Recondite is a master of smooth grooves. 2013's Hinterland was/is a superb compilation of intelligent electronic music that's ideal for just chillin' and listening, or thumpin' the bass in your whip on the way to the city lookin' for some debauchery. Recondites' sound is now. And believe me, I know that sentence sucks. It's pretentious,... Read More »
Phoenix in Flight. Orchestra: Slovak Radio Symphony Orchestra. Conductor: Kirk Trevor. Clarinetist: Richard Stoltzman. Navona Records CD NV801 This month seemed as though many of the releases I received were featuring very pleasant beautiful music and a great deal of it is on the first listed recording by Navona records. These are not the most... Read More »
Schubert, Winterreise. Matthias Goerne, baritone. Christoph Eschenbach, piano. Schubert Edition, No. 9. Harmonia Mundi. HMC 902107. Schubert's Winterreise can bring to mind Haydn's Seven Last Words (for string quarter or chamber orchestra), another hour plus long work focussing essentially on one mood, desolation. The challenge is how to sustain musical interest for that long without... Read More »
Beginning at the end of 2003, PF established its first annual awards for fine audio. The Brutus Award was established for the best that Dave Clark and I had heard in our own listening rooms during that year. You can think of it as our equivalent of an "Editors' Choice" award. The Gizmo Award, on... Read More »
Some records, I find, are best described as a sonic journey, a whole, rather than dissecting each track (though, admittedly, I'll be doing some of that), as Caribous' Our Love rarely got stopped while playing on any system I cranked it on! Now, the challenge here, is going to be describing the wonderful variety in... Read More »
David Roth - Will You Come Home Stockfisch SFR 357.8079.1, 2 x 180 g 45 rpm LP The tradition of Stockfisch LP releases goes back to the 1990s. On a 2006 compilation album, the record label claims that vinyl has been its passion for 14 years. Sara K.'s 2003 album Water Falls and a compilation... Read More »
Perla Barocca. Early Italian Masterpieces. Rachel Podger, violin. Harpsichord, organ, and therobo accompaniment. Channel Classics. CCSA 36014. CD/SACD. After the rich, close harmonies of the renaissance and before the fastidious counterpoint of the baroque, there was...early baroque? I write often in this column about the fascinations of transitions in the arts. We glibly describe them... Read More »
One of the fastest growing distributors in Canada is Charisma Audio. Owner Bernard Li always puts on a good show and this time was no exception. This time he collaborated with Trevor Wong of Update TV and Stereo for his TAVES Exhibit. The new products on display in this room included two turntables, the Well... Read More »
When the Beatles' digital remasters came out a few years ago on CD (and the higher-resolution 24-bit FLACs loaded onto the USB Apple version), a whole lot of people hoped for a full-blown analogue remastering for release on LP, but alas, it was not to be. When the stereo LPs finally arrived about a year... Read More »
Tis the season for TAVES and yet again, it provided a reason for celebrating sonic excellence. This is the one high-end audio show that I truly enjoy covering for many reasons. It is consistently well organized, personifies Canadian friendliness and in terms of size, number of exhibitors and visitors, it is a veritable Goldilocks. Some... Read More »
Enjoy the Music.TV's interview with David W. Robinson of Positive Feedback magazine and singer/musician/songwriter David Elias. Hosted by Steven R. Rochlin, we discuss creating and recording music, early Internet mp3.com and other services plus the places to buy modern DSD files today. As always, in the end what really matters is that you.... enjoy the music !
As many of you know—and as the title reference to "The Acoustic Revive Chronicles" suggests—over the years I've written quite a lot about the innovative Acoustic Revive audio accessories designed by the brilliant Mr. Ken Ishiguro in Isesaki, Japan. In fact, I've spent more time writing about Mr. Ken's Acoustic Revive accessories than I have... Read More »
"Oh help me, please doctor, I'm damaged There's a pain where there once was a heart It's sleepin, it's a beatin' Can't ya please tear it out, and preserve it Right there in that jar?" —"Dear Doctor" by The Rolling Stones So, first, I wanted apologize for jamming two sets of commentaries, the latter of... Read More »
I love and appreciate tube based audio gear and own sixteen pieces of tube gear between my two reference systems. Without a thorough knowledge of tube types and their substitution possibilities, you may be over-paying for your new or NOS tubes you employ, or just pick the wrong ones. This data is based on my... Read More »
"The digital music business has been a war of attrition that nobody seems to be winning," said David Goldberg, the former head of Yahoo music. "The CD is still disappearing, and nothing is replacing it in entirety as a revenue generator." Its no mystery that the wiring of our world has brought enormous changes in... Read More »
Analog Pearls, Volume 1 Cover Stockfisch Enters the Remastered SACD/DSD Market Some of our readers are familiar with Stockfisch Records. It's a small independent record label based in Germany that was initially known for their recordings of folk music starting in the mid 1970's. More recently, they have gained attention for their Super Audio CD... Read More »
The First Blueport "Audio Transcendence" Award (With a response by Marshall Nack) What does it mean that the onset of Global Warming coincides with the arrival of a theoretical Golden Age of audiophile possibilities? I'll think about that awhile as the emergence of DSD (direct stream digital), after a quarter-century languishing in audio twilight with... Read More »
Talking About Power Distributors (With a response by Jim Merod) Every time I'd get in a new power product, Joe Kubala would come over to check it out. And always, after assessing it, the same question lingered in the air: when—not if—would we see a Kubala-Sosna Power Distributor? During the five years it took to... Read More »
The New Lampizator Generation V DSD DAC (Photo: Brian Moura) In May I attended The Show in Newport Beach with a list of new products I wanted to hear. Near the top of that list were the widely applauded, tube-based Digital to Analog Converters from Lampizator in Europe. They had captured the attention—and dollars—of many... Read More »
SCHUMANN: Kerner Lieder, Op. 35; Lenau Lieder und Requiem, Op. 90; Liederkreis, Op. 39. Darren Chase, baritone; Sergey Schepkin, piano. Arabesque Recordings Z6852 (download only). TT: 79.12. Darren Chase's Schumann program has a great deal to offer. The baritone has a firm, compact voice that takes on a brighter colour as it ascends. The head... Read More »
I discovered the high end in 1978. But I seemed to have a natural inclination towards high-quality experience. My father was a largely self-trained EE, who was hired at RCA Camden as his first job in the US in 1951. He built our hi-fi systems at home including what I recall as the first stereo... Read More »
"No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it's not the same river and he's not the same man." – Heraclitus That's how I feel about most things in life; I appreciate the subtle differences and I don't like to experience the exact same things over and over. While I certainly have my... Read More »
A golden age only happens in retrospect: By the time you realize you're in one, you ain't. Hell, most of us have a hard enough time deciding the winners of the past (ever been stuck in a Linn Sondek LP12 vs Micro Seki DDX-1000 debate?) so speculating on Audio futures is always a dicey proposition.... Read More »
Bingo! Using the Astell&Kern AK 240 as a server in your main system just got super easy with the delightful AK Remote, $49.95. Using Bluetooth as the connection system, no need to aim your remote in any direction; just push the buttons and away you go from anywhere in the room. The 1.5 inch by... Read More »
John Harbison, String Trio; Four Songs of Solitude [for solo violin]; Songs Americans Love to Sing [flute, clarinet, violin, cello, and piano]. Members of Camerata Pacifica. Harmonia Mundi HMC 907619. Much in the spirit of Bach's Musical Offering, American composer John Harbison's (1938) String Trio (2013) does not give itself up easily. It shares the... Read More »
I've just spent a little time reading posts—both the originals and the comments on them—in some of the more than fifty audiophile groups that I know of on the internet. I'm sure there must actually be many more than just half a hundred of such groups, but from what I've seen, fifty is more than... Read More »
The weight of expectations must be huge for Thom Yorke. I mean, not only is he the front-man for Radiohead, but he's got deep commitments musically in a couple of different areas at once. His side projects: The freshmen solo LP Eraser, has garnered critical acclaim world-wide. Atoms for Peace; his band with Red Hot... Read More »
Jazz pianists are the archivists and barometric interpreters of the Great American songbook, a repository of melodic brilliance that legendary pianist Tommy Flanagan frequently called attention to. One Friday night @ ELARIO'S jazz club atop the Summer House Inn in La Jolla, playing to a packed room, Tommy noted that not all jazz trios or... Read More »
The turntable is a relatively simple mechanical design. Its task is to spin the platter with a vinyl disc in an appropriate manner, i.e. at a predetermined speed. The rotational speed should be perfectly stable over time and no external disturbances, including vibration and noise, should be transferred to the platter. In the real world,... Read More »
A Portrait of Michael Mercer: THE Show, Newport Beach, CA, 2013 I have to admit, it felt great to laugh out-loud while reading Dr. D's (as I call him) farewell essay on Harry Pearson. It was also refreshing; as he stated, because Dr. D never worked for Harry. He was able to take a more... Read More »
I admit it; I can be late to the party. The vast majority of gear I have written about is not new to serious audio buffs and some has had much previous press. There are two broad causes for this: One: I am not "initials" famous. You can't utter "gb" and watch as everyone turns... Read More »
The movement of reference-grade reference tapes to DSD for downloading continues apace. One of the industry leaders in this regard is High Definition Tape Transfers. Bob Witrak at HDTT, who had been working previously in high-resolution PCM, is setting a very high bar for both the quality and quantity of his DSD downloads. If you... Read More »
It was with great pleasure that I unpacked the newest isolation board from Janusz Rogoz, which is marked as the 3RP1/BBS. Large and heavy, employing the BBS (Balancing Board System) and nicely done, it is an idea developed by the business owner for quite some time now. I perfectly remember my first contact with the... Read More »
Harry Pearson, a characteristic pose. RMAF 2009, Denver, CO With the death of Harry Pearson, Michael Mercer and I talked and decided that we would put our thoughts about his passing together in a pair of brief reflections, and publish them together. Others have already done so, and will probably continue to do so, at... Read More »
Harry Pearson was an extraordinary man. He was always curious, and could turn an acidic, negative situation into fine wine and smiles with a quick-witted retort to a verbal challenge anytime. (Well, except after imbibing too many chocolate martinis). He loved knowledge, and was always reading something in the morning hours following his daily sunrise-walk.... Read More »
The Rolling Stones, Sam Cooke & The Animals in DSD Just over a year ago, Chad Kassem at Acoustic Sounds announced the launch of Super HiRez, a new downloads site that would bring out major artist albums in Direct Stream Digital (DSD) in response to many requests from music fans and audiophiles. Since that time,... Read More »
When I think about Phasemation I see a picture in front of my eyes of an older gentleman, the CEO of this company, standing next to the TechDAS Air Force One turntable gently lowering stylus to the groove. That's a picture, to be exact, from a Stereo Sound magazine, and since the size of that... Read More »
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