Fred Manteghian

Conducting an audio demonstration on the open show floor is usually only done for the wow factor. As in "Wow, that's loud. Would you mind turning it down or putting air shocks on it so you could drive it out of here?" The Lipinskis (Lukas' dad Andrew was in town too) had five of their 707 speakers setup in as workmanlike a fashion as you might expect given their surroundings. Without missing a beat, Lukas asked me to sit down. Even given the ambient noise, the five channel Manhattan Transfer recording he played for me was impressive. The true timbre of the speakers could still easily be heard through the surrounding ruckus. Lukas said that, noise aside, the open show floor is otherwise preferable to most of the hotel rooms he gets at other shows.

I think there were nine stories in this store in Tokyo's Electric Town area. One floor had a Tower Records on it. Another floor had musical instruments, toys, and yet another record store. If you can't find it here, you can't find it anywhere.

Shane didn't mention it so I will: JVC's new DLA-RS2 / DLA-HD100 projectors have a claimed 30,000:1 native contrast ratio without the use of an auto iris-stopping technology. Contrast that, pun intended, to the new Sony VW200 which they said had a 35,000:1 contrast ratio, but Sony uses auto-iris correction to achieve these ratios. Both are outstanding figures and, in this stratosphere, pretty close numerically speaking, but it will be interesting to see if our golden eyes can detect a difference or develop a preference.

When my favorite work lamp (relegated to laundry room duty – harrumph!) bit the dust electrically, I pulled it out of the trash and set it aside as a future project. But last weekend when I was out to replace the Grado Reference Sonata cartridge, a cartridge whose interaction with my VPI Aries turntable motor is legion, at least in my mind, the lamp lent a helping hand. I'm about to embark on a series of blogs about converting vinyl to various forms digital, I couldn't have any hum. Or buzz.