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Sweaty, Laidback, and Gritty with Salt

It’s inevitable: Working on “Recommended Components,” as I am now, leads to fantasies of new gear, new systems, outstanding new heights of recorded playback! I have to restrain myself, focus. Focus, Daniel-san, focus.

Look eye, always look eye.

Last April’s “Recommended Components” list was created, in part, while listening to Psychic Ills’ Mirror Eye, in a cabin on a cliff overlooking the mighty and restless Pacific Ocean, so it had a kind of acid-laced, overcast, far-off feel to it. (Didn’t it?) This particular iteration of “Recommended Components,” however, is being…

Tote Bags

Good thing I bought all those records.

I strode into the office this morning with my pair of PSB Alpha B1 loudspeakers. John Atkinson will use them in an upcoming review of the Peachtree Audio iDecco D/A integrated amplifier. (With luck, JA won’t break my speakers; he is such an equipment abuser.) I spent some time last night searching for their box, which would have made transportation from Jersey City to Manhattan so much simpler, but could not find it. Fortunately, I did find a couple of yellow shopping bags from the Princeton Record Exchange. Suitably large and durable,…

Plant's Band of Joy

One of the weirder NYC boozing trends as of late is the faux speakeasy. Yes, that would be a room, usually subterranean, that for some unknown reason—perhaps every other cheeseball concept has been exhausted—tries to recapture some of those long lost flavors of the salad days of that joyous time in American history called Prohibition. You remember that grand social experiment perpetrated by the far right of American society that like all right wing idiocies, ignored reality and plowed ahead regardless of the damage it might have caused. Instead of stopping alcoholism, it spread the…

Is Jazz a Young Person's Music After All?

A week ago, I went to see Chris Potter lead a top-notch quintet at the Jazz Standard. It was a great set. Potter’s big tenor-sax sound keeps getting more swinging, more virtuosic, yet at the same time tonally subtler. Joining him were Steve Nelson on vibes, Paul Motian on drums, Craig Taborn on piano, and Scott Colley on bass. Potter was smiling a lot during their solos, as if he couldn’t quite believe that he’d assembled such a crew.

But that’s not what I want to write about. I want to write about the fact that the set was jam-packed, and with more young people—including young women, in…

A Special Tweeter

This is the Ion TW1S tweeter module found in the Acapella High Violoncello II loudspeaker ($80,000/pair). As you can see from this picture, taken in JA’s listening room, the tweeter module rests beneath the Acapella’s midrange enclosure. (That big, purple bell&#151the color is actually Porsche Amethyst&#151has a diameter of 18.5”.) Housed in a perforated metal box and powered with its own AC cord, the tweeter module is a completely self-contained unit; it accepts a line-level input from an RCA jack and amplifies the signal with a class-A amplifier.

This is the Ion TW1S…

Jason Moran's <I>Ten</I>

Jason Moran’s Ten (Blue Note) commemorates the 10th anniversary of his trio called Bandwagon (with Tarus Mateen on bass, Nasheet Waits on drums), and it’s by far the group’s best recording, maybe Moran’s best all told, which, if so, would mean it surpasses his 2002 solo disc, Modernistic, which is saying a lot. Whether it does or not (I’m still mulling), this is a great album, that much is certain.

This is also the trio’s first album that’s not geared to a concept. It flits across the musical map, from originals to pieces by Monk, Leonard Bernstein, the avant-garde classical composer…

Sunday Morning Desire

So easy to look at, so hard to define.

Better This Way

Rega’s outstanding P3-24 turntable is available in lots of fun colors, and even though I do love my white P3, I still suffer from color envy. I want a green one, a blue one, an orange one, a pink one. I would like a different P3 for every day of the week, a P3 for my every mood. I wonder if the different colors have different sonic properties. For instance, does my white P3 sound purer than a black P3? Are certain colors better suited to certain types of music? Blue for the blues?

P3 owner Brian Willey is seeing red. He writes:

Stephen: I don't know how…

Drive Belt Upgrade

Speaking of upgrades, this just arrived in the mail. Rega’s drive belt upgrade ($59) is supposed to do something good for my P3. It has something to do with tolerances and stuff.

I’ll find out about that.

Thinking of Charlie

First, it’s time for all good thoughts and good energies to be directed south, to Vanderbilt Hospital in Nashville where Charlie Louvin, the great Charlie Louvin, is about to undergo the long and complicated operation needed to try and remove the stage 2 pancreatic cancer that he was unexpectedly diagnosed with last week. For those who don’t know, Charlie, 83, was once half of the Louvin Brothers, who were and basically still are the greatest duo act in the history of country music. Charlie has experienced something of a late career comeback in recent years thanks to Josh Rosenthal and…