LATEST ADDITIONS

Register to win a London Maroon Cartridge (Value $950.00 ea) and a StylusTimer (value $19.95) we are giving away.

According to the company:

"The legendary London (Decca) cartridge is known for its extraordinary and unmatched musicality, delivered by its unique transducer design. With a StylusTimer (2021 Stereophile Recommended Component) you can track cartridge break in-time, total stylus time, and the time you spend enjoying music, while preserving your system’s sound quality and protecting your records from damage from a worn stylus."

[This Sweepstakes is now closed.]

Beethoven: Symphony No.9, Hilary Hahn: Paris, Lavena: in your hands and Trio Karénine: La nuit transfigurée.

Sarah Vaughan: Sarah Vaughan, Ocelot: Ocelot and Jim Snidero: Live at the Deer Head Inn.

With the furor over the launch of DAT (digital audio tape), it is worth remembering that commercial digital recorders have been with us for some time now: it is now nearly a decade since studio PCM converters were first successfully used for audio recording in conjunction with a VCR (which uses a helical spiral recording via a spinning drum to achieve the high writing speed).

In her reworking of the Beatles' "With a Little Help from my Friends," on the 2018 tribute album, A Day In The Life: Impressions Of Pepper (impulse records), Brooklyn guitarist and composer Mary Halvorson reinvents both her instrument and the song.

Most baby boomers can hum the tune of the Beatles' classic, from Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, in a handful of notes. It might take longer to recognize Halvorson's joyous, angular version. A master of jazz phrasing, guitar technique, avant-garde discourse, and effects pedals, Halvorson bends the Beatles song to her 21st century will.

Shunyata Research is the brainchild of Caelin Gabriel, whose résumé includes stints at NSA, in military R&D, and in the computer industry, first digging weak signals out of noise then developing very high-speed network devices. He is also a lifelong audiophile.

Shunyata's roots are in the scientific understanding and engineering base Gabriel has developed during his career. I've long been impressed by those scientific underpinnings—which extend not only in audio but also to other fields including medical devices—and by how open the company is in talking about its technologies.

Big changes are afoot at Mytek. First up: The Mytek Brooklyn AMP+, the newest version of the compact, class-D Brooklyn AMP. The AMP+ is already in production.

In my 2018 review of the original Brooklyn AMP, I wrote that the class-D amplifier exuded "a consistent sense of truthfulness, striking resolution that was never analytical, spacious soundstages, superb dynamics, and some of the 'blackest' backgrounds I've ever heard...with the right recordings." I continued, "The AMP let me revel in its reproduction of the low end, with zero overhang or bloat, and profoundly impressive retrieval of micro- and macrodetail—but in doing all this, its touch was always light and never surgical."