Tango, Leather and Steak

It was a 10 hour direct flight, leaving New York's JFK at 10 pm, and landing at around 8 am in Buenos Aires (BA is 2 hours ahead with our daylight savings time). November is springtime in Buenos Aires, a temperate 55-75F. Perfect weather for strolling, shopping, and eating at outdoor parrillas or grills, capping the eveing with tango.

Now let's go over that again, one by one.

Buenos Aires is a great place to explore on foot. Our hotel, Melia Buenos Aires, was strategically located in the heart of the downtown area, along Reconquista. The street is lined by one outdoor cafe after another, serving everything from empanadas to steaks, with even a couple of Irish Pubs thrown in for variety. Handy corner groceries to stock up on bottles of agua mineral at 1/4 the price of the ones in your hotel room.

The hotel itself is quite good value for the money. Courteous staff, full amenities, and a buffet breakfast included in the $190/night. Unlike some of the smaller hotels, local tours pick up at our hotel lobby, which means you do not have to walk to another hotel or meeting point should you want to take a tour. Melia is sort of a european Hilton. We have stayed at Melia hotels from the Dominican Republic to Marbella and have never been unhappy.

A 3-hour city tour by bus is a good way to get your bearings, and figure out which parts of the city to explore in more detail later. You knock off the few "must see" sights like the Casa Rosada, with its balcony made famous by Juan and Eva Peron (and later, Madonna). It also gives you the opportunity to visit farther, esoteric but less safe neighborhoods that you would probably not want to have a go at on your own. The quaint La Boca district, with its local handicrafts and colorful streets, is the poorest sector of Buenos Aires. On the other extreme is the port district, with a row of renovated warehouses now hosting expensive stores and restaurants.

A couple of blocks from the hotel is Calle Florida, the city's main shopping district. On the weekends, it transforms into a lively outdoor market reminiscent of Barcelona's La Rambla. Leather is the main attraction. Bags, shoes and especially jackets. Choose a reputable store (yes, there's quite a bit of lesser quality leather usually employing hawkers to lure you in), and your custom tailored jacket will be waiting for you delivered to your hotel for no extra cost. Prices are unbelievable, starting at around $200 for good quality calfskin. Don't forget, you get a 17% tax refund at the airport (with a much more user friendly method than on EU countries, too).

Want to venture further? Taxis are aplenty, and for less than 20 pesos (5USD), you can be dropped off in a part of the city you choose, each with its own unique character.

The Recoleta neighborhood is beautiful place to spend the afternoon. Named for the original Recoleta monastery, it is also home to the Recoleta cemetery, where Evita's remains can be found in the Duarte family mausoleum. The neighborhood is brimming with elegant european architecture, flowered balconies, upscale clothing and shoe stores (Uru Recoleta and Guido, respectively, for instance), cafe's and heladerias.

San Telmo is an antiquing paradise. At the very center is Plaza Dorrego, where on Sunday an outdoor antique fair is held. Calle Defensa is the main street of (costlier) antique shops, but venture into the indoor market and smaller shops, and there are plenty of bargains to be found.

In the middle of the plaza, while you sip your cafe, there is frequently a tango show to take in. There are a number of places for basic tango lessons if that's what floats your boat. A Tango Dinner/Show is also a nice way to spend an evening. It is usually a two hour dinner affair, followed by a 1.5-2 hour show. There are a number of these to choose from, and can be booked through the hotel, or in advance by your agent.

Last, but not least, is BEEF. Argentina is definitely beef country. Forget about your tofu, white meat, or your other white meat. The average Argentine eats close to 150 pounds of beef yearly (just as the average male Czech drinks about 50 gallons of beer per year. Interesting facts you tend to pick up.). Argentinians take pride in their parrillas, and it is hard to go wrong with tender, choice beef grilled to perfection. There are a number of more posh restaurants you can make reservations at through your concierge, but many of the best places are the lesser known, and less expensive, neighborhood joints frequented by the locals. A lot of the fun is in discovering them. Just as in any strange city, don't be afraid to ask a stranger!

What? You don't feel comfortable doing that? Let's just put it this way... after you buy your leather jacket and the helpful sales lady (by the way, they work on commission) asks "is there anything else I can help you with?" just say... "Yeah, where can I get a really good steak?" ;)

Some links:

Our Hotel
Leather shopping
And more shopping
Tango
Mas Tango
Argentine Beef

Five Brothers

Tito Nanding, Tita Miling, Tito Deddy, Tita V, Daddy, Mommy, Tito Eli, Tita Sally, Tita Glory, Tito Monching


Tito Deddy (Eduardo Generoso) passed away a couple of weeks ago, at the age of 89. He was the last of the five brothers, and their wives, pictured above. The photo was taken sometime in the 60's (I think).

Of Vinyl and Morons

This past Christmas, I started updating my 15 year old budget stereo system, bought with my first paycheck from internship. I started doing some reading, mostly online, and came across quite a few interesting things.

One, there seems to be a small elite (or is it elitist?) group of people with money to burn and hi-fi systems that cost more than a small house - $10,000 turntables, $20,000 tube amps, $30,000 speakers! These are "tweakers" who are mostly concerned with how well their stereos can resolve sound. They listen for little things like the sounds of the drummer scratching his crotch. They play audiophile demonstration discs to hear how well thier systems sound. They buy music that is "well-recorded" to show off their systems' capabilities rather than for the, ahhh music. I admit, I was intrigued by this concept and found myself ordering one that was highly touted. I picked up an SACD of Rebecca Pigeon, and yes, everything about it sounded really good. Except her voice.

Then there's a group of folks who collect stuff. They have a "rotation" of amplifiers, for instance. Because each sounds differently. Well, I am not new to collecting. I admit to having 7-day sets of straight razors, for instance. Or even a very small rotation of wristwatches that I accumulated over the past 30 years (what can I say, they don't break). In the collector's world, the word "rotation" is almost as bad as the word "upgrade" as far as your wallet is concerned.

Well, I have strayed quite a bit from the topic I wanted to talk about this morning. Well, I figured such odd people were worth a couple of paragraphs.

In my readings, I came across the vinyl renaissance. People seem to be rediscovering vinyl. How the warm analogue sound is much better than the cold, sometimes blaring digital sound.

Honestly, pretty much anything will sound better than the compressed 128kbps MP3 downloads kids are playing on their ipods, really.

I grew up listening to vinyl. Dad's Sinatra, Glen Miller and Xavier Cugat, to my older brother's Led Zeppelin. Hmm why not? I was lucky enough to find that there are still a handful of brick & mortar record stores in town. One of them, Merle's Record Rack, actually refurbishes old turntables (and other vintage stuff). Mike, the owner, was quite informative, and helped me pick out an old Dual from the 70's, with a nice wooden plinth, and an Ortofon cartidge. It was refurbished, and had a new stylus. According to Mike, he sells quite a few record players, mostly to younger customers.

Of course, I did not have any records, so I picked up a Blue Note LP of Hank Mobley's "Soul Station" along with the Dual. I was hooked.

The fun thing about vinyl is that you can find $1-$3 used records, and if you know how to do it, they clean up nicely. Of course there are also the new pressings and remasterings, such as from Analogue Productions and Speakers Corner. These cost a little more than an SACD, upwards of $30, but are really as good as it can get.

Yes, it seems vinyl is making a comeback. Why not, it is inexpensive, as long as you remain sensible. It is archival, and does not deteriorate like digital media. It sounds great, plus it's just plain cool.

Home Audio in the 21st Century

The evolution of portable music has been pretty much straightforward. Sony introduced the Walkman cassette players in the 70's, and soon followed it up with portable CD players. Then came ipod, and the rest is history.

For home audio, it really has not been as clearcut.

As I am writing this, I am sitting at my desk, listening to some music. I mean amazing sounding music, with sound quality (SQ) that a decade ago you'd need to spend some serious money to get. And as I look at my desk top, there's not much here that resembles anything hi-fi, in the traditional sense of the word.

Over the past few months, I have ripped my entire music library of CD's. Not compressed MP3's, but all in a lossless format. That means, the files are pretty much identical to the CD's, with no loss of sound quality. There are different lossless formats available, with FLAC being one of the most popular. I just use Apple Lossless, for compatibility with my ipods. It is built into iTunes.

Under the advanced preferences tab of your iTunes, it allows you to select the compression for ripping music. I thing the default setting is 192kbps. Deselect that and choose the lossless option (no compression).

Of course the downside is that the files become much larger. If you are the type who needs to have 3000 songs on hand in your 30GB ipod, then this may not be for you. But for home audio use, your PC or laptop has much more memory available. Not to mention that the price for memory has now decreased significantly. I recently got a one-terrabyte external hard drive for less than $100 from Amazon. I use it to store my large digital pictures (mostly in RAW format), but it also houses my music library.

Now about iTunes. Well, I always thought it to be quirky, but I can live with it. Compared to listening to music in the traditional way - by CD, LP or tape, playing it through your computer gives you instant access to any part of your music library at the touch of a button. No flipping through to find the CD you want. No cleaning LP's. Don't want to listen to the entire album? Use playlists. No scratches. Did you know that the groove on an LP deteriorates everytime you play it? Well, digital media suffers from some data loss over time as well, but to a much, much less extent. Then again, you can burn a CD or create some other form of backup.

A lot of times, I find myself preferring computer playback over playing the CD (which you can also do through your computer's CD/DVD drive, btw) because the nifty (do people actually still say "nifty?") little iTunes equalizer lets me tweak the music to my liking.

Okay, that covers the storage and media player. Depending on how good the soundcard is on your computer, it may be perfectly acceptable to plug in a small pair of headphones and you are all set. But what I would consider the "hub" of any serious computer based audio set up is what is called the DAC. This stands for digital to analog converter. Huh?!?

DAC's are not new. At it's most basic form, it is a chip that converts the digital file which, in this instance, is your music, into an analog signal. The analog signal is, in the end, what goes to your headphones or speakers and come out as the music you hear. Your ipod has a DAC. Your PC soundcard does the same. Your CD player, your blu-ray player, etc. The difference is in sound quality between your ipod and, say, a cheap MP3 player from Wally World, in a large part, has to do with the quality of this conversion.

What a DAC does is act as an external soundcard for your laptop, in the simplest sense. The digital files bypass the built-in soundcard, and goes directly to the DAC, through a digital connection, either a USB cable, a coaxial S/PDIF cable, or an optical Toslink (after the Toshiba proprietary cable). The conversion is then accomplished by the DAC unit. In almost all cases, the DAC will do it better than your built in chip.

Aside from your laptop, you can also connect a "CD transport" to the DAC. This means, anything that will read your CD. It can be an expensive audiophile grade CD player, in which case the improvement in SQ may not be as noticeable, since most of these already employ pretty advanced built in conversion circuitry. After I upgraded to a blu-ray DVD player, my old DVD player has been gathering dust. Now I use it as a transport. As long as there is a connector in the back of the unit for "digital audio out" (mine has optical and coaxial), you are in business.

What leaves the DAC is now an analog signal. Most desktop DAC's have the usual RCA line out jacks in the back. You connect these to an amplifier to power your speakers, or if you choose, to a dedicated headphone amplifier to power your headphones. For my purposes, I listen with headphones on my desktop.

That's it. Of course, the equipment quality varies. You can spend quite a bit of money on the headphones, DAC, amp etc. The important thing to remember is to get good equipment, so you enjoy what you are hearing. Note I did not say "the best." There will always be something better, and more expensive (although they don't always go hand in hand). At some point, the principle of diminishing returns sets in. Some people will spend hundreds for a miniscule amount of improvement. Well, whatever floats their boat.

That being said, there is a lot of fun to be had for DIYers with some basic electronics skills. Modifying amps, rolling tubes and opamps, recabling headphones, making cable interconnects (with better material than the RCA interconnects that came with your CD player, for instance). I am a little handy with a soldering iron, so I have been having fun with this, but it is by no means a necessity.

So, what am I listening to right now? Well, I have Keith Jarrett's Vienna concert playing through my laptop's iTunes, out the USB, into an inexpensive (but very good) Chinese DAC/Headphone amp combo, powering a pair of Denon D2000 headphones which I modded. I can say I would be happy with this setup for all-around listening. As tends to happen, however, I right now also have a couple of other headphones and a dedicated headphone tube amplifier. They each have their own sound signature, which works well with different types of music, but I am not going to get into that right now.

What would be a good, inexpensive setup to try this out? This is what I recommend:

DAC/Headphone amp combo - read the UK review on Rock Grotto linked on the auction page. For the quality of materials and craftsmanship, this is a bargain at this price considering how much DACs and amps cost.

Headphone - this headphone is unbeatable in terms of "value for money" right now. The prices have already gone up significantly with the number of favorable reviews on the audiophile forums, but this store still has them at the old price. It also has low impedance and works well unamped, direct from your ipod or portable CD player. With a decent amp like the one listed above, it will give a lot of headphones priced 5x as much a run for their money. Here's a review on the same UK forum.

For <200 dollars, hook those two up to your laptop, play lossless files or a good quality CD, lean back and enjoy music in the 21st century!