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All this week, the Jazz Standard in New York will be celebrating the 20th anniversary of the Jazz Composers Collective, the brainchild of five musicians who formed five distinct bands: the personnel would remain the same, but each player would lead his own band and compose all of its music. Both concepts were unusual at the time: the continuity of players and the insistence on original compositions. Back then, jazz musicians rotated in and out of bands, not the other way around; and the emphasis was on covering standards or blowing improvisations.

After two full weeks away from the office&#151Hurricane Sandy followed us from Puerto Rico to New Jersey&#151it was especially nice to get back in here and be greeted by the Stereophile Recommended Components Collector’s Edition.

Isn’t it beautiful?

For me, every one of its 180 pages represents blinding pain and seemingly endless suffering. But, for you, dear reader, we hope the Recommended Components Collector’s Edition will represent nothing but pure pleasure and joy.

Saturday, November 10, 11am–3pm: Audio High (165 Moffett Boulevard, Mountain View, CA) hosts another vinyl sale to benefit the Friends of Palo Alto Library. Last year’s sale generated more than $1700 to benefit the Palo Alto Library, a cultural pillar to Santa Clara County community.

Some LPs that will be hallmarked for this sale include a Zappa collection, an assortment of French pop and avant-garde LPs, and as the “usual selection of hard-to-find rock and jazz titles.” Musical Surroundings and Clearaudio representatives will be at the benefit to answer turntable related questions and showcase their products.

Since its founding in 1993, Colorado-based Ayre Acoustics has made its name with amplifiers and preamplifiers based on truly balanced, solid-state circuitry that didn't use the ubiquitous panacea of loop negative feedback to produce linear behavior. Their first digital product was the D-1x DVD player, reviewed for Stereophile by Paul Bolin in February 2003, which offered unusually good video performance. The D-1x was followed by the C-5xe and DX-5 universal players, respectively reviewed by Wes Phillips (July 2005) and Michael Fremer (December 2010). But the most intriguing digital product to come from Ayre was the QB-9 digital processor. Reviewed by WP in October 2009, the QB-9 has just one input, USB, and uses Gordon Rankin's proprietary Streamlength code to give asynchronous operation, which in theory offers the best jitter suppression. "The QB-9 isn't a computer peripheral," said Ayre's marketing manager at that time, Steve Silberman. "It makes computers real high-end music sources"—a statement with which WP agreed.

Albert Lee: Tearing It Up
AIX Records AIX 85054 (BD). Mark Waldrep, prod.; Mona Waldrep, exec. prod.; Dominic Robelotto, assoc. prod., eng., BD authoring. DDD. TT: 100:00
Performance *****
Sonics *****

"From a layman's perspective, I'd listen to the 'Audience' mix on my first bourbon and the 'Stage' mix on my second."

Ahh, yes, out of the mouths of . . . audiophiles . . . who like good booze!

Lacking a 5.1-channel surround-sound rig at home, I enlisted the able assistance of "Music in the Round" columnist Kalman Rubinson, who then convinced his son-in-law, Michael Schechter, source of the above quote, to host us for an evening of listening to and watching the Blu-ray disc Tearing It Up, a new set by the incomparable English country-rock guitarist Albert Lee, recently released by AIX Records.

Donald Fagen isn't exactly a jazz musician, but he is a musician who plays jazz and whose music is suffused with a jazz sensibility, whether on his own or as co-leader of Steely Dan, so here we go. His 4th solo disc, Sunken Condos (on Reprise), is one of his best and maybe the best-sounding since the Dan heyday . . .