AUDIO NOTES

Peter Gabriel

Albums

Selling England by the Pound (1973) 1 listen i/o (2023) 1 listen

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Listening notes

Selling England by the Pound (1973) Genesis
VPI Cliffwood • Grado Prestige Green • Parks Audio Budgie • AE 45 monos

My copy of Selling England by the Pound sounds absolutely terrible. I can barely hear the drums. Cottony and soft, and volume did not help. My FLAC files are so much better. Luck of the draw, I suppose. I can’t have three jamming days with vinyl in a row, can I? Well — maybe I can. It may be time to open a new record.

Oh, yes. This is how “Firth of Fifth” is supposed to sound. Genesis is best when they get their prog thing on: what would be a three-minute song for any other band is a ten-minute banger here. And Hackett’s solo section is just great — what a mood he paints atop Rutherford’s driving bass line. I do wish the drums were further forward in the mix.

i/o (2023) Peter Gabriel
VPI Cliffwood • Grado Prestige Green • Parks Audio Budgie • AE 45 monos

After side A of Pretzel Logic, on went Peter Gabriel’s i/o — a brand new record, and one I had not heard yet. There seems to be a scratch on side A. What?

“Panopticom” sounds good, definitely different on vinyl. Not really thrilling. As “Playing for Time” starts I can hear the scratch, the needle going over it every revolution, and by the middle of the song it is very evident.

Well, double-fuck on me tonight.

Handmade Thunder: The Alan Eaton 45 Monoblocks

I blame John. My audio friend in North Carolina—the same guy who sold me the Dennis Had Inspire IFA-1 and loaned me the Decware Zen Triode—is a man of persuasive enthusiasms. He doesn’t sell; he just describes what he hears until you understand that you have no choice. His pitch for the Alan Eaton 45 monoblocks was characteristically direct: “I would buy another pair very quickly. He’s been making amps for a while …

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New Gear, New Ears Various Artists

When your gear changes, your library changes with it. Not the files — the same ones are still there — but what you hear in them. Over the past few weeks, I’ve rotated through three different amplifiers (the Decware Zen SE84C+, the Dennis Had Inspire, and the just-arrived Alan Eaton 45 monoblocks), and each swap has sent me back to familiar albums looking for what’s new. The result has been one of the more interesting …

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Nostalgia Trip Various Artists

Oops. I knew there was something familiar about my playlist about half-way through. My time was limited today, so I did what I normally do: went into my “Daily Playlists” folder on Tidal, selected the latest playlist, and hit shuffle. By the time I got to Peter Brown’s “Dance with Me,” I knew I had started a playlist that I had already listened to a couple of weeks earlier. Poo. Well, even though I’ve already …

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Mid-March Playlist Various Artists

My listening session today had another eclectic playlist, ranging from experimental atmospheric soundtracks to ninety’s pop. The Cronus was set to ultralinear mode through the whole session, and while none of the music sounded bad, there were obvious sonic stand-outs, both meh and yeah. I mention this, because my last system, I tended to avoid certain types of music since they sounded flawed. In this system, while it …

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