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Tonight at Horst Krzbrg. Be there & Dance! Read more

If you happen to be in Leipzig on friday, get you ass on the dancefloor at Staubsauger. I’ll be playing House with Filburt & Ron Deacon. Always a pleasure to spin records in this lovely city & so far each night there has been great. See Ya!

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Almost everyone in the world knows someone who has flown to the German capital in recent years and proudly returned with bizarre stories of previously unimagined highs at endless techno parties at Berghain, Watergate or Tresor. All these stories contain a grain of truth. But many questions remain unanswered: why is it that thousands of clubbing tourists land at Berlin Schönefeld airport every weekend? Why have clubs like Berghain become the stuff of legend the world over? Why have some of the best-known producers and techno djs moved with their labels to this city? These are the kind of questions explored in lost and sound by Tobias Rapp, a German music journalist who has been living, working and partying in Berlin since the beginning of the nineties. He has spoken with djs, clubbers, label bosses, hostel managers and urban planners; he has looked and listened carefully; and most important of all, he has been part of the dance floor himself. Read more

With the near-complete erosion of support for vinyl playback at the retail level, audiophiles devoted to the analog disc have little recourse but to become adept at the finer points of cartridge setup. And while correctly setting up these delicate devices does require relatively vast amounts of both time and patience, the steps involved are well within the scope of the audio enthusiast with a steady hand and the right tools at his disposal.

The goal of vinyl playback is to extract, as faithfully as possible, the tiny signal carved into the surface of the record by the record cutting lathe. If the stylus replicates exactly (in three dimensions) the cutter’s path through the record groove, then the signal extracted should be an exact replica of the one deposited in the groove by the cutter. Of course there are many reasons why correct stylus geometry with respect to the groove is insufficient to guarantee perfect analog signal extraction, the electromagnetic properties of the cartridge’s internal wiring and magnet structure, and the shape of the stylus itself being but two. Even exercising the utmost care and patience during setup, the best we can hope for is a good approximation of the original signal, which, in practice, turns out to be more than sufficient for superb musical results.

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