Colleen has told me once or twice that she wishes I would play more music for her in the evenings, when she comes home from work. She’s a great cook, but sometimes she needs musical inspiration and after all these years I still don’t have a bead on the music that really moves her. Like me she’s a classic rock kid, raised in Southern California in the ’70s and ’80s, so her ears prick up when I play things like Steely Dan and Dire Straits. But I do know she has a special place for the Gipsy Kings–she even brought a few of their albums into the relationship. That’s where Diego Baliardo’s Este Ritmo (website) comes to the rescue. I don’t know Diego Baliardo by name, but when I put Este Ritmo into the CD player and pressed play I instantly thought oh, this is just like the Gipsy Kings. There’s a good reason for that: Baliardo is one of their founders. (If you’re a Gipsy Kings fan, you know the group was started in 1987 by two pairs of brothers from the Baliardo and Reyes families.) He’s formed a new band, The Gypsy Revolution, and they are dedicated to […]
Tag Archives: dire straits
Having a Jeff Rowland Design Group product in my reference system reminds me, in a roundabout way, of one of the greatest hi-fi systems I’ve heard. This happened nearly a decade ago, at the 2011 Consumer Electronics Show in Vegas. I had just received my Trenner & Friedl ART monitors—yes, I’ve owned these little gems for almost ten years now—and I was invited to Bob Clarke’s Profundo room to meet Peter Trenner and Andreas Friedl. (This was the first time I had met Bob as well, come to think of it.) Bob had brought Trenner & Friedl’s newest version of their $175,000 flagship speaker, the Duke, all the way from Austria to Vegas at considerable cost, and after a couple of hours of listening and drinking and even dancing with Colleen, I came to the conclusion that every single track we played sounded glorious, and these were perhaps the finest speakers I’d heard up to that point. (I’m sure they still are, but it’s been a while.) The system behind these magnificent speakers was quite simple. Obviously, everything was wired up with Cardas Audio Clear (T&F uses Cardas for their internal wiring), using a dCS Puccini transport as a […]
My latest Vinyl Anachronist music review is now live at Part-Time Audiophile. You can read it here.