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Rex Orange County: The Alexander Technique; Still House Plants: If I Don't Make It, I Love U; Hinds: Viva Hinds.

A new UK-manufactured turntable line has appeared and it is set to reach listeners in the United States through Sierra Sound. The product is known as the TT-Hub, developed by Connected Fidelity, a company led by industry figure Michael Osborn, who has experience in acoustic isolation and related products for high-fidelity audio.

According to Sierra Sound, this distribution agreement marks the arrival of a design the manufacturer characterizes as entirely original. Connected Fidelity—as stated on its website and in related materials—focuses its engineering on addressing various elements of resonance control and isolation in audio playback.

German high-end audio manufacturer T+A elektroakustik has introduced its Pulsar S 130 loudspeaker, which the company says is part of an ongoing modernization of its speaker offerings. According to T+A, this model integrates technologies and design concepts from its higher-level Solitaire and Criterion series speakers, and is priced at $7490/pair.

Dynaudio and Innovative Audio invite you to join us on Thursday, December 12, 2024 for an evening of music and the introduction of some exciting new Dynaudio products at Innovative’s final ‘Meet the Innovators’ event of 2024, ‘Dynaudio: From Heritage to Confidence’. The event takes place at Innovative Audio Video Showrooms in NYC.

On Thursday, December 5, 2024, Miles Davis came back to New York City. Miles was escorted by Acoustic Sounds' Chad Kassem. This "from beyond the grave" appearance was one of the most memorable listening sessions I have ever experienced. Kassem previewed for us his Analogue Productions' issue Miles Davis—Birth of the Blue (Sony/Columbia APJ 172, 2024). The release date is set for December 13th. on 180-gram vinyl and SACD.

I have a day job at a museum. One of my favorite things about working there is taking the elevator from my office down to one of the floors open to the public; I walk into the galleries through a discreet panel in the wall. This makes me feel like I'm in one of those horror-movie manors with a tunnel concealed behind a bookshelf. Sometimes I startle people, which I kind of enjoy.

Mostly I like spending time looking at art, especially in the early mornings when the galleries are empty. Lately, I've been watching art handlers hanging a roughly 100'-long tapestry depicting some manner of planetary jetsam—or maybe they are aquatic plants—by Nigerian artist Otobong Nkanga. And I make regular trips to a small theater to watch mesmerizing footage of Orchard Street in working-class lower Manhattan, shot in 1955 by veteran filmmaker Ken Jacobs. Captured on warm, saturated 16mm film, the long-gone people on the screen appear as vividly alive as the museumgoers around me.

My favorite-ever thing at the museum, though, is a life-sized kitchen. Austrian architect Grete Lihotzky designed it for a Frankfurt housing complex in 1927.

In Gramophone Dreams #88, I described the sound of TEAC's VRDS-701T CD transport as "dense and precise in a way I had never previously heard from digital." I went on to explain, "by 'dense,' I mean there was a tangible corporeality effected by seemingly infinite quantities of small, tightly packed molecules of musical information."

What I noticed most during the review period was the extraordinary volume of data the 701T was vacuuming off those pits and lands and turning into music. As I have gotten to know it better, what I've noticed most is how the 701T sorts and delivers all that data in a manner that makes every DAC I pair it with sound more corporal and dynamic.

As I wrote that review, I wondered how the 701T would perform partnered with its matching UD-701N converter/streamer/preamplifier and how the TEAC flagship DAC's sound character would compare to flagship DACs from HoloAudio, Denafrips, and dCS.