LATEST ADDITIONS

Road Shows, Volume 3 (on Okeh Records) might be Sonny Rollins' greatest album ever. Certainly it's the album that most closely supplies the sensation of a live Sonny Rollins concert—or the best moments of several live Sonny Rollins concerts, which is what the whole Road Shows series is meant to be.

How good does it get? I think I’m closer to having an answer to that one.

VPI Industries' Harry Weisfeld has tried, built, and marketed almost every known way of spinning a platter. He began in the early 1980s, before many recent turntable enthusiasts were born, with the belt-driven HW-19, and since then has produced rim-driven models, and 'tables with motors outboard or inboard, one or three pulleys, one or three belts, and platters of acrylic or aluminum alloy. But while Weisfeld has owned quite a few direct-drive 'tables, he'd never come up with his own—until now.

In 1995, Harry Weisfeld's son Jonathan was killed in an automobile accident. Jonathan was a charismatic young man whom I had come to know—a genuinely gifted artist and musician who, at the time of his death, was helping his father develop the tonearm that would be named for him: the JMW Memorial Arm. The design of the original JMW Memorial Arm focused on providing easily adjustable and repeatable VTA and SRA via a massive threaded tower that bolted to the plinth. The bearing point, on the other hand, sat near the end of a relatively long and not particularly rigid metal platform cantilevered off the VTA/SRA tower.

Poor Jimmy Page. After listening to eight tracks from the newly remastered Led Zeppelin studio albums from Atlantic/Swan Song/Rhino, the first three of which, I, II, III, will be released on June 3, the guitar great graciously opened himself to questions. Were the alternate takes, that are the meat of the “companion audio” disc that accompanies each original album, pieced together from a number of alternate takes?

It was the summer of 2000. We had closed Stereophile's office in Santa Fe, New Mexico, the City Different in the Land of Enchantment, where the magazine had been headquartered since 1978, and moved lock, stock, and audio systems to New York City. Once I got to New York, I needed an editorial assistant. Stephen Mejias became that assistant in August 2000, at the age of 21.