From the History File - Dateline: 1959
Even a sneaky little cat knows that there's a big old swirling blue world of machines and tools and electronical gadgets out there. Some we decide to build ourselves, others we buy, and some we smash to bits with an old bottle jack and a length or two of cold-rolled steel.
"Smash it!" Lulu hisses above the murmur of the whirling mill. "Blow it up!"
More times than most though, we just work quietly in the basement shop, me and the cat.
One afternoon over cocktails (and you don't have to tell me cats shouldn't drink) our blurry talk drove up and parked on the topics of sound, modern recording and the whole vintage vacuum tube equipment craze that's sweeping the world.
The afternoon ended all fuzzy with the question "are vacuum tubes really the center of the universe?" and it was right then and there that we fired up the soldering iron and the work exploded crazy before us.
We've certainly built a pile of crap since then, that's for sure, and about the only thing we can honestly say about the process is that there doesn't seem to be an answer. After all is said and done, it turns out to be just like one of those Zen koan thingamajigs, like one hand clapping or a tree falling in the woods. There isn't a Spice model, scope trace, or whatever, that can make you hear something you don't hear, that can make you like something you don't like, that can make you hate what you like.
So, grasshopper, as the cat now meows, "Some noise is east noise and some noise is west noise and never the twain shall meet."
