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Norman Varney of AV RoomService Ltd. has joined Positive Feedback as a Senior Technical Editor as of Issue 113. His expertise in his field of audio acoustics and experience in the field makes him a helpful voice in our creative community for the audio arts. As has been our wont from the beginning of PF,... Read More »

An electric bass sets the rhythm and is instantly recognizable as the snap of a snare drum and the splash of a single cymbal resonates in the background. The lights are turned down in my listening room and Stevie Nicks voice is dark, haunting, and otherworldly. Though this is a classic song, the lyrics remain... Read More »

Over the past four years, I've found myself regularly returning to recordings by the Spanish string quartet, Cuarteto Quiroga. Their performances are refined, beautifully played, nuanced in interpretation, and played with total conviction. They recently released their sixth album for Cobra Records, Und es Ward Licht! (below), and it's a stunner. It's well past time... Read More »

The SON also Rises The name Wolf von Langa (WVL) is known in Germany as a manufacturer of high-end audio speakers. Unless you are up on the European speaker scene, the brand may be new to you. Here's a little background about Herr von Langa, the man: After making his very first speaker at age... Read More »

Patricia Barber, Clique!. HQ180 33.3 LP: $39.99 MSRP. Patricia Barber patriciabarber.com. Impex Records impexrecords.com Patricia Barber's Clique! was released to great fanfare by Impex Records in August, 2021. I had the good fortune to review the DXD (Digital eXtreme Definition) 32-bit/352.8kHz digital download files of the album at that time, and you can read my review... Read More »

With this article, Positive Feedback continues its content-sharing relationship with Enjoy the Music where Maurice Jefferies visits the home of Greg Weaver, also known as the Audio Analyst Dr. David W. Robinson, Editor-in-Chief The New Apartment Lounge's Maurice Jeffries visits the Audio Analyst at home for the third time. Report By Maurice Jeffries What would we do without... Read More »

Beware! Wildly broad generalizations coming below...  Interesting conversations get started over morning cappuccinos in our household. Today, the discussion was about files from the HDTT (High Definition Tape Transfer) catalog versus modern recordings from the NativeDSD catalog. Ann opined that, overall, she found the NativeDSD files in our library were the files to which she... Read More »

The Absence of the Presence. Happy Valley, OR, 2022. Photograph and image processing by David W. Robinson. About my Brutus Awards… For years I have reiterated what our PF Brutus Awards represent. This is especially for the benefit of new readers who are unfamiliar with what we have in mind for this special recognition. Another... Read More »

I love guitarists, and I own a lot of LPs by guitarists. Although I file the jazz guitarists, like Barney Kessell, Johnny Smith, and Wes Montgomery, alphabetically, many guitarists, regardless of genre, are also found in my miscellaneous guitarist section. That's where the obscure guitarists and multi-artist collections of guitar music are found. One obscure... Read More »

The AT-ART20 lists for $2900 and resides as the second most expensive cartridge in the ART series cartridge line. The AT-ART20 is only topped by the $4999 AT-ART1000. The AT-ART20 magnetic circuit was based on the AT-ART9XI, but the AT-ART20 has a thicker front yoke, which improves the flux density and increases the output by... Read More »

High Definition Tape Transfer has been on quite a roll in 2022 with a strong schedule of new releases. Their jazz releases in 2022 have been phenomenal and, hopefully, merited your attention. But, the classical albums they've reissued have been similarly outstanding, including performances in the top echelons of the catalog such as the Mercury... Read More »

Remastering is a technique applied to improve sound quality. It can be done in digital or analog domain. There are few audio manufacturers who also release their own recordings. One of them, and probably the most interesting, is the Japanese Esoteric, which remasters classical music from the world's best labels. Esoteric is a brand owned... Read More »

One of the few Polish audio brands that conquered global markets, highly acclaimed among both users and reviewers around the world, J. Sikora, after several years of consolidating its market position, prepared premiere products for the last Audio Video Show in Warsaw—new, improved versions of their fantastic tonearms. For this test, we received the first... Read More »

Room correction is catching on in the two channel world. Some will read this first sentence and think that I have lost my mind, some will say "of course," and others will say "really, I had no idea." Room correction is easily one of the most debated topics by audiophiles, and ranks up there with... Read More »

Enid Lumley, the long-ago first female reviewer for The Absolute Sound, was possibly a little over the top, but at least a major portion of her observations were dead on. She was right, for example, in thinking that lifting speaker cables off the floor (she ran them over short pieces of two-by-four) would improve the... Read More »

A Breakthrough Amplifier Design A pair of the Zesto Audio Eros 500 Select Monoblock Amps (image courtesy of Zesto Audio) The more I immerse myself in this hobby since I retired from the entertainment industry in 2008, the more certain I have become that the amplifier is the most important and telling piece of equipment in... Read More »

I've written before about the recordings of pianist Hannes Minnaar (see HERE and HERE). I'm writing now to share with you a new solo piano recording of the Shostakovich 24 Preludes (a marvel), an earlier recording of piano works inspired by Bach, and a scrumptious complete cycle of the Beethoven Piano Concertos with Jan Willem... Read More »

In this superb release from Eudora Records, the Protean Quartet deliver stylish performances of the last of the Haydn's Russian Quartets, the first of Beethoven’s String Quartets, op. 18 no.1 (but already a masterpiece), and the first recording of Juan Pedro Almeida Mota’s String Quartet op. 7 no. 1. Performed on period instruments, with historically... Read More »

It used to be that when traveling out of state, I would tell people I was from Chicago. But in reality, it couldn't be further from the truth. I live in a suburb more than an hour north of Chicago and largely avoid going into the city. Lately, I have begun to be more truthful,... Read More »