Various Artists – Blue Note Re:imagined (2020)
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Evening Tunes
Afternoon Soundtrack
George Michael – Listen Without Prejudice (1990)
George Michael – Patience (2004)
Both are severely underrated albums.
When I think of George Michael, I think of Faith (1987) and him getting busted in a Los Angeles park toilet. Sorry, but that’s where my mind goes (and the number of times I narrowly avoided a similar fate as a young man – DON’T ACT ALL SHOCKED AND SURPRISED, I never claimed to be an angel).
Faith is one of my go-to high fidelity recordings. By that I mean the recording itself—along with the performance—is the type of disc I would take to an audio salon to audition equipment. It’s intimate. It’s expansive. You can almost hear every breath as he sings.
But I realized today that his 1990 followup, Listen Without Prejudice shares many of those qualities. I find myself just getting lost in Cowboys and Angels. As we used to say, it just plays me.
Patience (2004) feels different from the other two, but it stands proudly on its own right—and retains the impeccable sonic qualities of its brethren. Amazing and Flawless (Go To The City) are two cuts that make we want to get up off my tired, sagging ass and dance.
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J’Adore
One week of break-in, and I’m loving these more and more. No regrets. They really are as good as everyone says they are.
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Cheeky Bastard
I pulled out my Stax electric earspeakers from the media cabinet this afternoon fully intending to photograph and then throw them up on eBay. They seem to be going. from $125-200, so that’s not just a little walking-around money.
Out of curiosity—since I’ve been listening to so many different types of headphones lately—I went ahead and hooked them up to my amp and took a listen. Wouldn’t you know, they sound pretty damn good; definitely as good as anything else I’ve been auditioning over the past few years.
I think the reason I stopped using them was because they were such fidgety, specialized cans that require the intermediate energizer box connected to an amp’s speaker outputs in order to work. In other words, they couldn’t be used with any of my portable devices and as those became increasingly important in my life, being tied to one location was unacceptable.
That being said, for those rare instances when I do want to listen in the living room privately, I’ve decided to hold on to them and keep ’em connected. They sound much better than I remembered and certainly match—if not slightly exceed—any of the other headphones I’ve been using over the past several years.
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Saturday Afternoon Soundtrack
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Evening Listening And My Initial Thoughts On The Sennheiser HD600s
I Who Have Nothing and Take Me To Heaven: the first two songs I put through the new Sennheisers at angelic volume. Keeping in mind that these need a week or so to “break in” and it may change, as of right now I’m very happy with the purchase. They sound great right out of the box, and if anything, they’ve unabashedly revealed the differences between my CD players. Surprisingly, the oldest players I own, the D-10 and the D-15 (1988 and 89 respectively) sound significantly better than my newest, the D-EJ915 (1999/2000) and D-EJ100 (2004) but honestly, that may just be my imagination playing tricks.
They’re also high impedance and therefore power-hungry. On the older players I barely had to turn the volume control above it’s lowest setting to get decently loud with my other ‘phones; now I have to turn it about 1/4 of the way up. On the newer players with digital volume controls, I have to crank it to 3/4 of the way to max to get the same sound level.
On my main system, they’re 
Comfort-wise, so far so good. The pads are big enough that they fit completely over my ears and the pressure on my glasses is minimal. We’ll see how that plays out as time goes by.
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