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Late last year, I had a tremendous review opportunity that focused on ProJect's The Classic turntable; unbeknownst to me, the review unit arrived as the heavily upgraded Superpack SB edition. Which, along with electronic speed control and other really nice goodies thrown in, also came with a Sumiko Blue Point No. 2 cartridge attached to... Read More »

Muddy Waters was born on April 4, 1913 and died on April 30, 1983. The 35th anniversary of his passing has recently come and gone. For this occasion, I find no better reason to introduce to you a dissection of one of the greatest blues albums ever recorded, entitled Folk Singer. Before we begin, please... Read More »

You may have noticed a trend over the years in my response to high-end audio shows. I've gravitated more and more to photographs not of products, but of people. Less and less of audio porn; more and more of the folks who make up the slightly mad world of fine audio. There are plenty of... Read More »

Saturday mornings I'm at the Greenmarket early and later I make my way over to Academy Records, my favorite music retailer. While perusing the bins recently, I stumbled upon Jazz Ballets from Broadway, an early stereo LP from 1958 (Warner Bros BS 1240). The title won't ring a bell for many people, but it was... Read More »

Making the simple complicated is commonplace. Making the complicated simple, awesomely simple, that's creativity. - Charles Mingus Years ago my friend, the British guitarist Robert Fripp (of King Crimson renown), found the time for a brief assignation at a Greenwich Village bistro. Over lunch, when I inquired as to how his visit to Manhattan was... Read More »

"May you live in interesting times." Legend has it that in ancient China this was a curse to be invoked against one's enemies to deprive them of a calm, simple life. The modern audiophile equivalent was the April 2, 2018 press release from Oppo's audio/video division announcing cessation of production of existing products and closing... Read More »

Fergus Henderson—the chef who's the reason the hip restaurant around the corner from you serves bone marrow, sweetbreads, and other animal bits—opens his seminal cookbook Nose to Tail Eating: A Kind of British Cooking, with a terse description of lunch at Sweetings. When you order the smoked eel at the bar of this London seafood... Read More »

The world of fine audio was rocked by the news of David Wilson's passing. In this memoriam, our good friend John Marks, the editor of The Tannhauser Gate, reflects on David's contributions to the industry, and how he helped to set the foundations for modern high-end audio.  I echo John's prayer for his eternal rest and... Read More »

ESS 422H Heil AMT/Moving Coil Hybrid Headphones: New Current Production Back in February when I reviewed these brand new headphones with their amazing drive system, they did not look like the current cans on the shelf today. They were pre-production and were supposed to be exactly like they are now in every musical parameter. Actually,... Read More »

As I began listening to the Gingko ARCHs the many audio tweaks I've tried over the years ran through my mind. The more I thought about it virtually every system I've heard, no matter price or size, included some sort of accessory I would—at least loosely—label as a tweak, an accessory that can improve the... Read More »

German loudspeaker manufacturer Audio Physic has a long and storied history of innovation. From the employment of side-mounted woofers and narrow baffles featured throughout its loudspeaker lines, to coaxial, string-suspended midrange / tweeter drivers utilized in the legacy Kronos and Caldera II models, and even to the promotion of radical nearfield-based placement recommendations, Audio Physic... Read More »

I've been using JPLAY as my go-to computer-based music player/streamer for the last couple of years—it's without a doubt the very best bang-for-your-buck improvement for use with any PC music playback system. In my review of the Sonore microRendu last year, I found that music via my PC with JPLAY came darn close to matching... Read More »

This will be the first of another sporadically updated series I hope to do, maybe annually or maybe more often, about helping people set up their first real stereo system. I'll help them through the process of deciding what they hope to accomplish (hopefully wanting to listen to their favorite music at home and have... Read More »

I think of Shunyata Research as an investigative research center for signal and power transmission. And I suspect its principal scientist, Caelin Gabriel, has a lot of fun digging into how electricity works, down to the quantum level. After all, Gabriel spent his early career with the NSA, designing military systems to acquire extremely low-level... Read More »

Before our eyes, slowly a hierarchy of devices used to play audio files begins take a shape. For a long, too long time, there was no clarity in this matter and we had to wade through various offers, each of which seemed to be the "right one", that its producer declared to be "the best",... Read More »

I told a knowledgeable audio friend that I was writing about Q Acoustics speakers, and he didn't know the brand, so he looked it up. He saw online that the 3050 floorstanders I was to review cost $700. "This is bargain-basement stuff," he said. "Why is Positive Feedback getting you to review them?" Why do... Read More »

Two gents walk into a bar… So the joke generally begins. Unlike a joke, however musing, what comes next is nothing short of a blockbuster HiFi story worth telling and then some. The two gents in question, Howard Sosna, and Joe Kubala, went on to form what is otherwise known as Kubala-Sosna (or "KS" for... Read More »

So, months, days and year (no "s") into my sojourn with the Pear Audio Blue Little John (system par excellence), I've hit critical mass. I'm taken, enamored, sold-on, dedicated, committed to and otherwise fully engaged with this turntable life. Without spending another three-thousand-plus words telling you all the ways I'm madly in love with the... Read More »

Ye Olde Editor, in medias res… (photograph by John Robinson) No, this is not a major review. It is more of a retrospective and reflection on what I've heard in the upgrade of our LampizatOr Golden Gate DSD DAC from its original design to its new Golden Gate 2 version. As it turns out, that upgrade... Read More »