LATEST ADDITIONS

Ray Kimber founded his enterprise in the late 1970s, and for the last half-century has withstood the ravages of this difficult market. He first got involved in cable technology while addressing the problems of induced interference in audio connections where high-power installation lighting was involved, especially early thyristor-controlled systems.

I hadn't come across the distributor Aaudio Imports for a time—I learned they had moved from Colorado, to California—so it was interesting to see what was new in their world. In a rather large room, Laguna 1, the speakers were striking, even unusual looking. They are from AudioNec, a French brand that Aaudio recently began importing.

On July 10, EveAnna Manley, co-founder and owner of Manley Labs of Chino, California, surprised her social media followers by announcing the sale of Manley Labs. The buyer is Dirk Ulrich, founder of Brainworx Audio and Plugin Alliance.

Just Biber
Rachel Podger, baroque violin; Brecon Baroque
Channel Classics CCS48525 (Reviewed in DSD128 and 24/96 PCM). 2025. Jonathan Freeman-Attwood, Prod.; Jared Sacks, Eng./Edit/Master
Performance *****
Sonics *****

YG Acoustics and Supreme Acoustic Systems set up a massive, no-holds-barred system at T.H.E. Show in Southern California.

Why should we worry about the conservation and preservation of old analog master tapes when they've long ago been transferred to digital? It's a reasonable question—especially since AI-powered digital signal processing is on the horizon, promising perfect repair of bad-sounding digital audio files. Musicians and many audiophiles are skeptical that DSP could ever perform authentic correction on natively analog domain-transferred music files, the way (eg) Plangent Processes can. A forceful argument for better preservation of the surviving tapes is that when they're gone, we'll have lost not only the absolute (if also decaying) reference but also vital information that can be essential to applying authentic corrective processes.

David Bowie: Young Americans; Lucy Dacus: Forever Is a Feeling; Gabe Dixon: Parts I've Played; Neal Francis: Return To Zero.