James Matheson: A major new release from Yarlung Records! Todd Rosenberg photography Esa-Pekka Salonen conducts the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, Baird Dodge, violin Color Field Quartet (members of CSO and Chicago Lyric Opera orchestra) soprano Laura Strickling & pianist Thomas Sauer Executive Producers: J and Helen Schlichting Jim Matheson, Baird Dodge, Esa-Pekka Salonen and the Chicago... Read More »
In this continuation of his assessment of the artistry of Sergey Schepkin, John Marks spends a few minutes with him discussing how his ongoing maturity as a performer has affected and deepened his understanding of Bach over the years. Every musician must decide the point at which it's worth recording a new set of performances... Read More »
I love experiencing great sounding music. It's my favorite drug. The high is everlasting, and the withdrawals are nothing compared to chemicals flowing through my bloodstream. When the music stops, when I have to take a break from it (maybe I'm not in my car, or in my room, and my attention is required elsewhere, and music is not a welcome accompaniment during that time period) the great thing is I don't suffer physical withdrawals like I did when I was a dope-fiend ("dope" as in heroin, smack, or Oxycontin). Sure, I've messed with all sorts of drugs, and I don't wanna get too deeply into that here, as I probably said too much already! But music is the only one that I can return to every-time without blowing up the world around me! Now, when I say music is my favorite drug, I mean it's my favorite natural stimulant. Now, there are dangers when experimenting with any drug, natural or chemical, and music is like a narcotic for my soul. And I love narcotics! So, believe me when I say that music literally saved my life more than once.
A couple of years ago (wow, make that like 3 years and you can read it HERE) I had the pleasure of reviewing the Vandersteen Audio Quatro Wood loudspeakers here in our home. Yeah, we both fell head over heels for the speakers with the review being as positive as one could ever expect. Shortcomings?... Read More »
Music technology specialist MQA (Master Quality Authenticated) appoints Mike Jbara as CEO MQA, the music technology company founded by Bob Stuart, announced today that it has hired music executive Mike Jbara as CEO. In addition to day-to-day leadership responsibility, Jbara will sit on the Board of MQA Ltd. Bob Stuart, Chairman of MQA said: “We... Read More »
The Avalanches, Wildflower Astralwerks 2547900289 $19.99 for the two LP set "Is that serious music?" I remember my first wife asking me that question back in 1989 when I brought home Pixies' Doolittle and gave it an inaugural spin. I'd gotten all the way to the eighth song on the album, "Mr. Grieves," to the part where... Read More »
We had a great time at Lone Star Audio Fest 2016. From my vantage point inside the event as an exhibitor and listener from Thursday afternoon through Sunday evening LSAF 2016 was once again any audiophile's candy store. The first paragraphs of my Positive Feedback report on LSAF 2015 (HERE) details the history of this... Read More »
The Swiss company Goldmund has been present in Asia for more than three decades. The high demand for Goldmund products and the brand excellent reputation on this market are easily explained by the first strategic plan of the company. Issued in 1982, at a time when most audio brands were trying to conquer the USA,... Read More »
In this week's cross-published installment of "Vault Treasures" from his site, The Tannhauser Gate (http://www.thetannhausergate.com), John Marks shifts his attention to one of the lesser-known (today) singers of the 1950s, Julie London. Her story is a Hollywood-classic "I was discovered while doing something pretty mundane, and then I became a star." But her natural singing ability, unschooled... Read More »
David W. Robinson, with John Tucker Winston Ma at his garden: A portrait. Bellevue, WA, 2001. There seem to be a number of passings in 2016 already. Sure, that's always true, statistically. But this has already been a bad year for notable music figures dying…David Bowie, Prince, Natalie Cole, Glenn Frey, John Berry, Merle Haggard,... Read More »
Introduction: Interviews to listen to... For the English version of the second and third parts of the review on the Chord DAVE, we have come up with something new: You can listen to Rob Watts' comments on the individual pages of his presentation, and Mr. Roland Dietl's and my intermediate questions. Roland Dietl (left) and... Read More »
The SI-300.2d integrated amplifier is yet another milestone as Cary Audio forges deeper into the new era of sought after premium audio systems. Cary Audio is highly regarded for the rich, warm, yet detailed sound of our components. This includes both analog components and digital components, as we have become a reference standard in both.... Read More »
A Very Unique Power Amplifier First Watt's new F7 power amplifier (MSRP: $3,000) is a very unique power amplifier; a two-stage push-pull JFET (input)/MOSFET (output) topology with fewer parts than any First Watt amplifier to date. The new F7 has been created as an updated version of the earlier F5 amplifier. Conceived in 2007, the F5 was... Read More »
It's refreshing not to have to cringe at a "new" singer's technical flaws, as I find myself doing more and more. Klaus Florian Vogt, in a program is mostly drawn from the Heldentenor (heroic tenor) repertoire, offers a clear, compact tone, a reliable legato, and some interpretive smarts. Vogt's actual instrument sounds, as recorded, more... Read More »
This week, John Marks touches on one of the truly great popular singers of the 20th Century, Frank Sinatra. Where Are You? comes to us from the later 1950s, and shows Sinatra maturing in his mastery. It also shows us just how great the recording arts had already progressed by this time. With his "Vault Treasures"... Read More »
Isolates, improves sound, overcomes distance restrictions PS Audio is proud to introduce LANRover, the digital audio equivalent of our Power Plant products. Just as Power Plants isolate, clean, and regenerate AC, LANRover galvanically isolates a computer or server from the DAC, buffers and retimes packets of audio data, and allows the use of a LAN, rendering... Read More »
"The more things change, the more they remain the same." - Jean-Baptiste Alphonse Karr What a load of crap! Sometimes, when things change, they seriously change, and things are nowhere nearly the same as they were! What I'm referring to here is my personal situation, where, in the space of a couple of months, we bought... Read More »
The Sound Organisation is excited to announce the Rega Planar 2 Turntable, shipping now! The result of over two years of R & D, Rega engineers along with a skilled staff hand assembling, proudly release the Planar 2 on the heels of the recently announced Planar 3. The Planar 2 features a new tonearm, platter,... Read More »
Award-winning DACs are improved yet again--at no cost PS Audio's DirectStream DAC has, in the last two years, won just about every Product of the Year award that there is to win in the world of audio. Our DirectStream Junior (DSJ) offers the DirectStream DNA at a lower price-point, while including our Bridge II network card... Read More »
In which our hero meditates… Some plaudits where plaudits are due I have several items that have been accumulating in my notebook for a couple of months now. One was a notion for a full review that didn't need to be done, since another PF reviewer (Marshall Nack) did the main lifting; the others were candidates for... Read More »
For this week's "New Music" selection, John Marks shares with us Sergey Schepkin's Bach: The Six Partitas. I agree completely with John when he writes "Familiarity with at least some of Bach's masterworks is a matter of core Cultural Literacy..." Amen! Think of it as a matter of "cultural critical mass"...the truly worthy things that you... Read More »
"Carmine said one boy, here are two!" – Larry London, The Freshman I'm not sure why I started hearing the late Maximillian Schell's heavily accented voice in my head the first time I listened to Jane Ira Bloom's new CD, Early Americans. I suspect it had something to do with reviewing Todd Hunter's Eat, Drink,... Read More »
So if you have been following my ramblings over the years (of which I tend to ramble—hence the title of my column) it is obvious that one of my goals with our system is to minimize noise. Not my music per se, since much of it is noise, but the noise that rides in the... Read More »
For John Marks' initial cross-publication to Positive Feedback of his Tuesday offerings on great recordings from The Tannhauser Gate (http://www.thetannhausergate.com), we offer the first of his columns: Clifford Brown with Strings. As usual, John enriches our lives with recorded gems that we should all be aware of...and this time is no exception. Read on! Dr. David W. Robinson... Read More »
Standing behind him, Michaelis saw with a shock that he was looking at the eyes of Doctor T. J. Eckleburg, which had just emerged, pale and enormous, from the dissolving night. "God sees everything," repeated Wilson. "That's an advertisement," Michaelis assured him - Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby They look like eyeballs to me. At first, they... Read More »
This interview originally ran in 2916, but deserves another read. Note: Robert Schryer left PF to write for Stereophile. DeVore Fidelity: Why Getting the Best Sound is all About Balance, or: "C'mon, John. Just once for the camera—Cheeeeese!" "I began obsessing about hi-fi more than 40 years ago. I also love station-wagons with manual... Read More »
Japanese label releases select albums in MQA for easy download UNAMAS, the Japanese hi-res music label run by award-winning recording engineer, Mick Sawaguchi, has selected ten albums from their catalogue for encoding in MQA. The recordings, ranging from Schubert’s “Death and the Maiden” performed by the Unamas String Quintet, to Hiroshi Fukamizu’s “Everything for Drums”,... Read More »
Portland, OR - July 11, 2016 – We’re happy to announce the launch of our Online Storehttp://www.avoptions.com/store All our AC related products are now available for purchase online by USA and Canadiancustomers. Our other sections (Phono products - Speaker and Interconnect cables and NaimAudio accessories) will be launching in the coming months. To provide support... Read More »
OccupyHifi readers know it's been a trying year for me. Ok, that's puttin' it rather mildly. Pardon my French, but it's been a clusterfuck of a year: Divorce after 20-yrs of partnership (as if that isn't difficult enough) while I was trying to walk-through many years of shared memories with my former partner, dodging the shrapnel that break-up left all over the place, surrounding its vast blast radius; I ended-up hearin' about all sorts of rumors and innuendo making their rounds through-out the high-end and personal audio communities .
Delmoni & Martorella: Chopin/Milstein One of the categories of music reviewing and commentary that John Marks brings to Positive Feedback from The Tannhauser Gate is that of music videos. With the global explosion of online videos driven by YouTube, music lovers and audiophiles have been given a great opportunity to see as well as hear great performances, and... Read More »
Many PF readers will be as surprised by finding this as I was. It's properly academic (in the more pleasant sense of the word), but also very au courant with political and cultural thinking and teaching in American universities. For whatever that's worth. Now have at it. Their opening salvo: Sounding Out!/ is a weekly... Read More »
A portrait of the artist at play: David W. Robinson with EveAnna Manley (photograph by Dave Clark) The second part of my THE Show report from Newport Beach 2016 shifts the focus (so to speak) from the event, the rooms, and the equipment, to the people in our high-end audio community. As an artist, I... Read More »
Nativ Disc™ brings convenient access to large CD collections, in lossless quality and with rich metadata experience Nativ™ today unveiled its new Nativ Disc™, a bit-perfect CD Ripper that allows users to import up to 12,000 CDs into their Nativ Vita™ high-resolution music player. Nativ Disc™ is true plug-and-play and connects to Vita™ via bus-powered... Read More »
John Marks' first cross-published music review from The Tannhauser Gate (http://www.thetannhausergate.com) is of a composer near and dear to my heart for many years now: Ottorino Respighi. I have many of his recordings various formats, including LP, CD, and SACD, but am always pleased to find a new recording that renews my delight with his creative... Read More »
Already! Already THE Show has come and gone! Where did June 9-12 go? The first post-Richard Beers event is in the books now, and the results are in. According to Maurice Jung, the new president of THE Show, and his staff, total attendance was nearly 10,400 over the four days. The “Industry Day” was Thursday,... Read More »
The impact of tests in trade magazines is either described as none or of a sort that can change everything; it depends on whether or not the one who expresses such an opinion likes or does not like the press and/or reviews. But if you want to form your own opinion, it would be best... Read More »
For a number of months, I've been jamming to the sounds of the Benchmark Media Systems DAC2 HGC D/A converter and AHB2 stereo amplifier. While a bit late to the review party; I am anything but a groomsman, because listening to this gear is the ultimate reward for my time. BM builds serious professional equipment;... Read More »
