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I'll admit to a conflict of interest in choosing as Recording of the Month a work co-engineered by our very own John Atkinson. We—I, who nominated the piece, and Editor Jim Austin, who ultimately chose the winner—have both worked with John for years. And I'd never deny it was moving to sit next to him during his recent visit to Port Townsend following the…

Otra Noche, the most recent release on Todd Garfinkle's M•A Recordings, is a continuation of Será Una Noche, a project begun in 1998, then continued with La Segunda in 2003. Twenty years later, Otra Noche is here, and it strikes me as one of the most perfect examples of digital recording I've ever encountered.

Otra Noche is a simple, spaced-omni stereo recording of real people performing together in real…

To fresh your memory, the data on Red Book CDs is limited to a sample rate of 44.1kHz—44,100 samples of data per second—and has a word length of 16 digital bits per sample. This yields a range of 65,536 possible…

Really, one issue per month is enough fun; two is cruel and unusual. In previous years, we…

"Nothing happens purposefully in our improvisations," Bob Reina declared, post-concert in a five-way conference call with the band. "What you hear is how we all feel collectively about the direction of the piece. Given all our musical backgrounds, I think it's amazing how underivative our music is. It doesn't remind you of another band, or another type of music that we're copying from."

"I really enjoy taking an instrument, seizing the improvisational nature of sound, and playing off it as though I were painting," Don Fiorino…

There are more and more shows each year, it is true.…

Even though Henry Brant's mind-boggling Ice Field for orchestra and organ won the Pulitzer Prize for Music in 2002—the year after its premiere—and years later was revisited by the San Francisco Symphony, for which it…

On the 2017 Winter Solstice, the astounding Joyce DiDonato—the coloratura mezzo-soprano from Kansas who zips through impossible runs of Rossinian roulades faster than anyone can shuck corn—took a break from opera to present a song recital in London's famed Wigmore Hall. With Jake Heggie and Gene Scheer's…

I hear not the volumes of sound merely, I am moved by the exquisite meanings.—Walt Whitman, "That Music Always Round Me," from Leaves of Grass

These two statements, to me, express the core perspective shared by Stereophile's contributors. When I encountered both of them within a span of 30 days, they spoke so strongly that I felt impelled to hook up the biggest, baddest loudspeakers I could find…