2nd Edition
Are you still into that sound stuff?
A decade ago, my mother, on noticing a copy of Stereophile on my kitchen counter, asked me, "Are you still into that sound stuff?" Her tone had a touch of exasperation.
Recording of the Month: Vivaldi: L'Estro Armonico
It's no big secret that classical music is in trouble. At a time when selling a few hundred CDs will land you squarely in the upper reaches of the classical music chart, and the venerable New York Philharmonic faces an unsettled future in terms of its endowment.
Acoustic Sounds' Major Vinyl Expansion
Just three months after buying 13 vintage record presses, Chad Kassem of Acoustic Sounds (above) has purchased The Mastering Lab (TML), the legendary facility of Grammy Award-winning mastering engineer, Doug Sax.
Rip It Up
It’s an old story, told by many, which starts appropriately enough...Many years ago, when the Riot House on Sunset Boulevard was still the Riot House, an impressionable young journalist, in the midst of a vodka chased with Merlot . . .
Ran Blake & Singers
Ran Blake may be the most unjustly obscure jazz pianist out there, so it's worth noting--shouting, even--that he has three new albums that rank in the top tier of his career: Cocktails at Dusk (Impulse!), The Road Keeps Winding (Red Piano), and Kitano Noir (Sunnyside).
KEF Reference Series 103/4 loudspeaker
By now most readers will be familiar with the relatively new tuned-cavity method of low-frequency loading. Such designs have popped up all over the place of late, especially in those little satellite/woofer systems.
LAST Record-Preservation Treatment
LAST (Liquid Archival Sound Treatment) is a record treatment developed by one Dr. Catalano, which promises to retard dramatically the wear of vinyl discs.
From the JGH Archives: A Plague Upon Our House
The summer of 1975 will be remembered by us, with no fondness whatsoever, as The Time the Roof Fell In. Or the Murphy Months, or the Period of the Plague Upon Our House.
Aurender Flow D/A headphone amplifier
Aurender was a name new to me when I encountered the company at the 2015 Consumer Electronics Show, where they displayed a range of music servers designed in California and manufactured in South Korea.
THE Show Newport 2015: That's A Wrap
Herb Reichert, Jason Victor Serinus, Sasha Matson, and Thomas J. Norton report live from Newport Beach CA with complete coverage and insight.
1st Edition
THE Show Newport 2015: That's A Wrap
Herb Reichert, Jason Victor Serinus, Sasha Matson, and Thomas J. Norton report live from Newport Beach CA with complete coverage and insight.
RFI, CB, and the FCC
We are reprinting this 38 year-old "As We See It" essay because if you substitute the words "WiFi" and "cellphone" for "Citizen's Band" and "CB Radio," you will realize that not much has changed in the decades since, with our audio systems still awash in a bath of RFI.
Valve Amplification Company Signature SE preamplifier
For me, the highlights of any audio show are finding a room with great sound and visiting it often throughout the show, to relax and absorb a wide range of great music.
Hegel Music Systems H160 integrated amplifier
For decades, I read all the British and American audio magazines, and I pretty much believed everything written therein--with one exception. The equipment reviews published in Stereo Review had an off-puttingly disingenuous quality.
Listening #150
As sometimes happens, this started out to be a very different column. But by the time I was a thousand words into it, I found that my point of view had changed.
The Fifth Element #91
The business of high-end audio can fascinate me almost as much as does high-end audio itself. Designers and entrepreneurs such as Frank McIntosh, Avery Fisher, Saul Marantz, Edgar Villchur and others combined technical brilliance and varying levels of business skill with flairs for publicity and marketing.
The Jaki Byard Project
Sometimes a good album passes me by, unnoticed (so much music, so little time), but few turn out, upon discovery, to be as very, very good as the Jaki Byard Project's Inch By Inch, Yard Byard (on the GM Recordings label).
Soul Men
Soul singing is essentially a young man’s game. You gotta have limber vocal chords to endure the screams, cries and soaring that is required. Although they have the pathos that young men don’t, veteran soul singers can be a challenge to record.
KEF Blade Two loudspeaker
The story's been often told: 30 years ago, British speaker manufacturer KEF was asked to design a small, spherical loudspeaker that could be used in a European project to research room acoustics.
Harbeth Super HL5plus loudspeaker
To some, the measure of a company has less to do with the amount of money it makes than with the honesty of the things it sells: the assurance that every product in its line is designed not as a marketing exercise but as a straightforward and presumably unique answer to a real consumer need.
From the JGH Archives: Late Again!
It is probably unnecessary for us to point out that this issue is late. Five months late, to be more or less exact. Under the circumstances, it took more than a little gall to date this our "Winter 1975/76" issue, but the truth must out, and the truth of the matter is that this "Winter" issue will be going out to subscribers around the end of August 1976.
Gramophone Dreams #4
So, audiophiles, riddle me this: What does a DAC actually look like? I don't mean the box it hides in--I mean the little doodad that does the actual converting from digital to analog. Is it bigger than a phono cartridge?
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