LATEST ADDITIONS

Register to win a pair of AudioEngine 5+ Speakers (MSRP $399.00) from Needle Doctor we are giving away.

According to the company:

"Audioengine continues to manufacture powered speakers that are among the best you’ll find for the money. They’re a very focused company, and for that, we’re lucky. With resources pouring into a relatively centralized field, Audioengine is able to dream of and produce poignant products that entirely meet the needs of many listeners."

[This Sweepstakes is now closed.]

Soundings Fine Audio Video are having an open house Thursday, December 4, from 6 to 9pm, celebrating the Colorado debut of Boulder's 3060 and 2160 stereo amplifiers and the 2110 preamplifier. Representatives from Soundings and Boulder Amplifiers will be on hand to demonstrate and talk about these new products and to answer questions you may have about them. Adult beverages will be served alongside fine food provided by Great Northern Tavern. Click here for more details.

Frank Kimbrough is a protean artist; his voices are myriad, adaptable to the occasion, as a musician, bandleader, sideman, and composer. His new CD, Quartet (on the Palmetto label), is his first album as the leader of a foursome. (The other albums under his name have been solos, duets, or trios), and it's among his most inventive.

The experience left me doubting my ears. After I'd performed all the measurements of Ayre Acoustics' KX-R preamplifier ($18,500) to accompany Wes Phillips's review in our November 2008 issue, I spent a weekend listening to it. To my astonishment, the sound of my system with a Transporter D/A processor feeding the preamplifier was better than when the DAC fed the power amplifier directly. Through the KX-R, images sounded more tangible, and the sound was better focused, despite the signal's having been passed through not just another set of interconnects but also through the preamp's input and output socketry, switches, a volume control, printed circuit-board traces, and active and passive parts. Logically, you'd think that having nothing in the signal path would have less of a degrading effect than so many somethings. But no, that was not what I heard, much as I would have preferred otherwise.

James Brown: Love Power Peace: Live at the Olympia, Paris, 1971
Polydor/Sundazed 5470 (3 LPs). 2014. James Brown, prod., mix; Ron Lenhoff, eng., mix; Bob Irwin, mastering. AAA.? TT: 92:50
Performance *****
Sonics ***½

In the one scene in the new James Brown biopic, Get On Up, that's actually about his music, JB, who began his career in music as a drummer, tells his horn section to "sound like a drum." It also shows him being dictatorial and harsh, traits that contributed to his losing several bands' worth of key musicians over the years. Perched on the edge of such a precipice were the shows in Paris, at the Olympia Theatre, in March 1971, one of which was recorded by King Records.

It’s Thanksgiving time, and New York jazz fans know what that means. No, not the Macy’s parade down Broadway or the lighting of the Christmas tree in Rockefeller Center. The really big shows for our crowd—annual traditions for a while now—are the Maria Schneider Jazz Orchestra at the Jazz Standard and Jason Moran’s Bandwagon Trio at the Village Vanguard.