9780593555248
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The Perfect Sound audiobook

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The Perfect Sound Audiobook Summary

A poet’s audio obsession, from collecting his earliest vinyl to his quest for the ideal vacuum tubes. A captivating book that “ingeniously mixes personal memoir with cultural history and offers us an indispensable guide for the search of acoustic truth” (Yunte Huang, author of Charlie Chan).

Garrett Hongo’s passion for audio dates back to the Empire 398 turntable his father paired with a Dynakit tube amplifier in their modest tract home in Los Angeles in the early 1960s. But his adult quest begins in the CD-changer era, as he seeks out speakers and amps both powerful and refined enough to honor the top notes of the greatest opera sopranos. In recounting this search, he describes a journey of identity where meaning, fulfillment, and even liberation were often most available to him through music and its astonishingly varied delivery systems.
 
Hongo writes about the sound of surf being his first music as a kid in Hawai‘i, about doo-wop and soul reaching out to him while growing up among Black and Asian classmates in L.A., about Rilke and Joni Mitchell as the twin poets of his adolescence, and about feeling the pulse of John Coltrane’s jazz and the rhythmic chords of Billy Joel’s piano from his car radio while driving the freeways as a young man trying to become a poet.
 
Journeying further, he visits devoted collectors of decades-old audio gear as well as designers of the latest tube equipment, listens to sublime arias performed at La Scala, hears a ghostly lute at the grave of English Romantic poet John Keats in Rome, drinks in wisdom from blues musicians and a diversity of poetic elders while turning his ear toward the memory-rich strains of the music that has shaped him: Hawaiian steel guitar and canefield songs; Bach and the Band; Mingus, Puccini, and Duke Ellington. And in the decades-long process of perfecting his stereo setup, Hongo also discovers his own now-celebrated poetic voice.

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The Perfect Sound Audiobook Narrator

Kaleo Griffith is the narrator of The Perfect Sound audiobook that was written by Garrett Hongo

About the Author(s) of The Perfect Sound

Garrett Hongo is the author of The Perfect Sound

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The Perfect Sound Full Details

Narrator Kaleo Griffith
Length 11 hours 12 minutes
Author Garrett Hongo
Category
Publisher Penguin Random House Audio Publishing Group
Release date April 30, 2024
ISBN 9780593555248

Subjects

The publisher of the The Perfect Sound is Penguin Random House Audio Publishing Group. includes the following subjects: pop culture, audio, biographies and memoirs, summer reads, summer books for women, retirement gift, retirement books, gifts for dad, fathers day gifts, fathers day book, father's day, fathers day, dad book, books for teachers, beach reads, music books, autobiographies, biographies, opera, new books, noise, poetry, memoirs, Neil Young, audiophile, musician gifts, race, japan, Hawaii, gifts for travelers, travel books, geek gifts, Technology, culture, gifts for men, Autobiography, Biography, music, memoir, asian american, biography, Biography & Autobiography, Cultural Heritage, Music, Recording & Reproduction, Technology & Engineering, Acoustics & Sound The BISAC Subject Code is Biography & Autobiography, Cultural Heritage

Additional info

The publisher of the The Perfect Sound is Penguin Random House Audio Publishing Group. The imprint is Random House Audio. It is supplied by Penguin Random House Audio Publishing Group. The ISBN-13 is 9780593555248.

Global Availability

This book is only available in the United States.

Frequently asked questions

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