Added to the Archives This Week

From the current issue, Wes Phillips and John Atkinson tell the story of Against the Dying of the Light: the Second Cantus CD. Phillips sets out to find the true genesis of this astonishing new recording from the Minnesota-based male-voice choir, while JA fills in the technical details.

"How much fun can you have with an audio component?" asks Michael Fremer as he kicks off his review of the Musical Fidelity CD-Pre24 CD player-preamplifier. Fremer gleefully exclains, "Think of the CD-Pre24 as a CD player with a bonus analog preamplifier, bonus digital switching facility, and analog and digital tape loops."

After years of dreaming, Kal Rubinson finally gets his hands on a "sexy" Nagra PL-L preamplifier. Caressing its carefully crafted controls, KR comments, "This line-level preamp without phono stage made me think about what, in this age of digital sources and stand-alone phono stages, is a preamp's fundamental role."

Next, Chip Stern spends several musical months with the Vacuum Tube Logic TL-5.5 line preamplifier, forcing him to "reassess many long-held notions about the 'characters' of solid-state and tube components."

Finally, the current installment in our "Recording of the Month" series for the online archives, Recording of October 1996, Portraits of Cuba. On this Chesky recording, Michael Ullman notes, "The soundstage is natural, the soloists stand out as they should, and the whole is beautifully balanced, from the lustrous bass upward."

X