More of the Music of Dave Brubeck
More Columbia 30th Street Studio Recordings
The drum solo Joe Morello lets loose on Far More Drums is one of the best on record. I was playing that song recently and it occurred to me that it is practically impossible for a screen or panel speaker of any design to reproduce the sound of those drums properly, regardless of how many subs you have.
Most of the music is not in the deeper bass anyway. It’s the whack of instruments whose energy is in the lower midrange and mid-bass that a screen speaker will struggle with.
A good large-driver dynamic speaker fed by fast electronics can handle the energy in that range with ease.
This is the album you need to take with you next time you head to your local stereo store to audition speakers.
It will help clarify the issues. Screen speakers do many things well, but drums are not one of them, at least in my experience they aren’t. If drums are important to you, do yourself a favor and buy a dynamic speaker, the bigger the better.
Time Further Out, like most of the classic Brubeck albums, is a Big Speaker record. It requires a pair of speakers that can move air with authority below 250 cycles and play at fairly loud levels. If you don’t own speakers that can do that, this record will never really sound the way it should.
It’s the kind of recording that caused me to pursue Big Stereo Systems driving Big Dynamic Speakers for as long as I can remember. You need a lot of piston area to bring the this recording to life, and to get the size of all the instruments to match their real life counterparts.
For that you need big speakers in big cabinets, the kind I’ve been listening to for more than forty years. (My last small speaker was given the boot around 1974 or so and I have never looked back.)
To tell you the truth, the Big Sound is the only sound that I can enjoy. Anything less is just not for me.