Doc and Merle Watson: Bear's Sonic Journals, Never the Same Way Once: Live at the Boarding House May 1974
Owsley Stanley Foundation (7 CDs). 2017. Hawk, exec prod.; Starfinder Stanley, Jeffrey Norman, Pete Bell, project coordinators; Owsley Stanley, orig. eng.; Jeffrey Norman, CD mastering, tape archivist; John Chester, Jaime Howarth, digital transfers. ADD? TT: 5:33:17
Performance *****
Sonics *****

The late Owsley "Bear" Stanley spent his life raising consciousness. Whether it was mixing up jars of LSD, building his famous Wall of Sound PA system for the Grateful Dead, or supervising the creation of an incredible library of live recordings, Bear Stanley was after a certain purity, a higher level of quality, epiphanies.

Hitting mailboxes, newsstands, and tablets today, the 204-page October Stereophile, offers 36 pages of audio equipment reports and the revised and updated "Recommended Components" listing. Featured on the cover is VPI's Prime Scout record player, reviewed by Art Dudley, who also offers auditions of speakers from Burwell and Wharfedale. Herb Reichert reviews the AMG Giro turntable, John Atkinson report on his time with KEF's Reference 5 loudspeaker, Robert Deutsch lives with PS Audio's Memory Player, and there are reviews of amplifiers from Dan D'Agostino, Rega, and Linear Tube Audio.

The Waiting Room

Semyon Bychkov and the Vienna Philharmonic's splendid recording of Franz Schmidt's Symphony No.2, recently released by Sony in CD and hi-rez formats, is dazzling in its pastoral splendor. The music is lush and liquid, with one gorgeous orchestral effusion after the other.

On his first solo record since 2011's Modern Art, Sweet again returns to what he knows best, short, sweet, guitar-pop originals.

Kentucky manufacturer Thiel has acquired a reputation for the coherence of sound presented by its range of distinctive, sloping-baffle, floor-standing loudspeakers. Designer Jim Thiel gives a high priority to linearity of phase response; as a result, he chooses to use phase-linear, first-order crossovers in his designs, the target response being the combination of electrical and mechanical filtering. As the out-of-band rejection is then only 6dB/octave, it places demands on his chosen drive-units to be well-behaved, not only in their passbands, but also outside of them. In effect, the loudspeaker has to be designed as a whole system, the interaction between the drive-units and crossover being considerable.