Category: Tech

Denton Doctors

Wharfedale Denton 80th Anniversary Edition

The finest sounding loudspeaker I have ever owned is the Wharfedale Denton 80th Anniversary Edition. Don’t be put off by the relatively small size of the cabinet and the 5-inch woofer. The cabinet is heavy and solid, with beautiful mahogany wood veneer — not cheap vinyl — on all sides, and bass response from the Kevlar woofer is excellent.

Rear panel with bi-amp option (jumpers included if not wanted)

This is a warm, smooth and refined speaker, yet richly detailed and musically dynamic, in the best British mini-monitor tradition. The Denton is not ideal for a surround sound system, but for music it is magnificent, presenting an incredibly deep and wide sense of space. Adding a subwoofer is not only unnecessary, it would be a mistake, in my opinion.

A Little of Annie

Thanks to Annie Little’s Facebook page, I’ve been keeping tabs on her career ever since she appeared in the Amazon commercial for the second-generation Kindle. She was on last week’s episode of </scorpion>, playing a museum director and not, thankfully, a murder victim.

Thanks to YouTube, I haven’t had to do much video capturing and editing for a long time. But I needed to do it for this post, and I must say that the process sure is a heck of a lot easier and faster, with much better resulting quality, than it was ten years ago. One quirk, now that video can be embedded directly with HTML5, instead of relying upon a Flash plugin, is that each Web browser has its own style of player.

The return of an audio classic?

Amazon is listing the Technics SL1200MK5 turntable as being “temporarily out of stock.” But it was discontinued a long time ago and hasn’t been available, except used, for years. If Panasonic were going to start producing it again you’d expect the listing to be a pre-order.

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Well, the fact is that Technics did put the venerable SL1200 back into production this year, in a limited edition with Abbey Road Studios. It’s a 2-year licensing deal, and the thing costs $4000, but according to The Vinyl Factory in London there will also be a standard edition. If that’s what Amazon is offering, for less than $500, the actual model number will be SL1200G. But I have my doubts, as the standard edition is supposed to be priced about the same as the limited edition.

FM’s static-filled history

I have just purchased a new book called “The Network: The Battle for the Airwaves and the Birth of the Communications Age,” about a subject that interests me greatly. The relationship of the brilliant engineer Edwin Armstrong and David Sarnoff, the CEO of RCA. Sarnoff saw the potential of radio broadcasting that was made possible by Armstrong’s AM circuit wizardry, and used it to build the mighty NBC network. He failed, however, to see the significance of Armstrong’s invention of FM, to the point where the FCC had to force Sarnoff into accepting FM for TV sound.

It’s a classic modern tragedy of an independent inventor being crushed by a giant corporation. Keeping in mind that Sarnoff also rolled over Philo T. Farnsworth, the inventor of all-electronic television, I do not yet know if the book’s author, Scott Woolley, sees Sarnoff as having been completely in the wrong. Based upon a segment on last Friday’s Marketplace, I get the impression that Woolley might favor the view that Armstrong should have accepted reality and given up the fight.