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The room was filled with other gear, most of it not connected, including about five other pairs of expensive loudspeakers. Mr. Li's assistant (he has a full-time employee to take care of the systems) played some multichannel SACDs and the effect was mind-blowing.
The sense of space, continuousness of the soundstage from front to back, and immersion were as good as I've heard from any multichannel setup.
We left the "Wilson room" to discover a smaller space with a pair of Venture loudspeakers (about $65k) and a whole host of top-end electronics and sources, including a huge Burmester power amplifier.
A pair of speakers was off to the side, unused at the moment. Both rooms were filled with CDs and LPs lining the walls, and CDs were stacked on coffee tables in front of the listening seats.
We didn't stay to listen; there was more to see. Unfortunately, I didn't take detailed notes of all the sources and electronics in each room; it went by so quickly and cataloging everything would have been a major job. Nonetheless, I didn't see any gear that was anything less than first-rate.
We took the elevator up a couple of floors to find another system based on the JM Lab Grand Utopia driven by the massive Mark Levinson monoblocks.
As with most of the rooms, this one featured two turntables, one fitted with multiple arms and cartridges. All the turntables in Mr. Li's house were spinning and ready for action. We didn't stop to listen to this system; it just happened to be on our way to another huge room, this one featuring the MartinLogan Statement loudspeaker.
The Statement is a massive four-piece electrostatic-dynamic hybrid system about eight-feet tall with similarly sized dynamic woofer columns. It represented MartinLogan's best effort, and cost, if I remember correctly, about $85,000.
This room also had video projection and multichannel capability. Electronics included a Mark Levinson No.40 Media Controller ($30k). The LFE channel was reproduced by a pair of Wilson WATCH Dog subwoofers. Again, the sound was spectacularly great; effortless dynamics, huge soundstage, and tremendous bass extension and power.
On the way to the next stop on the tour, we saw a small room with just one listening seat and a pair of Venture mini-monitors set up for nearfield listening. The main attraction, however, was the adjacent space, which housed a pair of the big Kharma Exquisite Reference loudspeakers. One of the turntables was the giant multi-tonearm Thorens (I don't remember the other), and the CD source was a top-of-the-line Goldmund.
The walls of this room, like the others, were lined with CDs and LPs.
This is where we spent the next 45 minutes listening, with Mr. Li choosing selections from his vast library. Watching him adeptly run the system, along with his ability to put his hands on any piece of music he wanted to play, showed me that all this gear wasn't for the sake of having the gear, but of using it as a vehicle for exploring the world of music.
There was a reason we spent most of our listening time in this room; the sound was extremely warm, beautiful, and musically engaging. Mr. Li had had the Kharmas only two weeks and said they needed more break-in time.
Would we like to see the LP collection? I thought we already had, in the rows and rows of LPs lining entire walls of most of the rooms and in walk-in-closet-sized rooms adjacent to the listening areas. The 60,000-LP archive on the third floor consumed about 700 square feet of floor space, with shelves to the ceiling. The collection was well organized and protected by temperature and humidity control systems.
The music spanned a huge range, and included European classical music, jazz, traditional and contemporary Chinese music, and rock.
We had finished the tour of Mr. Li's house, but there was more. Mr. Li had set up a hi-fi club in a nearby building for the benefit of anyone interested in high-end audio. The club was a large space with about 40 seats and a system consisting of classic Westlake loudspeakers driven by Gryphon monoblocks.
A huge array of top-end sources, preamps, and power amplifiers was arranged behind the system (an amplifier I remember seeing was the vertical tubed Nagra amps, which cost about $40k). The walls were lined not with an LP collection, but with single LPs mounted on the walls as tribute to the musicians and music. Portraits of composers also hung on the walls.
The club also housed the rest of Mr. Li's LP collection. The rest of it? Mr. Li recently bought the entire 200,000-LP archive from a library in Japan. The library, which might have been the equivalent of the U.S. Library of CongressâI couldn't get the answerâhad just digitized all their LPs and wanted to divest itself of the vinyl. The LPs were shipped in containers to the club and were awaiting organization, and, presumably, a new home in Mr. Li's house.
I would estimate that these 200,000 LPs consumed a volume of about 5000 cubic feet. The photo shows one room of LPs; there were three others just like it.
This description doesn't do justice to the vast array of gear in every room and to the massive range and amount of music everywhere. In each of the rooms, I would look around and happen to catch sight of other gear on-handâa Linn CD12 CD player, a Jadis preamp, a top-of-the-line Goldmund phonostage.
The list was seemingly endless.
All this gear is put to good use; Mr. Li opens his house to anyone who wants to come and hear music. He's extraordinarily passionate about music and high-end equipment, and shares that enthusiasm with anyone who's interested. Similarly, the club is open to the public so that ordinary people can come and hear great music wonderfully reproduced. What a wonderful gift to the people of Yang Jiang.
Several people in the hi-fi industry made the trek from the GuangZhou show to Mr. Li's home, and afterward we shared a wonderful meal in Mr. Li's restaurant.
The photo shows, from left to right, Mr. Li, Dick Diamond (representative for YG Acoustics), me, Peter Lau (founder and designer of Audio Space), and Alfie Liu (the U.S. representative of Audio Space).
So, is Mr. Li the "world's Number One audiophile"? If he isn't, I can't imagine who is.
Read the first installment of Robert Harley's trip to China with a detailed report on the GuangZhou Hi-Fi Show.<|endoftext|>The Iranian rapper Amir Tataloo released a new music video the day before the Iran deal was finalized on 14 July. It was called Nuclear Energy and took the Iranian web sphere by storm. The clip features members of the Islamic republic navy on a warship singing “This is our absolute right, to have an armed Persian Gulf”.
The video, with clear support from the regime and its military apparatus, has shocked many Iranians, given that officials have snubbed rappers as “westernised” thugs at best, and fomenters of evil, at worst. Tataloo, a 32-year-old rapper with millions of followers on social media, had to produce his music underground until just a year ago. He was arrested in December 2013 for his alleged cooperation with foreign satellite stations. The military’s participation in a music video with an underground artist who flaunts his tattoos, long-hair, and piercings, appears to be a conundrum. But it’s not. It reinforces a strategy that the regime’s cultural producers have been advancing for the past decade. The Islamic republic’s cultural elite believe that it is of the utmost importance to garner the support of Iran’s youthful population, support they fear has been shaky since the street protests of the disputed 2009 presidential election.
Tataloo’s video is only the latest example of the ways in which the regime’s cultural centres have funded, supported, and promoted nationalism in lieu of Islamism to attract the youth, often appropriating banned popular culture in the process.
MTV viewers get a dose of Iranian politics Read more
With the US invasions of Afghanistan in 2001 and of Iraq in 2003, Iran found itself surrounded by military forces and categorised by president George W Bush as part of an “axis of evil”. Unsure of the Bush administration’s next move after the fall of Baghdad, and the meddling of American and Israeli intelligence services fomenting unrest among its ethnic minorities, the Islamic establishment knew it had to shore up public support.
Some in Iran’s pro-regime cultural centres felt they had a problem though: very few young people were interested in state-sponsored media. Media makers had spent the past 20 years creating films, television series, and books about the “Sacred Defence”, the 1980-88 Iran-Iraq war. But, from the 1990s onwards, ticket and book sales were dipping, according to their own accounts.
Iran's state TV tries 'soft power' to win hearts and minds Read more
For the most part, large numbers of young Iranians were not responding to films and books about the war and the past of the Islamic republic as “sacred”. If the United States were to attack Iran, some pro-regime filmmakers pondered, would young Iranians rise up to defend their nation? Fearing that the answer would be no, they took it upon themselves to tweak their historical narrative as one less reliant on religion and more rooted in nationalism.
“Frankly, we turned young people off with the propaganda we produced in the 1980s and 1990s,” one prominent pro-regime film producer, who served all eight years of the war at the front as a volunteer soldier and was later a high-ranking officer in the Revolutionary Guard, told me. “We have to learn to speak the language of youth and use their codes if we want them to like our work. In short, we have to entertain them.”
Observing an increasing trend in displays of nationalism in the general population, the regime’s cultural producers and the political elite sensed an opportunity. Noting a spike in pre-Islamic Persian names for babies and the ever-present farvahar pendant, the pre-Islamic Zoroastrian symbol, they turned to nationalism to connect with people. As international pressures against the country increased, including stifling sanctions and an intensified proxy war with Saudi Arabia, the sense of nationalism continued to rise in Iran. State media-makers began to highlight this sentiment in all their cultural productions, from museums to films and books - and now music.
Iran-Iraq conflict remembered through the lives of widows Read more
A prominent example is the newly built multi-million dollar Museum of the Sacred Defence in northern Tehran, funded by the office of Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, the city’s mayor and a former commander of the Revolutionary Guard, which opened in late 2012. It presents a different narrative of the Iran-Iraq war from the older, more traditional martyrs’ museums that dot every city and town in the country. The latter memorialise the war in purely religious terms, celebrating martyrs who died for “Imam Khomeini and Islam”, while the former takes great pains to frame it in national terms.
One of the main exhibits in the new museum displays large maps that demonstrate the expanse of the Persian empire ruling swaths of Asia over 3,000 years ago. It juxtaposes it against shrinking Iranian territory throughout the centuries. Iran’s size today is minuscule in comparison to the glorified empire painted on the wall. The message of the museum: past kingdoms gave away territory, thinking more about stuffing their own pockets than the well-being of the nation...until the Islamic republic came about and defended Iran’s borders, and by extension, its dignity as an ancient civilisation.
This museum, in line with the new strategy pursued by these cultural producers, moves away from celebrating martyrs to offering a narrative heavy on nationalism, dignity, and pride. “This youngest generation doesn’t understand our religious language,” a key filmmaker said at one meeting of pro-regime cultural producers where I was present. “We have to reframe our heroes for them - give them heroes they can relate to.”
Bullet-riddled cars and lush gardens: Iran's memorial to its 'nuclear martyrs' Read more
In this light, large amounts of state funds and funding from the Revolutionary Guards have gone to make films with “relatable” heroes who defended Iran as much as they professed an allegiance to the revolution. Most notable among them has been Ebrahim Hatamikia’s Che (2014), a film about Mostafa Chamran, the first defence minister after the revolution. The film casts Chamran not so much as a defender of Islam but as a man who fought to defend the oppressed, in essence as the Iranian Che Guevara young Iranians could admire.
Seeking larger audiences, filmmakers such as Masoud Dehnamaki, former leader of the militant conservative group Ansar-e Hezbollah, appropriates youth pop culture. In his trilogy, The Outcasts, Dehnamaki borrows liberally from banned Iranian pop music in depicting a group of social outcasts - drug addicts, thieves and general thugs - who are “redeemed” and turned into ideal citizens with the help of kind supporters of the regime.
Following the box office successes of Dehnamaki’s films, another prominent regime film producer began to seek out underground rock musicians to score music for new war films. “I don’t care that they’re banned and that some of our politicians think that they’re bad people,” he told me. “This is what young people listen to and we need to embrace that and have them work for us.”
Whether such efforts work or not is hard to assess. It is noteworthy, however, that a public funeral held last month for the recently discovered bodies of 175 military divers from the Iran-Iraq war drew unprecedented crowds of all social and political stripes, including those who would not usually attend state-sponsored events. They were celebrated as national heroes who defended Iran’s sovereignty.
“The divers were the bravest of us. They gave their lives for the independence of our country and the success of our revolution,” Mohsen Rezaei, who led the Revolutionary Guards in the war, said in an address at the ceremony. Tataloo’s music video unfolds within this context and uses familiar tropes seen throughout the past decade. The ultimate goal of all state-sponsored cultural work, and the vast funding required to produce it, is to keep the revolution alive.<|endoftext|>‘Relationships were a problem, as there aren’t many men who like smart women. I tried socialising in Mensa. I don’t any more. Being intelligent doesn’t make you empathic or honest’
I’m almost certainly smarter than you. That’s not a boast, it’s a fact. I’m smarter than most. I can think and make connections, and spot discrepancies, too.
I’m a member of Mensa and I know what my IQ is (164). I’ve never held a high-powered job, I don’t have a string of qualifications. I don’t do terribly clever things in my spare time, although I enjoy the odd pub quiz. And I don’t tell many people. If I do, then if I say or do something stupid, there is glee and sarcasm: “And you’re a member of Mensa?”
At primary school I was fast-tracked a couple of years, which seemed like fun, until I ended up as a 12-year-old brat in a class of cool teenagers, who ignored or bullied me. I left education after A-levels, because I was bored. I could do most school work without a thought, so when subjects came along that needed hard graft, I gave up (although I’ve graduated through the Open University since. They let you work at your own pace, which for me means fast).
Relationships were a problem, as there aren’t many men who like smart women, but I did find some. I’ve stayed gainfully employed, but I wouldn’t say I’ve done anything remarkable in any job.
I tried socialising in Mensa. I don’t any more. Being intelligent doesn’t make you empathic or honest. Mensa was full of intellectual point-scoring. It’s an organisation for the smart-ass rather than the wise.