from that, drawn from a contemporary live broadcast, is easy to find. You can hear a powerful audio track from it, “Helpless,” on YouTube. You a Stanley Kubrick fan? His early films—The Seafarers, Flying Padre, and The Day of the Fight—are a few clicks away.
And let’s remember that on a level below the finished artistic works we’re talking about here are untold thousands of pieces of creative endeavor, of interest to scholars and fans, of a different sort: Outtakes, demos, and rehearsals from the sacred and the profane, the high and the low. Eighties-arena-rock scholars take note: After I told a friend about this article, he volunteered that an acquaintance of his had given him a large set of rehearsal tapes from …. Van Halen’s 1984 album.
The singularity isn’t quite here: Over on Jeffrey Wells’ Hollywood Elsewhere blog, the left column features a list of films never released on DVD. I found many of these just with cursory checks of the major torrent sites—just about all you could want of Peter Greenaway’s penetrating film work, Bogdanovich’s At Long Last Love, and the evanescent ’70s cause célèbre Looking For Mr. Goodbar—but there were a few I couldn’t as well. (Wells’ position, incidentally: “If a film is not legally available, I don’t want to know about it.”)
And there are a couple of broad categories we might never see. The thousands of films and TV shows forever lost by careless storage or deliberate, if misguided, destruction—like most of Jack Paar’s Tonight Show and the first 10 years of Johnny Carson’s. And there are some films (and far fewer albums) made, but never released in any form and not yet seen, so to speak, in the wild. Jerry Lewis’ The Day the Clown Cried has famously never been released and is not to be found on the Internet (at least by me).
With exponential increases in storage space and even faster download speeds, the best way to find a lesser-known song or album is simply to torrent a discography of the artist in question. Interested in Frank Zappa? There’s a 70-disc, 10-gigabyte collection—with about 250 seeds and peers participating on just one torrent site. By my crude estimation, you can probably fit whatever your definition of the pop music canon is on the 1 terabyte hard drive most desk computers come with these days—that’s 1,000 gigabytes. Let’s say that’s the equivalent of some 15,000 albums, depending on the sampling rate of your MP3s, or the equivalent of an average of three releases a week over the last 50 years.
As a new generation of music fans comes of age unimpeded by moral or technological roadblocks to this form of collecting, even discographies will become too minuscule to play with. It will be increasingly easy for fans to share massive archives containing the complete works in given eras of music: the Complete British Invasion … Singer Songwriters from Dylan to Oberst … punk and post-punk—you get the idea.
Soon, we’ll all have Lester Bangs’ basement in our pockets. And it’s just a matter of time that we’ll be able to do something similar for film.
Torrenting and other file-sharing sites remain an ongoing nightmare for the large media companies. The vast majority of it involves current and popular movies and music, the illegal sharing of which unquestionably takes money out of the companies’ pockets. Yet as technology evolves, the ways we share media—new and old, ubiquitous and “rare”—is changing in different and even paradoxical ways.
Lester Bangs’ Basement
NOT the author of this piece!
Article Originally presented in Slate, April 19, 2011
When we originally posted this article, it was mistakenly assumed that the author, Bill Wyman, was the former bassist of The Rolling Stones. Wrong! Bill Wyman is actually a journalist from the Atlanta, GA area. Apparently, Bill Wyman (the Stone) is none too happy about Bill Wyman (the journalist) and has even threatened to sue him. So we weren’t the only ones who were hoodwinked. A great story within a story, though!
Lester Bangs, the late, great early-rock critic, once said he dreamed of having a basement with every album ever released in it. That’s a fantasy shared by many music fans—and, mutatis mutandis, film buffs as well. We all know the Internet has made available a lot of things that were previously hard to get. Recently, though, there are indications of something even more enticing, almost paradisiacal, something that might have made Bangs put down the cough syrup and sit up straight: that almost everything is available.
Music and movie fans of a certain age and a certain bent have strong visceral responses to this issue of availability. We grew up in an age of excited, roiling change in the music and film worlds, but the vicissitudes of the technologies and industries involved made the logistics of merely keeping up—much less being an expert—a time-consuming, expensive, and sometimes impossible chore. I won’t bore you with the details, but let me tell you—it was a drag.
Actually, I will bore you with the details. The music you wanted to hear wasn’t played on the radio and you couldn’t find the records you wanted to buy. You couldn’t even find the magazines that told you what records you should want to buy. It was almost impossible to see filmed footage of the artists you wanted to see. And movie fans? We scurried like rats after what could be, for all we knew, once-in-a-lifetime viewing opportunities to see this or that film at movie theaters or in unexpected showings on television.
Fast forward a few decades, and we’re approaching a singularity of sorts—one in which the digital convergence, in a gradual warm flash, is nearly complete. If you were born to this it’s an unshakeable, seemingly permanent feature of the world. The rest of us marvel that a significant part of everything out there that should be digitized and made available has. And once it’s out there, getting your hands on it is a fairly simple process. The concept of “rarity” has become obsolete. A previously “rare” CD or movie, once it’s in the iTunes store or on the torrent networks, is, in theory, just as available as the biggest single in the world. (In practice, there are marginal differences, like having to do a few extra searches or wait a bit for a download, but that’s a big difference from, say, driving across town to a Tower Records to find that they don’t have a CD in stock.)
A rarity might be less popular; it might be less interesting. But it’s no longer less available the way it once was. If you have a decent Internet connection and a slight cast of amorality in your character, there’s very little out there you might want that you can’t find. Does the end of rarity change in any fundamental way, our understanding of, attraction to, or enjoyment of pop culture and high art?
The phenomenon crystallized for me while working on a story about the Rolling Stones. I wanted to see the 1972 documentary Cocksucker Blues again. The film, a porny, drug-soaked cinéma vérité by the noted photographer Robert Frank, was never officially released. Indeed, under some sort of legal agreement with the Stones, Frank can show it publicly only when he is physically there. It tends to be presented at college events or in museum screening rooms.
The film took me about 30 seconds to find on the torrent networks, and perhaps half an hour to download. The movie was in great condition. Indeed, I was surprised at how explicit the sex scenes were; although I’d seen it twice before, I didn’t remember them. I wouldn’t swear to it that they hadn’t always been there, but it made me wonder whether Frank had shown expurgated versions at the showings I’d seen in the 1980s and ’90s—and that the illicit one on the Internet was the definitive version.
Later, I noticed that I’d made the process unnecessarily difficult on myself: The thing is on YouTube, complete with gobs and gobs of sex. And if you’re into the Stones you can of course find tons of other footage, right down to a circa 1964 Rice Krispies commercial. All the Ed Sullivan performances; odd documentaries, like one from Australia, or another bit of foofara called Charlie Is My Darling.
Sometimes the quality isn’t great, but on the other hand they uniformly lack the bad aspects of official DVD releases: No intrusive previews, many fewer commercials; no security warnings from the FBI or Interpol in multiple languages or legal announcements regarding the commentaries; no inconsistent navigation; and so forth. The so-called “illegal media” are often more consumer-friendly and easier to use than the legal.
On a roll, I looked for Let It Be, the wan Michael Lindsay-Hogg feature documentary on the making of the Beatles’ penultimate recording sessions, never released on DVD. It took maybe an hour to download. (By the way, I’m sure some of the hard-to-find works I’m talking about technically had a release, whether as an import, on laser disc, or whatever. Let It Be, for example, was put out early in the VHS era; here’s a copy of it for sale on eBay for $200.)
Plastic Fantastic
Why Vinyl Still Matters By Henry Rollins
(Henry Rollins is an American singer-songwriter, spoken word artist, writer, publisher, actor, radio DJ, and activist. Friend of the store, Rollins speaks of listening to his Wilson Sophia 3 speakers that were purchased from Brooks Berdan Ltd.)
Last week I was at El Compadre, sitting across from my editor, one Gustavo Turner. He handed me an Amoeba Records bag and said the contents was a gift that he hoped I would like. I reached in and pulled out an LP by the Argentine tango master Astor Piazzolla. The LP, titled Suite Troileana, was one I had never heard before. I looked forward to the evening to get that platter spinning.
Hours later, there I was, sitting happily in front of my Wilson Sophia 3 speakers, soaking up every drop of this exquisite album. It was a perfect experience. At some point during side 2, I remembered what Gustavo asked of me. Memo from Turner: Deliver some writing on music, something that captures your enthusiasm. By the time the Astor LP had come to an end, I had the idea for what to write about.
Wonderful readers, pardon me while I wax euphoric about the simple and complete joy of listening to music from a vinyl source.
As I write to you now, I am listening to a pristine Canadian pressing of Television’s absolutely perfect Marquee Moon album. It is, to me, as good as music gets. The title track is one of the best things ever committed to magnetic tape. While the recently remastered CD version is excellent, there is but one way to truly enjoy the utter magnificence of the songs contained on this album and it is from the LP. Those of you who know what I’m talking about know exactly what I mean.
Yes, yes, y’all, it’s not hipster, elitist hype — vinyl sounds better. Much better. There is actual music in those grooves. Technically speaking, there is no music whatsoever on a CD. Lots of information but no music. Digital technology has made great strides to deliver a series of numbers to be read by a laser to emit that which is doing its damnedest to replicate its analog and sonically superior master. There are some very good CD players out there that sound incredible. I recommend the Rega Isis valve version, but even that cannot capture the full-bloom soundscape of your turntable interacting with an LP or single.
As an LP spins, your needle goes on the musical journey with you, traveling great distances as it deftly picks up the analog information and delivers the sonic message to you in real time. Vinyl is the people, a CD is The Man.
Oh! Do you know that guitar breakdown right before the snare comes back in at the very end of Marquee Moon to end side A? That moment never fails to move me. It just happened. Tom Verlaine, one of the great guitarists of all time. What a moment!
Since I was very young, the playing of the vinyl has been one of the most enjoyable rituals of my existence. It was Beatles records at first and, as I grew older, Zeppelin, Hendrix, Isaac Hayes, Aerosmith, Nugent, Van Halen, Stones and the like.
And then, in my very impressionable later teenage years, in came the noise that would start a revolution in my mind that I have never been able to quell. The Clash, Ramones, The Sex Pistols, Buzzcocks, Devo, The Saints, The Damned, The Adverts and many others, all fitting somewhat together under the umbrella of punk rock and independent music. It was these bands that turned me into the record store–haunting album obsessive that I am now, decades later.
Some of these albums, I have no idea how many times I have played them. Their digital descendants don’t sound the same and leave me wanting. I have had some of these LPs for well over half of my life. I know every crack and pop on them. Those surface noises are, to me, as much a part of the music as the songs themselves and give the music some textural perfection that digital sterility simply cannot achieve.
I am now listening to Hawkwind’s Doremi Fasol Latido LP, released on United Artists in 1972. Amazing! A masterpiece. I don’t know how I am going to get to sleep tonight. I just want to stay up and listen to music.
I have a lot of compact discs. I need them for radio play, and convenience. Many bands and artists I am a fan of don’t always release their work on vinyl, so I take what they feel like giving me.
Sitting in a room, alone, listening to a CD is to be lonely. Sitting in a room alone with an LP crackling away, or sitting next to the turntable listening to a song at a time via 7-inch single, is enjoying the sublime state of solitude.
To burn a CDR of music you like to give as a gift to someone you wish to become closer to is a cold, moist-palmed, mouth-breathing bummer. A tape made from albums and singles, constructed in real time, every track representing a separate and careful needle drop, says a real heart indeed beats inside this body and, baby, it beats for you.
There may be, at the back of one of your closets, a stack of your old and forgotten albums. I suggest you rescue them from obscurity and reconnect with your inner analog self. The brain remaps, the ears quickly adjust, all of your cells wonder what took you so long.
Perhaps the mightiest slap in the face of music has been the music file, easily downloaded and put into a playback device. This format strips the meat from the bone. Imagine an orange, squeezed by a gorilla. It’s still an orange, but in name only. If Otis Redding could hear his music on MP3, he’d wonder what hack was trying to impersonate him.
Thankfully, many bands and labels have brought back the LP. Labels like Dischord, Third Man, 4 Men With Beards, Art Yard and many others take vinyl very seriously and their releases are a dependable source of endless hours of happy happy joy joy.
I have seen some stunning vinyl collections in my life. Mine is not one of them, but what I have, I love as dearly as music itself and play whenever I can. Vinyl takes me to a very ecstatic place. My favorite day of the week is Friday. It’s a throwback from school and how much I hated it. I would sit in class all day long on that day, knowing that if I could somehow get through this oppressive, time-suffocating hell, I would eventually be able to go back to my room and put on Zeppelin’s IV. Do you know what I mean? Well, you should.
So, before your ears are too far gone, show them you love them and get a turntable plugged into your system immediately. Get some good records and get down with it!
To those of you who never stopped playing albums or, like some people I know, absolutely refuse to listen to music from any digital source, I salute your purity. I fall woefully short in that department and listen to digitally processed impostor sounds on a daily basis. But whenever I can, it is vinyl all the way.
Los Angeles Magazine
Best Of LA, August 2007
Best High-End Stereo Store
Optimal Enchantment and Weinhart Design sell state-of-the-art components from manufacturers like Audio Research and Meridian. If you crave a nonpareil listening experience, however, take your ears to Brooks Berdan Ltd. System prices range from $3,000 to $500,000, but this equipment could put Disney Hall to shame. Mr. Berdan carries acrylic turntables and stainless steel amplifiers from such artisan-quality companies as Wilson Audio and Jadis.
From Script To DVD
Speaker Review By Bill Kallay
(An Excerpt from Bill Kallay’s review of the Vandersteen Model 2Ce Signature II speakers)
Berdan Saves The Day
Upon a visit to Brooks Berdan’s shop in Monrovia, California, I was finally brought down to reality. Brooks is one of the most respected gentlemen in audio and is known as the king of analog. He runs the store with his son Brian, who is no less knowledgeable in audio. The first thing Brooks asked me was what was in my system. He pinpointed the culprit to my bad sound; the receiver. Keep the speakers for now, replace the receiver with an integrated amplifier. Or run a couple of RCA lines from the receiver’s pre amp hook-ups into an amplifier, and presto! Nice CD sound on its own audio line, and movie sound on its own audio line. I bought a nice little Rega Brio3 amplifier from him and couldn’t be happier.
But I still wasn’t totally satisfied.
Nearly a year later, I bought a pair of Vandersteen 2Ce Signature II speakers. I had gone between the Model 1C speakers and the higher priced speakers. My self imposed budget and my conscience said the Model 1C speakers were the speakers to buy. But my audio hungry side said opt for the Model 2. Brooks and Brian steered me to the 2Ce Signature IIs. Unlike many big box retailers which try to sell you on the most expensive equipment, rather than what’s in your budget, the Berdan’s take an honest assessment of your current needs. No snow job here. No used car salesman tactics. They don’t pull an attitude of “audiophile” superiority on their customers. Even though some of the audio equipment they sell is very expensive, the Berdan’s don’t make you feel like you’re a chump. They’re great salesmen and honest, and totally patient.
I didn’t want to spend a lot of money and be unhappy with the results once I got home. But the Berdans calmed my fears of audiophile mystique. They told me that I’d be much happier in the long run with the 2Ce Signature IIs. They offered a tweeter, midrange and woofer, whereas the budget Model 1C had a tweeter and woofer. A nice little speaker, but I’d get more of what I was looking for in the Model 2.
Sold!