453 words on Music
Just saw a documentary on Lou Reed on telly. Brilliant stuff. I got into modern music quite late. And before that I mostly listened to older stuff like Led Zeppelin, The Animals, Janis Joplin or Lou Reed. I only had a ‘Best Of’ CD by him back then and, later on, New York (plus the obligatory The Velvet Underground CD). Somehow my neighbour Martin and me always ended up listening to those when playing Civilization or Sim City on the computer and even these days when we hear songs like Satellite of Love or New York Telephone Conversation together, we are always reminded of those games and get in the mood for building world wonders…
Even on those two CDs there are so many great songs, it’s unbelievable. But I have mostly ignored Lou Reed’s other stuff. I find that often when you’ve gotten used to something early on you’re just sticking to whatever you’ve had for ages as this built your opinion in the first place. This may be the case for me and Lou Reed. I did get two of his newer albums since, which I haven’t listened to too frequently. Perhaps I should have gotton some of the older CDs.
A fun thing with the New York CD happened when I bought my stereo a while back. When going to the shops to try out a few stereos I took that CD with me. Because I had listened to it a lot and was familiar with it. And because I like it of course. I chose Dirty Blvd. for listening and found out that the little playing of the second guitar which starts about 10 seconds into the song and which I am particularly fond of sounded much more subtle and much less distinguished than I knew it.
So there I was sitting in front of a fancy stereo, which was much better than my old one and one of my favourite songs didn’t sound ‘right’. I was irritated, if not disappointed. Everything else sounded all right, though. So I told the guy from the store about this when he came around to see whether I need any help. He said that it’s most likely the speaker cables that caused this. And I immediately started thinking yeah, speaker cables, all right…
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To prove his point he got a different kind of speaker cables (of the same price), muttered something about different materials, and set them up. And… the sound was just fine with those cables. This surprised me a lot. I really had thought that the differences between speaker cables were mostly esoteric and not in a range where they actually affect the sound in such a way.