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Craft Recordings continues their Original Jazz Classics relaunch with three superb new reissues, featuring Tony Bennett and Bill Evans together on The Tony Bennett/Bill Evans Album (1975, Fantasy); Tommy Flanagan and John Coltrane on The Cats (1957, New Jazz), and Yusef Lateef's Eastern Sounds (1961, Moodsville). The Tony Bennett/Bill Evans Album was the first of... Read More »

If you've followed along with some of my other articles, you may have picked up on how much I admire the recordings made by Bert van der Wolf of Northstar Recording Services (see HERE, HERE, HERE and HERE). Bert ranks very highly among a small group of highly talented independent recording and mastering engineers whom... Read More »

Is your system where you want it to be? How would you know? There are a number of "test records" for you to get a sense of your progress that feature pink noise, white noise, and other noises can help you do that. If your perspective arises from science or testing, those can be good... Read More »

Clifford Everett "Bud" Shank (1926-2009) was an American sax player and flautist regularly mentioned as being one of the preeminent exponents of the subgenre commonly known as West Coast jazz. Call it West Coast jazz, or even Cool jazz, if you will; it's freely associated with the likes of Gerry Mulligan, Chet Baker, Stan Getz,... Read More »

On what would have been his centennial, Craft Recordings has releasing the complete recordings of jazz guitarist extraordinaire Wes Montgomery's seminal 1962 live date, Full House. Which in its new guise, The Complete Full House Recordings, presents everything recorded on June 25, 1962 at the short-lived Berkeley, California coffee house and jazz hotspot, Tsubo. Compiling... Read More »

Craft Recordings has just released Hot House: The Complete Jazz At Massey Hall Recordings, which is an expanded reissue of the original album, The Quintet: Jazz At Massey Hall. The event took place on May 13, 1953, at Toronto, Canada's Massey Hall, and the gathering of jazz giants Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, Bud Powell, Charles... Read More »

Rhino Entertainment has released The Yes Album: Super Deluxe Edition (SDE) in a stunning new multi disc package that includes media choices to suit all listeners. The really unique package features an LP-sized gatefold that opens to reveal the same photograph of keyboardist Tony Kaye that's spread across both inner panels of the original album... Read More »

Having been in the audio world for going on 30 years, I've been keen to the rise and fall of many brands. Names like Classe, Apogee, Wadia, Thiel, and Sonic Frontiers, once ubiquitous mainstays, have long gone by the way of the Dodo. On the upswing, digital from DCS and electronics manufacturer Vitus' growth has... Read More »

When I receive a review component, I start with no tweaks and plunk it beside the component it is replacing. Trying for a tabula rasa, I just plug it in and listen like a cello string, what resonates, what does the component bring, what insight does it provide? Does it excite me or am I... Read More »

One of the hooks that grabbed me when I first fell for high end audio was that it totally aligned with my need to obsess over whatever brand of gizmo or gadget that caught my eye. After all, my entire childhood was defined by a series of brands I'd obsess about from the likes of... Read More »

I've written here and there about my preference for listening to 32-bit PCM versus 24-bit PCM files (either 352.8kHz or 384kHz). When there is no Pure DSD256 file available because the file has been post processed in PCM, these 32-bit files have become my preferred alternative for sonic enjoyment, even over the DSD256 files that... Read More »

In the 36 years that I have been reviewing high end audio components, I have steadfastly held the notion that when it comes to cables, most mechanical filtering usually results in deteriorated sound quality. My rationale; it is very difficult to eliminate or reduce undesired artifacts in the sound signal passing through a cable without... Read More »

I'm excited about this most recent group of Recent Finds, all released over this past year at NativeDSD. Included are a great new album from Carmen Gomes and Sound Liaison, a new Rembrandt Frerichs album on Just Listen Records, Anna Fedorova and Dana Zemtsov on Channel Classics, several albums from the Navis Classics label which... Read More »

This third incarnation of the Trumpet MC Phono Stage is a musical blockbuster. With an amazing purity combined with near reference definition, the listener will be transported to the event as close as the vinyl allows. Very flexible and versatile, the Trumpet heralds a breakthrough performance similar to my reference stages at a quarter of the cost... Read More »

It's been five years since I organized and posted a shootout on this title. Click HERE if you would like to read that article. After several requests from readers for a comparison, three of my audiophile buddies joined me for a wonderful two nights of fun. This kind of thing might sound a little over... Read More »

As far back as can I remember, organ music has brought me pleasure. Whether it's the sound of a small pipe organ in a small church, an electronic organ, the huge pipe organ at UCLA's Royce Hall accompanying an orchestra, or a theater organ with huge pipes, bells, and percussion, I love the way organ... Read More »

Ten-plus years have passed since I reviewed Audio-Technica's AT150MLx cartridge (HERE), a flagship moving magnet model without the flagship price: just $485 at the time. It featured a gold-plated boron cantilever tipped with a MicroLine stylus, a heavy metal body, MuMetal shielding between the channels and a ceramic mounting base to combat resonance. It was... Read More »

DVOŘÁK, Symphony 6; Husitská Overture. Milwaukee Symphony/Zdeněk Mácal. Koss Classics KC-1001.  TT: 57.59 I was looking forward to hearing this, finally. I'd always been pleased by the sound of Koss headphones in various price ranges—though you'd not have mistaken them for Grado or Sennheiser—and I was anticipating engineering of comparably high, possibly audiophile quality. So Husitská, the... Read More »

Digital playback technology is now commonly viewed as a mature field, where groundbreaking discoveries have already occurred, and the consumer can expect a higher level of performance, more features, and a lower price tag as the industry moves forward. After all, the first digital PCM recording was created in 1971 by NHK, and Sony and... Read More »