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The S&V Interview
King of the British Blues: John Mayall Reflects on His Special Life
Mike Mettler  |  Jun 11, 2014
Photo by Maureen Clark

There are blues legends and there are blues masters, and then there’s John Mayall. Long acknowledged as the father of the British blues scene that emerged in the heyday of the ’60s and the man who helped school the guitarslinging likes of Eric Clapton, Peter Green, Mick Taylor, Coco Montoya, and Buddy Whittington, the 80-year-old Mayall shows no sign of slowing down anytime soon. “You have no other choice, really,” he says matter-of-factly. “You set your feet on your path, and that’s what you stick with. It’s the only thing that you know to do.” His latest album, A Special Life (Forty Below), carries on the rich blues tradition, thanks in no small part to Mayall’s rapport with his band, led by a Texas-born guitar ace (Rocky Athas) and anchored by a Chicago-bred rhythm section (bassist Greg Rzab and drummer Jay Davenport). “Never plan to fade away,” Mayall sings in the title track. Dear John: We’re going to hold you to that.

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A/V Veteran
The Truth About Audio
Thomas J. Norton  |  Jun 10, 2014
Rummaging through my piles of lost papers the other day, I came across the following pearls of wisdom. Nothing on the paper indicated where it came from, or to whom it should be attributed. It has the ironic angle of the late Stereophile founder J. Gordon Holt, but may well have come from elsewhere. In any case, here it is for your delectation. I’ll add my own comments in a future blog entry, but leave this to speak for itself for now:
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Tower Speaker Reviews
GoldenEar Technology Triton One Speaker
Darryl Wilkinson  |  Jun 10, 2014

Performance
Build Quality
Value
PRICE $4,998/pair

AT A GLANCE
Plus
Three forward-firing active woofers with four side-firing passive radiators and a 1,600-watt amp
Remarkably open, balanced sound quality
Extremely dynamic
Minus
They’re really, really heavy

THE VERDICT
GoldenEar Technology’s Triton One is Sandy Gross’ magnum opus and provides an astounding performance-versus-price ratio.

It’s not an overstatement to say that Sandy Gross is a legend—a double legend, as a matter of fact, since he’s in two entirely different industries’ Halls of Fame. In high school, Gross was an award-winning racecar designer. With his best friend, Howie Ursaner, the Gold Dust Twins (as they were called) were a professional racing team that competed around the country. (At one point, Ursaner won a Corvette. Unfortunately, he wasn’t able to legally drive it—because he was only 14 years old.) That was during the late 1960s and early ’70s, a time generally considered to be the Golden Age of Racing—slot car racing, that is.

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Signals
Fighting the Last War
Ken C. Pohlmann  |  Jun 10, 2014
It’s often said that generals fight the last war. If the previous war was fought in trenches, you train and equip your armies for that kind of conflict. Then the enemy drives its fast-moving tanks around the ends of your fortified line, and before you know it, is eating croissants in Paris. So you re-equip and retrain for massive tank battles in the hedgerows of Europe, and suddenly you’re wading knee-deep in rice paddies in Vietnam. It’s tough on us troops.

The same could be said of the record and movie industries...

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Grace Notes
Dust & Grooves: Adventures in Record Collecting
Leslie Shapiro  |  Jun 09, 2014  |  First Published: Jun 08, 2014
In a new 416-page coffee-table book, part-time DJ and photographer Eilon Paz takes an intimate look at over 130 vinyl collections and collectors , exploring the beauty and passion behind each treasured trove. The book is a glorious celebration of vinyl records, and showcases the wide variety of collections along with the people and stories behind them.

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The Connected Life
Invest in Your Network
John Sciacca  |  Jun 09, 2014
The landscape of our entertainment systems and how we enjoy them has continued to evolve with changing technology. And the importance of different components has changed right along with it. Remember when a cassette player/recorder was the most important music playback device? And then it was a CD player. And then a CD changer. And then an iPod. Now you probably never use any of those devices any longer, rather relying on streaming music from a drive on your home’s network, some cloud-based service like Pandora or Spotify, or beaming it via Bluetooth or AirPlay.
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Audio Video News
Poll Results: Many Paths to Music Outdoors
SV Staff  |  Jun 08, 2014
Having music on or around a patio or deck for barbecues, pool parties and just lounging around is important to S&V readers who responded to last week’s poll question: “What kind of outdoor music setup do you have?” It turns out more than a third of the respondents have hard-wired weatherproof speakers but beyond that it’s very much a mixed bag. Here’s the breakdown...
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3D Blu-ray Player ReviewsBlu-ray Player Reviews
Samsung BD-H6500 Blu-ray Player
David Vaughn  |  Jun 06, 2014

Performance
Features
Ergonomics
Value
PRICE $180

AT A GLANCE
Plus
Outstanding audio and video performance
Loaded with streaming options
Unique screen mirroring with Samsung smartphones and tablets
Minus
Suspect build quality
Controls are on top of the player, limiting placement options

THE VERDICT
A good budget player that makes up in performance and features what it lacks in build quality.

Last week I was playing poker with a bunch of guys and our topic of conversation turned to home theater. I was asked what I was currently reviewing, and when I mentioned the Samsung BD-H6500 Blu-ray player, one of my friends was shocked. “They’re still selling Blu-ray players! Why?” Needless to say, I was shocked, too. When I asked the table of nine other guys, only two said they had watched a Blu-ray movie in the past three months; the rest were getting their movies from PPV (pay per view) or streaming them from Netflix, Vudu, or Amazon VOD.

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Blu-ray Movie Reviews
It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World
Chris Chiarella  |  Jun 06, 2014
Picture
Sound
Extras
Interactivity
Patently rejecting the notion that brevity is the soul of wit, IaMMMMW is Hollywood’s first (and last?) “epic comedy,” clocking in at two hours and 24 minutes in its popular version. Just about every A-list comedy actor of the era is involved in this sprawling tale of some everyday folk who drop everything for an unplanned dash to find a deceased criminal’s buried loot.
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Ears On
Say Buh-Bye to These AVR Features
Mark Fleischmann  |  Jun 06, 2014
The AV receiver is such a feature-rich beast that it's hard to believe designers would ever dispense with a single feature. As the category has grown, features have just piled up, and generally manufacturers prefer adding them to subtracting them. But slowly, stealthily, a few features are vanishing from the spec sheet and the back panel. It had to happen eventually. Every feature costs money for parts or licensing. Either prices have to go up, sound quality has to suffer, or some old features must go gentle into that good night. That last alternative seems like the least of all possible evils.

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