Description
A poets audio obsession from collecting his earliest vinyl to his quest for the ideal vacuum tubes A captivating book that ingeniously mixes personal memoir with cultural history and offers us an indispensable guide for the search of acoustic truth Yunte Huang author of Charlie Chan
Garrett Hongos passion for audio dates back to the Empire 398 turntable his father paired with a Dynakit tube amplifier in their modest tract home in Los Angeles in the early 1960s But his adult quest begins in the CDchanger era as he seeks out speakers and amps both powerful and refined enough to honor the top notes of the greatest opera sopranos In recounting this search he describes a journey of identity where meaning fulfillment and even liberation were often most available to him through music and its astonishingly varied delivery systems
Hongo writes about the sound of surf being his first music as a kid in Hawaii about doowop and soul reaching out to him while growing up among Black and Asian classmates in LA about Rilke and Joni Mitchell as the twin poets of his adolescence and about feeling the pulse of John Coltranes jazz and the rhythmic chords of Billy Joels piano from his car radio while driving the freeways as a young man trying to become a poet
Journeying further he visits devoted collectors of decadesold audio gear as well as designers of the latest tube equipment listens to sublime arias performed at La Scala hears a ghostly lute at the grave of English Romantic poet John Keats in Rome drinks in wisdom from blues musicians and a diversity of poetic elders while turning his ear toward the memoryrich strains of the music that has shaped him Hawaiian steel guitar and canefield songs Bach and the Band Mingus Puccini and Duke Ellington And in the decadeslong process of perfecting his stereo setup Hongo also discovers his own nowcelebrated poetic voice
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