UHF No 70 (Net).indd - Ultra High Fidelity Magazine

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Software Ambience ribbons Moon by Simaudio Meadowlark Audio Roksan JPS Labs Castle Acoustics Monarchy Audio Moray James Cable Cambridge Atoll I.S.D. Speakers audioroom@telus.net 1347 - 12th Ave. S. W. CALGARY, ALBERTA T3C 0P6 south. In 1973, the hit movie The Sting won awards not only for best picture but also for best musical score…for the rag The Entertainer. Do I like rags? Yes I do, for one of the benefi ts of being eclectic is the ability to fi nd happiness with many different musical styles. I envy the composers, who can express so many fi ne sentiments using this very complex music that merely sounds easy, if only because it is played by pianists with astonishing talent. The originators of ragtime were all magicians of the keyboard. The present recording features Richard Dowling and his Steinway, playing rags by such celebrities as Joseph C. Northup, Artie Matthews, James Scott, Joseph F. Lamb, Gershwin, and Scott Joplin — dubbed the king of ragtime. Included are Joplin’s Bethena, Maple Leaf Rag and A Mexican Serenade. This last is as sentimental as you could wish, with rubato, pregnant pauses…the works. Except for William Bolcom, who was younger, the others were born before the turn of the century. 68 ULTRA HIGH FIDELITY Magazine Affordable, Remarkable High Performance Stereo Components that Honour Music Shanling QED Audible Illusions Audio Refinement Black Diamond Racing Blue Circle Antique Sound Lab MSB Technologies Mordaunt-Short and much more! Oskar Antique Sound Lab Ruark Dali YBA Chord Cable Reference 3a Rega Monster Cable Harmonic Cable XLO Cable Tel: (403) 228-1103 Fax: (403) 245-8198 The CD opens with Bolcom’s The Cannon Ball of 1905, a highly original blend of classics and ragtime. The booklet says that it recalls (What? Did I read right!) Franz Liszt. Begging your pardon, I don’t agree. And yet… Listen to those rapid cascades of arpeggios, staccatos and clever repetitions, blended with the syncopated rhythm typical of ragtime, and tell me this is not a virtuoso piece! What we call light music is not necessarily music that is easy to play, as this disc demonstrates. Dowling has the knack for broad chords, thirds and octave jumps, delivered with remarkable precision, without ever breaking the luminous rhythm that make the hours seem short. Then come two rags by arranger Artie Matthews, believed to have also written the fi rst blues, Baby Seal Blues, in 1915. Joseph E. Lamb’s American Beauty Rag is especially attractive and a bit sentimental, though without sacrifi cing the joyousness of the genre. Lamb’s Ragtime Nightingale has touches of rubato here and there. James Scott’s tongue-in-cheek Hilarity Rag is irresistible. Jay Roberts’ Entertainment Rag is full of contagious humor, and contains some easily-spotted quotations. Kitten on the Keys is absolutely divine, and represents very well a cat choosing to dance on the black and white notes. The list could go on. In short all of the pieces on this CD are dazzling, both by their style and by the pianist’s exciting play. I recommend it warmly. One Life Katinka Wilson Opus 3 CD22032 Rejskind: It seems you can’t go to an audio show without fi nding a new CD by a new female jazz singer. Most would sound fi ne if you ran across them in a smoky club late at night, but buying the CD is another matter. A number of these singers come from the Far East, particularly Hong Kong. Do they understand what they are singing? On the primary level, sure, but… Now and again you get a hit. Sheffi eld’s Margie Gibson is such a prize. And remember Thérèse Juel, who sang so gorgeously in Swedish on the Opus 3’s original demo disc? Katinka Wilson is also from Opus 3, and I’m sorry to say I can’t put her in the hit category. Despite her un-Swedish last name and her fl awless English phrasing, she was born near Stockholm. She is multitalented, not only singing but playing guitar, and writing her own music and lyrics. She has good backup, which includes Janne Petersson, one of Eric Bibb’s people. I tried to get into this music, I really did, but neither the melodies nor the words kept me from thinking about things other than music. Wilson has studied some pretty good singers, and she has learned all the tricks well, but really good singing is not a trick. It is an art, or should be. Even the sound left me cold, something I don’t often say about Opus 3 recordings. It is a hybrid SACD, yet its sound is oddly fl at and one-dimensional. Perhaps it’s the fact that this is a multitrack mix, as given away by the fact that Wilson sometimes adds in overdubbed choral effects. I can’t think of a reason to recommend it.
Though Blue Circle was originally known for tube gear, it has been moving extensively into solid state…including its new BC27pi phono stage. The unit has been made slim so it can be tucked behind the turntable or preamp, to keep cables short. The second chassis is the power supply, which includes a whopping 200,000 mF of fi lter capacitors…enough for a pretty good power amp. The BC27pi costs US$1395. The BC27, which has a more conventional power supply, is US$595, and is upgradable to the “pi” version. * We reviewed the Creek CD50 player just in time…before Creek replaced it with the Mark II version. It looks the same, and reportedly sounds similar too, but it is radically different. Instead of using the usual upscale Philips transport favored by most manufacturers, Creek uses an inexpensive computer-grade computer-grade CD-R drive, which loads data into into a block of computer memory. memory. The The memory buffer then plays the data, with what what we can assume is minimum jitter. There are potential problems: Europeanpean record stores are full of discs mucked up with copy protection schemes aimed at foiling their use in computers. Creek claims the CD50 MkII will play all current discs, and that the player’s fi rmware is on an easily-changed plug-in device. * Among new products from Benz Micro is a line of new titanium watches. Says the company: “Swiss precision, style and it’s analog!” Gossip&News News From the Trenches Swedish radio has gone to 5.1 channels. No, not on the air, but on the Internet. The experimental service offers surround sound music concerts you can download, burn to CD, and then play through a home theatre system. Both DTS and Dolby Digital versions are included. This is not for dialup connections: fi les run up to 729 Mb! Try them at http://www.sr.se/multikanal/english/ e_index.stm. * The upsampling stakes keep being raised. Numerous CD and DVD/SACD players now offer upsampling of CDs from the usual 44.1 kHz to 96 kHz. Now MSB goes one better: 192 kHz. That’s available in the company’s new Super DVD player. This is another in the growing category of “play anything” machines, handling DVD, DVD-A, SACD, etc. It costs US$7995. An add-on for some earlier MSB players adds the upsampling capability for US$699. * Naim will soon release its new DVD5 player, which will include an onboard Faroudja video processor. DVD player. The DVD5 has been designed for use with very large displays, and can upscale images to 1080 lines…the video counterpart to audio upsampling. The new player, whose price has not yet been announced, will play DVD- Audio, but not SACD. Gossip that is more than gossip Even before the Internet, gossip was easy to come by. But you don’t have to have sent your bank account number to a former Nigerian dictator to know that a lot of information fl oating around is of little value. Beastly CDs What’s different about the gossip you’ll fi nd in the pages of UHF is that it comes with comment. In short, it’s not just cut and pasted, it’s also thought about. In late June there was a flurry of angry Internet postings about the new CD by The Beastie Boys. Not only was it copy-protected, but if you inserted it into your computer drive, it would automatically install a “worm,” a malicious piece of software that would prevent you from copying the contents. The postings got rather vicious, with some Beastie Boys fans (oh, they’ve got them) calling for lawyers, or even a mob with torches. We couldn’t check this out, because copies made in the US or the UK don’t contain the virus, if indeed that’s what it is. But this may turn out to be be much ado about nothing…or at least nothing we haven’t seen before. The Beastie Boys themselves blame Is it still just gossip? Perhaps we should come up with some other term. their record company, EMI, for imposing the protection, but deny that the CD contains either a virus or spyware. Rather, they say, it is the same Macrovision CDS-200 CDS-200 copy protection system used used on numerous European discs. If that’s true, what the disc does is bypass the normal music player built into Windows or the Macintosh OS, and install its own music player instead. So the music will play, but it can’t be copied in the usual way. Of course that doesn’t really mean it can’t be copied. Our view: any executive who thinks gadgets like this will protect his company from the 21st Century should be checked for transplantable organs. ULTRA HIGH FIDELITY Magazine 69 Gossip&News
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