The Perfect Sound
A Memoir in Stereo
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- 9,99 €
Beschreibung des Verlags
A poet’s 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 Hongo’s 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 CD-changer 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 Hawai‘i, about doo-wop and soul reaching out to him while growing up among Black and Asian classmates in L.A., about Rilke and Joni Mitchell as the twin poets of his adolescence, and about feeling the pulse of John Coltrane’s jazz and the rhythmic chords of Billy Joel’s 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 decades-old 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 memory-rich 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 decades-long process of perfecting his stereo setup, Hongo also discovers his own now-celebrated poetic voice.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Poet and essayist Hongo (The Mirror Diary) delivers a memorable memoir on reflection and artistry, as rendered through his audiophile tendencies. He relates his fascination with music as a kid in Hawaii—from his obsession with countertop jukeboxes to seeing the calming effect Hawaiian singer Marlene Sai had on his parents' oft-stormy moods. When his family moved to Los Angeles in 1957 when he was six years old, music became a vehicle to escape the confines of racial expectations, and his "first lessons on love and poetry, ardor and longing" came in the form of The Penguins' doo-wop hit "Earth Angel." As he describes in lyrical, fervent passages, his penchant for spinning vinyl on cheap turntables would eventually become a love for elaborate equipment, amplifiers, speakers, and vacuum tubes. While, admittedly, much of the in-depth discussions of audio technologies—among them, Tung-Sol 6550 tubes, his Air Tight ATM-2 amp, and the Dutch pentode—can be a lot to digest, Hongo's soulful work shines brightest when he looks to sound to make sense of his own struggles: "Leave me alone, Joel sang, and I said it too, spitting on my failed past and turning the yellow Toyota compact into the southerly corona of my new life." While it can be dense, this paean to the power of music mostly sings.
