Schroder sq and the new talea

Good Luck.

If you are not thinking, then you are present. This is not possible with thought; your thoughts are trying to convince you that they *are* you, and seek to place you in the past or the future; neither is a place where anything happened or will happen. Happening is only in the present.

So life is, as the Gladius is, as these tone arms are. We as humans attach the 'value' to such things, and the 'meaning' thereof. As a designer, one likes to think that the value and meaning is built into the design, but when that design makes its way into the world, like any fine art the values and meanings attached are rarely that of the origin.

Hello Ralph. Yes, thought is necessarily dualistic and temporally bounded, but I truly believe that there is correspondence between your designing mind and the mind that listens, and I think it can be more than a simulcrum of your original intent, or vision. I know this in your case because I have conducted the empiric injunctive of listening to your preamps. Their musical-ity (defined here as the ability to catalyze the mind to deeper symmetries of perception of meaning), I would kindly submit, is not a random occurence. The MP-1 is one of my favorites, for many reasons; some of them to be explained in words, some of them ineffable.

True, from a mechanical perspective, the creation of technology, or tools, is nothing more that the manipulation of matter into various forms, and it is certainly a tough row to hoe to embue the creative mind within that material creation...and yet, you keep on.

Funny how that happens...

M-

Asa, I was not saying that trans-cognitive knowledge stems from a failure of knowledge. Rather, in literary terms at least, there is merely a caution that any attempt to rationalize full absorption of the Other contains inevitably parasite potential that indicates "a crack" in the original notion of perfect symmetry. With respect to gladius, its quality(sharpness, hardness) cannot be entirely separated from its value or purpose in the context of its use in the service of imperialism. Similarly(but without the martial implication)a tonearm's quality cannot be separated from its value or purpose as a transcriptor. However, unlike the Gladius, there is enough deviation in theory, design, execution & measurement of tonearms(unlike the simple kill-shot of Gladius) to mostly confuse distinctions between quality and value, and to relegate judgment to opinion. For example, while debate continues regarding long vs. short pivot arms and even shorter linear arms, there has really been no success in ranking all of the variables of these divergent designs. As there is no reasonable prospect of synthesis, there is probably no possibility for a sine qua non of tonearms. And yet audiophiles yearn for this convergence, probably from the false assumption that these are at bottom simple devices.

To The O.P. Vertigo.Has your question been answered ????

Before I studied electronics, I used to wonder why no one had adopted the strategy of building a perfect circuit using perfect parts, so there could be no doubt among end users that the product was "perfect". Now that I know something about electronics, I fully realize that there is a large number of ways in which to design a potentially great phono stage. And once that's done, the choice of parts with which to build said phono stage constitutes yet another determinant of the outcome. There can never be any such thing as a perfect anything in audio, as is true of our other very earthly pursuits. Because this is the way I think about it, I may appear dismissive, when I say that the Talea and the Schroeder are just tonearms, albeit very fine examples of the tool. For that matter, the Gladius was just a sword. (By the way, my perception was that the gladius was a factor in Roman dominance in part because its short length, relative to the battle swords of the opposition, allowed it to be particularly maneuverable and therefore lethal in hand to hand combat, not per se because of superior metallurgy.)

As to what my brain is doing when I am not thinking. I can't know, but I do know that it is doing its most important work on unsolved problems, when I am thinking about something other than those problems. That mysterious process must have been at work for Schroeder and Durand when they conceived their respective products and probably still goes on for them. For any of us in creative pursuits, it is always going on.