AUGUST 2006
This past July 19th was my father’s 85th birthday. He is in Denver, so I called
him to wish him a happy birthday just after dinner. When I got off the
telephone, the sky was getting dark and the wind was picking up speed as a
storm came on. Shortly thereafter, we got hit with a fairly nasty but short-lived
thunderstorm. Our lights flickered a time or two but stayed on. The storm
passed by us and I really didn’t think anything more about it. It seemed like
just a typical summer storm*.
My wife works for St. Louis County government. The next morning she called
me from work to let me know that areas east and north of us had been badly
hit by this storm, far worse than we had suspected here at our home.
According to the newspaper over 700,000 electrical customers were without
power.
Another storm hit about lunchtime on Friday, which not only did further
damage but also undid some of the repairs that had already been made.
To make a long story short, some residents of the St. Louis area went without
electrical power for as long as nine days. It seems that most people who lost
power experienced at least a three to five day outage, many longer than that.
And it was hot here the whole time. It’s been hovering between 95 and 100
degrees. As I write this our patio thermometer says its 98º in the shade.
The problems these outages have caused for my stereo system are,
obviously, trivial in the extreme compared to what a lot of people, typically
poor people, have gone through.
Nevertheless…
What I have noticed over the years here is that the system just never sounds
as good during the summer as it does the rest of the year. I am very hesitant
to make any sort of definitive judgments regarding what I hear as a result. I
think the demand for air conditioning is so great summers that the electrical
grid is always under stress. We keep our house about 80º inside and still the
AC seems to cycle on and off every five minutes.
Since my listening room is in the basement, which is around five to seven
degrees cooler than the main level of the house, I just shut off the AC while I
was listening this past week. This definitely improved the sound but after
three to four hours of listening, the main level of the house got to over 85º.
With the humidity, it was definitely uncomfortable but it was still worth doing to
be able to enjoy the stereo at something close to its normal quality. Petty
gripes from a cosmic view, I know.
Fall just can’t get here soon enough.
Kenwood KW-44 Receiver
I leave the house as little as I can get away with, even more so in the
summer. Leaving the house here is synonymous with driving as it is
impossible to walk anywhere and even I’m not unbalanced enough to get on
the roads with a bicycle. I hate going out in the heat and I don’t want to spend
any money on gas that I am not absolutely forced to. Nevertheless, going out
in the traffic eventually becomes unavoidable as it did this past Wednesday.
I ran my errand and put some gas in the van. Because of the traffic, I circled
back to the house via a lengthy but relatively traffic-free series of side
streets. As it was Wednesday, and Wednesday is garage sale day here (I
have no idea why.), I stopped at a sale that I happened upon.
Now, I am a garage sale devotee from way back. For the last couple of
years, though, there has been nothing out there to buy (it’s all on eBay) and
with gas prices, I have really cut back on the time I spend going to them. The
sale I stopped at actually had something interesting for a change, though, a
tubed Kenwood KW-44 receiver circa the early 1960s.
I paid $5 for it, after a fruitless attempt to beat the seller down to $2, and
hauled it home. The case is not pristine but it does have its lovely beige over
dark brown two-tone paint. Internally, it’s really in nice shape, no rust or
corrosion. The quality of the finish and fit is so far beyond my Eico HF-81
that it makes the Eico look like it was made with stone tools. The Kenwood
has nice touches such as the tube numbers stamped into the chassis by
each tube; the transformers are beautiful as is the overall layout. All the tubes
test good, which was a nice bonus. Nicer if they had all been Mullards, of
course.
When I turned the unit over and took off the bottom plate, it was a somewhat
different story. All the electrolytic caps look puffy and some look truly
diseased. One has completely failed. As near as I can tell, though, it is the
cap that runs from the hot side of the AC line to the chassis, a cap that would
be removed anyway when installing a grounded AC cord.
I put this unit on Audiogon just to see if it was a hot item or not. It appears
that “not” is the correct answer. While getting over 750 looks in less than four
days, I have had only one inquiry. So I have also been checking around to
see if I can find a schematic. What is kind of interesting/disturbing is that
running a Google search brings up my own Audiogon ad as one of the first
items it finds.
Fortunately, most of the caps that need replacing are still legible so, even
lacking a schematic, I am thinking of just keeping this receiver and replacing
parts over the winter. I am really curious as to what one of these receivers
sounds like. We’ll see what happens. It was just nice to actually find
something interesting at a sale for a change. Click here for a photo. And
here. And here. And you might as well click here, too.
MOZART’S 250th
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart was born on January 27, 1756 making this year
the 250th anniversary of his birth. But you knew that.
I have been listening to a fair amount of Mozart lately. I got out the Amadeus
soundtrack (Fantasy FCD-900-1791-2) and also re-watched** the movie. I
picked up the director’s cut of the movie on DVD a couple of years ago at a
garage sale and hadn’t gotten around to watching it until this weekend. The
director’s cut contains a lot more scenes than the videotape I first watched
back in, I think, 1986. What particularly struck me about watching the wide
screen DVD was how the video format had literally cut off about half of each
frame. It’s still a very enjoyable movie, more enjoyable when you can see all
of it. Sound-wise there is no comparison between the digital 5.1 channel
soundtrack through even my humble home theater system and the mono
sound via 4-inch TV speaker I heard the first time.
The soundtrack consists mostly of highlights. I find this sort of recording
really useful in determining what compositions I want to buy and hear the
complete versions of. I noticed that there is a special edition of the
soundtrack out that includes three CDs instead of only the two that are in the
original soundtrack. I saw it at Barnes & Noble so it was way too expensive
to even consider buying.
There is also a very good article on WAM in the July 24, 2006 New Yorker. It
references a lot of the available books on Mozart and seems like a good
place to find a starting point for reading about his life.
And what if his life had lasted seventy years instead of only thirty-five? I think
the music of everyone who came after him would have been vastly different
as a result of his extended influence. Mozart’s life would have almost
completely overlapped Beethoven’s. What would the result of that have
been? Interesting to consider.
* * *
The way things stand at the moment; I don’t foresee getting any articles on
the web site this month. We will be getting organized to drive my daughter to
college at the end of August. It will be so strange not having her home that I
don’t know how I’m going to cope.
My favorite scene in the Steve Martin version of Father of the Bride is when
his daughter is telling him about her fiancée at dinner and what he sees is a
five-year-old chatting away at him from across the table. The last eighteen
years have gone much, much too quickly.
Kent Johnson
July 31, 2006
*Although it did take down my TV antenna. I had to replace the tripod that
supports the mast. During this time, we had no OTA high def television. It
was hell. Having gotten used to HD for most of our viewing, even my wife
noticed how inherently crappy the basic cable signal is. It’s really kind of
outrageous to have to pay for a picture that bad.
**If it’s been twenty years since I watched it and barely remember any of it, is
“re-watched” really the most appropriate word to use here?
This past July 19th was my father’s 85th birthday. He is in Denver, so I called
him to wish him a happy birthday just after dinner. When I got off the
telephone, the sky was getting dark and the wind was picking up speed as a
storm came on. Shortly thereafter, we got hit with a fairly nasty but short-lived
thunderstorm. Our lights flickered a time or two but stayed on. The storm
passed by us and I really didn’t think anything more about it. It seemed like
just a typical summer storm*.
My wife works for St. Louis County government. The next morning she called
me from work to let me know that areas east and north of us had been badly
hit by this storm, far worse than we had suspected here at our home.
According to the newspaper over 700,000 electrical customers were without
power.
Another storm hit about lunchtime on Friday, which not only did further
damage but also undid some of the repairs that had already been made.
To make a long story short, some residents of the St. Louis area went without
electrical power for as long as nine days. It seems that most people who lost
power experienced at least a three to five day outage, many longer than that.
And it was hot here the whole time. It’s been hovering between 95 and 100
degrees. As I write this our patio thermometer says its 98º in the shade.
The problems these outages have caused for my stereo system are,
obviously, trivial in the extreme compared to what a lot of people, typically
poor people, have gone through.
Nevertheless…
What I have noticed over the years here is that the system just never sounds
as good during the summer as it does the rest of the year. I am very hesitant
to make any sort of definitive judgments regarding what I hear as a result. I
think the demand for air conditioning is so great summers that the electrical
grid is always under stress. We keep our house about 80º inside and still the
AC seems to cycle on and off every five minutes.
Since my listening room is in the basement, which is around five to seven
degrees cooler than the main level of the house, I just shut off the AC while I
was listening this past week. This definitely improved the sound but after
three to four hours of listening, the main level of the house got to over 85º.
With the humidity, it was definitely uncomfortable but it was still worth doing to
be able to enjoy the stereo at something close to its normal quality. Petty
gripes from a cosmic view, I know.
Fall just can’t get here soon enough.
Kenwood KW-44 Receiver
I leave the house as little as I can get away with, even more so in the
summer. Leaving the house here is synonymous with driving as it is
impossible to walk anywhere and even I’m not unbalanced enough to get on
the roads with a bicycle. I hate going out in the heat and I don’t want to spend
any money on gas that I am not absolutely forced to. Nevertheless, going out
in the traffic eventually becomes unavoidable as it did this past Wednesday.
I ran my errand and put some gas in the van. Because of the traffic, I circled
back to the house via a lengthy but relatively traffic-free series of side
streets. As it was Wednesday, and Wednesday is garage sale day here (I
have no idea why.), I stopped at a sale that I happened upon.
Now, I am a garage sale devotee from way back. For the last couple of
years, though, there has been nothing out there to buy (it’s all on eBay) and
with gas prices, I have really cut back on the time I spend going to them. The
sale I stopped at actually had something interesting for a change, though, a
tubed Kenwood KW-44 receiver circa the early 1960s.
I paid $5 for it, after a fruitless attempt to beat the seller down to $2, and
hauled it home. The case is not pristine but it does have its lovely beige over
dark brown two-tone paint. Internally, it’s really in nice shape, no rust or
corrosion. The quality of the finish and fit is so far beyond my Eico HF-81
that it makes the Eico look like it was made with stone tools. The Kenwood
has nice touches such as the tube numbers stamped into the chassis by
each tube; the transformers are beautiful as is the overall layout. All the tubes
test good, which was a nice bonus. Nicer if they had all been Mullards, of
course.
When I turned the unit over and took off the bottom plate, it was a somewhat
different story. All the electrolytic caps look puffy and some look truly
diseased. One has completely failed. As near as I can tell, though, it is the
cap that runs from the hot side of the AC line to the chassis, a cap that would
be removed anyway when installing a grounded AC cord.
I put this unit on Audiogon just to see if it was a hot item or not. It appears
that “not” is the correct answer. While getting over 750 looks in less than four
days, I have had only one inquiry. So I have also been checking around to
see if I can find a schematic. What is kind of interesting/disturbing is that
running a Google search brings up my own Audiogon ad as one of the first
items it finds.
Fortunately, most of the caps that need replacing are still legible so, even
lacking a schematic, I am thinking of just keeping this receiver and replacing
parts over the winter. I am really curious as to what one of these receivers
sounds like. We’ll see what happens. It was just nice to actually find
something interesting at a sale for a change. Click here for a photo. And
here. And here. And you might as well click here, too.
MOZART’S 250th
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart was born on January 27, 1756 making this year
the 250th anniversary of his birth. But you knew that.
I have been listening to a fair amount of Mozart lately. I got out the Amadeus
soundtrack (Fantasy FCD-900-1791-2) and also re-watched** the movie. I
picked up the director’s cut of the movie on DVD a couple of years ago at a
garage sale and hadn’t gotten around to watching it until this weekend. The
director’s cut contains a lot more scenes than the videotape I first watched
back in, I think, 1986. What particularly struck me about watching the wide
screen DVD was how the video format had literally cut off about half of each
frame. It’s still a very enjoyable movie, more enjoyable when you can see all
of it. Sound-wise there is no comparison between the digital 5.1 channel
soundtrack through even my humble home theater system and the mono
sound via 4-inch TV speaker I heard the first time.
The soundtrack consists mostly of highlights. I find this sort of recording
really useful in determining what compositions I want to buy and hear the
complete versions of. I noticed that there is a special edition of the
soundtrack out that includes three CDs instead of only the two that are in the
original soundtrack. I saw it at Barnes & Noble so it was way too expensive
to even consider buying.
There is also a very good article on WAM in the July 24, 2006 New Yorker. It
references a lot of the available books on Mozart and seems like a good
place to find a starting point for reading about his life.
And what if his life had lasted seventy years instead of only thirty-five? I think
the music of everyone who came after him would have been vastly different
as a result of his extended influence. Mozart’s life would have almost
completely overlapped Beethoven’s. What would the result of that have
been? Interesting to consider.
* * *
The way things stand at the moment; I don’t foresee getting any articles on
the web site this month. We will be getting organized to drive my daughter to
college at the end of August. It will be so strange not having her home that I
don’t know how I’m going to cope.
My favorite scene in the Steve Martin version of Father of the Bride is when
his daughter is telling him about her fiancée at dinner and what he sees is a
five-year-old chatting away at him from across the table. The last eighteen
years have gone much, much too quickly.
Kent Johnson
July 31, 2006
*Although it did take down my TV antenna. I had to replace the tripod that
supports the mast. During this time, we had no OTA high def television. It
was hell. Having gotten used to HD for most of our viewing, even my wife
noticed how inherently crappy the basic cable signal is. It’s really kind of
outrageous to have to pay for a picture that bad.
**If it’s been twenty years since I watched it and barely remember any of it, is
“re-watched” really the most appropriate word to use here?
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