RAAL-Requisite SR1a headphones
EXPLORING THE ANALOG ADVENTURE
THIS ISSUE: Herb reviews what may be the first-ever full-range true ribbon headphones. And feeds the Little Mermaid.
Tell me now: When you’re there in the scene, watching Lord Voldemort chase Han Solo through the Cave of the Klan Bear, how often do you notice that the sounds you’re experiencing are being pumped at you from five black-painted room boundaries, while the flickering-light images approach from only one? Moreover, in a parallel, more quotidian reality, you’re sitting upright in your seat, noisily chomping popcorn while absorbing—and processing—massive amounts of sensory data: Did you ever consider the sensual, mechanical, and psychological complexity of a moment like this, and how fundamentally unnatural it is?
What I love most about cinema is how easily and effectively my brain lets me experience being there in the bed with Brigitte Bardot in Les Femmes (1969), or there on the platform of the train depot during the opening sequence of Once Upon a Time in the West (1968). My memories of both places remain vivid.
I confess, I do not understand how my mind can convert marginally realistic sounds and two-dimensional flickering-light images into me being somewhere else. But I do have this memory of my 3-year-old daughter putting a cookie in the door of our VHS player. When I asked her why she did that, she looked at me and said, with absolute matter-of-factness, “I’m feeding the Little Mermaid.” It was then I realized: We are wired from an early age to assemble extremely abstract data into powerful conscious realities. This reality-forming process appears to function pretty well no matter how unnatural or abstracted the data it’s working with.
Whether I’m reading a book, watching a movie, or listening to
