WHY CDS ACTUALLY SOUND BETTER THAN VINYL

James Russell’s mother told him that his first invention was the “automated battleship” that he built when he was six. By the time he was thirteen, he was fixing toasters, irons and fans at a local appliance store in his home town outside Seattle. The summer before he left for college, he was hired to set up a radio station, transmitter and all — something he’d never done before. He’d never even seen an antenna that big.“That’s why I am an inventor,” says Russell, now 83. “I can envision how it should be.”

At Portland’s Reed College, Russell studied physics and built his first turntable. Unsatisfied with the standard needles of the day, he used cactus needles, which he sharpened with sandpaper, to play the first LP he purchased: a recording of Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov’sScheherazade. Even so, with his sharp ears, he could hear the quality of his LPs disintegrate after the tenth or twelfth spin.

After he graduated, in 1953, Russell took a job in the research laboratories at Washington state’s Hanford Works, the nuclear reservation that produced the plutonium used in the atomic bomb dropped on Nagasaki. Longtimeclassical-music fans, Russell and his wife, Barbara, were subscribers to the Seattle Opera, even though it meant a 400-mile round-trip drive for each performance.

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