When I saw Linn's <A HREF="http://blog.stereophile.com/cedia2007/090809klimax/">Klimax DS</A> at CEDIA, I was impressed by the company's claim that it sounded "better than a CD12," the marque's (now discontinued) <A HREF="http://www.stereophile.com/cdplayers/86/">flagship CD player</A> for many years. Quite a claim, I thought, but I wasn't able to make it to a nearby hotel and actually <I>hear</I> the DS in action.
Pure Pleasure Records is a British audiophile-label that—like the stateside Analogue Productions, Classic Records, and Cisco Recordings—reissues blue-chip jazz albums on pristine virgin vinyl. Pure Pleasure’s focus is the catalogue of Candid Records, an adventurous label that lasted only from 1960-61, with critic Nat Hentoff in charge of A&R. In the past few years, PPR has released such essential works of modern jazz as <I>The Newport Rebels</I>, <I>Charles Mingus Presents Charles Mingus</I>, and Max Roach’s <I>We Insist!</I> But its latest reissue, trumpeter Booker Little’s <I>Out Front</I>, is a revelation. Little was 23 when he recorded this, his fourth and final album as a leader; he died of uremia just six months later—a huge loss for the music.
Thomas P. Colangelo, designer of some of the best regarded solid-state components of the last three decades, died in a single-car collision on September 5.
Bagheera thinks the space between the preamp and the upper shelf is exactly cat-sized.
Huckleberry thinks I don't have sufficient respect for nap time.
Linguist John McWhorter casts a kindly eye on quotation marks conveying emphasis. Fine, but when he defends "impact" used as a verb, I suggest he goes too far. "Quite simply, the verbs view, silence, worship, copy, and outlaw all began as nouns. No one has a problem with them."
ELP
As Christmas approaches, the reissues have begun to trickle in. Today's bounty was Emerson, Lake and Palmer's <I>Brain Salad Surgery</I> or what the notes call "Prog Rock's masterpiece."
Chet Raymo manages to coax an entire essay out of a description of a kiss: "The way bees on a drowsy day suck honey from fuchsia."
<I>Universe Today</I> has posted a photo of a pulsar eating a star. Well, <I>I'd</I> never seen that before.
Stevie Nicks would like her forties back. "'It was eight completely wasted years of my life.' Here's the irony, she says: the 'powers that be' had sent her to the psychiatrist in order to keep her working, but the 'treatment' he gave her made work almost impossible. 'It's very Shakespearean. It's very much a tragedy.'"