Audio mystery


A stereo speaker that works just fine except when a particular musician is playing.

I have a reasonably nice stereo, with Celestion speakers. It works just fine except that one speaker gets distorted whenever Jim Hall is playing. What's that about? Is it some essential wonderfulness of Jim Hall that reaches into some area of sound that the speaker can't deal with and that no other musician enters?

Who's Jim Hall? Well, follow that link to buy some of his CDs. I asked someone who should know to say something interesting about Jim Hall, and he said, "Everyone says: He knows a lot of chords." I tried to Google my way to that quote, but couldn't find it. But I did find this : "Everyone knows that Jazz musicians like to play ideas one step above the tonal center." What possesses people to say "everyone knows" about something that unusual? Anyway, we got sidetracked into talking about whether Google needed to worry about the word Google becoming generic and losing the trademark. It occurred to me (as I assume it's occurred to a lot of people) that Google doesn't have to try to protect itself from the word becoming generic, because its competitors have no interest in appropriating the word. Since the competitors are on line, they must have a distinctive word. If they try to attract people using the word Google, it will only cause people to end up at Google, because they are only looking on line. That's an interesting benefit to doing business on line.

But back to my point. What is it about Jim Hall that is having a unique effect on my speaker?

Posted: Sun - May 2, 2004 at 05:25 PM      

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