LATEST ADDITIONS

With Quad's reworking of Peter Walker's "Wonder," the full-range ESL-2912 electrostatic, featured on its cover. Inside you'll find John Atkinson on Rockport's Avior II loudspeaker; Herb Reichert on an affordable amplifier from Emotiva and cost-no-object headphones from Abyss; Art Dudley on a Bryston's CD player; Michael Fremer on Brinkmann's MQA-capable Nyquist DAC and Ortofon's Windfeld Ti cartridge; and Jim Austin on PS Audio's ultimate monoblock.

Conductor Osmo Vänskä, whose Minnesota Orchestra has previously distinguished itself in multiple recordings of Sibelius and Beethoven, is now turning to the symphonies of Gustav Mahler. Newly arrived is his hybrid SACD, for BIS, of Mahler's Symphony 5. The first issue in a projected series that will next offer Mahler's Sixth and Second Symphonies at dates unspecified, it may not win over those whose allegiance adamantly rests with Bernstein, Chailly, Rattle, Abbado, Tilson-Thomas, Fischer, and/or other distinguished Mahler interpreters. Nonetheless, the strength of the recording's first movement alone, and its hi-rez provenance as DSD derived from 24/96 file, make its epic journey from darkness to light essential listening.

If you can put aside the fact that what was once a rock 'n' roll band has now grown into a merciless money machine, and a somewhat creaky repetitive live act that hasn't made a great record since 1978, they still do deserve a nod for never saying die. To borrow a famous line from Midnight Cowboy, those boys are gonna die on the stage. And yes, we will certainly miss them when they're gone!

Palmer Audio's 2.5 turntable, with its laminated plinth of Baltic birch and metallic features, looks Scandinavian but is made in the UK. It shares a few conceptual similarities with the turntables made by Nottingham Analogue, another British brand. The review sample had the optional side panels of cherrywood veneer.

Bernie Krause: Citadels of Mystery
Mobile Fidelity MFSL 1-505 (LP).

This is a very hyped, contrived recording, but then nobody ever pretended that this kind of musical construction was supposed to approximate the sound of a live performance. The strings are quite steely on this but, in all other respects, the recording is is stupendous—unctuously rich, smooth and limpidly clear, with some awesomely taut low end and cuttingly crisp percussion sounds.

Better known for their speaker cables and interconnects, The Absolute Reference Audio Labs (TARA Labs) has quietly branched out into electronics and loudspeakers. Their Passage is a line-level–only preamp. I actually favor such a modular approach to preamp design. Standing as we are at the dawn of the digital audio age, the breakup of the traditional preamp into separate phono and line-level stages represents a more flexible, cost-effective design approach.

If you have read my reviews of the Ortofon M-15, the Shure V15-III, and the Decca Mark V, you have probably formed a pretty firm impression of which of the three contenders for the title "Best Pickup" is the winner. In case you haven't, though, here's a capsule wrap-up of our reactions to the three phono cartridges reviewed in May 1974.