Afrobeat Eric
Stereophile.com participant Eric Schneck of Brooklyn, New York (that's right, Brooklyn...watchu lookin' at) is the lucky winner of the Fela Kuti Box Set Sweepstakes.
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LATEST ADDITIONS
Laissez Le Bon Temps Roulet
So it’s Fat Tuesday, or mardi gras and while I have not had a Hurricane cocktail quite yetold men need to keep pacing in the forefront of their thoughtsI have been listening to many of the gems of NOLA's glorious musical history.
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Live at the Lab: Gem Trails "Adobada" Lathe Cut EP
I'm running sound at a new DIY venue in Brooklyn called The LAB, and I snag some weird stuff. Here's a sample…
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Trevor Peterson arrived with a guitar and a bevy of pedals and samplers. With the help of adaptable computer music softwares like Ableton and Logic and popular hardware like the Roland SP-404SX or the Akai APC40, the combinations of technologies passing through the Lab morphs constantly.
Matmos: The Marriage of True Minds
Back in September, I told you a bit about Matmos’s The Ganzfeld EP, which blew my mind and promised many more great things to come.
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It’s been a long wait, but The Marriage of True Minds, Matmos’s eighth full-length album, will be released by Thrill Jockey on February 19th. My complete review will appear in our April issue, but you can stream the entire album right now through Pitchfork Advance.
Wired for Wireless at AudioVision SF
Sonos's Geoff Marks talks to attendees about networked music
If ever one needed an object lesson on how to put on a successful demo, the team at AudioVision San Francisco provided. At an evening entitled "A Sonos Wireless Event," held on the evening of February 7, at least three demonstrations were held simultaneously: the first in the store's main "High-End System" room, which in itself involved two different systems; a second in the store's smaller demo room, again including a switch of Triangle loudspeakers, Bel Canto Design electronics, and Nordost cabling; and at least one more in the hallway. Representatives from Sonos Wireless Audio, Bel Canto Design and Nordost conducted the demos with an able assist from AudioVision staff.
Cassettivity
Interested in new cassette releases, but don't know where to start? Cassettivity is a cassette-only distribution site, founded by music lover Dave Sandifer. In 2013, a cassette-only distro might seem like an odd venture, but I was delighted to see it: I’ve had a difficult time keeping up with the many new and exciting cassette-only labels—they’re often extremely obscure and titles are often extremely limited—so an intelligent distribution channel makes good sense.
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Beets
Photo created by reddit user will_evans10199
This morning, I revisited Stereophile's office sample of Beats Studio headphones ($299.95).
At one point, my naive ears loved these headphones.
Hot Off the Presses: 1000 Copies of Stereophile Test CD 1
Stereophile's Assistant Editor Stephen Mejias models the fresh produce
Are you curious to hear J. Gordon Holt's lecture on "Why Hi-Fi Experts Disagree"? Maybe you are yearning for Sam Tellig, the "Audio Anarchist" as identified in the liner notes, to whisper sweet nothings into your ear with his radio-friendly baritone while checking a 1kHz reference tone at 20dB. Or how would you like a dog named Ralph to howl at you while configuring your left and right speakers? All this and more can be found on Stereophile's Test CD 1, now available in the Stereophile eCommerce Store.
Behind the Scenes: What the Brothers Sang
Even though my own band has recorded and released a handful of CDs and EPs, the act of making music remains mysterious and awesome. I love it. I’ll never get tired of watching musicians create.
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Here, we get a behind-the-scenes look into the making of Dawn McCarthy and Bonnie “Prince” Billy’s upcoming album, What the Brothers Sang, inspired by the music of the Everly Brothers.
Arcam FMJ D33 D/A processor
As I wrote in my review of the Bricasti M1 D/A processor in February 2012, it seemed a good idea in the late 1980s: upgrade the performance of your CD player by feeding its digital output to an outboard digital/analog processor. British manufacturer Arcam, one of the first companies to see the opportunities in this strategy, introduced their Black Box in 1988. When I reviewed the Black Box in February 1989, I found that its low-level linearity was among the best I had measured at that time for a product featuring the 16-bit Philips TDA1541 DAC chip set. However, that linearity still wasn't very good in absolute terms. Back then, it required heroic and expensive engineering to obtain D/A performance that did justice to the 16-bit CD. These days, however, the semiconductor foundries produce a plethora of relatively inexpensive D/A processor chips that both handle 16-bit data with ease and wrest full resolution from 24-bit data.
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