In a little over four months, Constantine secured the relatively small-scaled Hilton Garden Court in Emeryville, and booked at least 34 exhibit rooms displaying well over 100 brands. He spent a bundle on advertising, getting major boosts from ads on stereophile.com, jazz station KCSM-FM, and also from our show preview.…
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Constantine and Ann Soo deserve a huge thank you from the audiophile community. Responding to pleas from insistent dealers and distributors, who lamented the absence of an audiophile show from the San Francisco Bay Area, Constantine and dagogo.com took a huge risk.
I received an interesting call today from a man named David Garrett in Atlanta, Georgia. David has 25 years of experience as an architect (in fact, he grew up in Highpoint, North Carolina—“Furniture Capital of the World”) and, for the last 13 years, has operated his own interior design company. He is aggressively and enthusiastically looking to change directions, however, and has recently started an LP rack business called Nomad Crates.
“I’m 49 years old, so I have plenty of good experience and I’m still young enough to put it to work.”
David wanted to design something…
Photo: Melissa Horn
A pause to celebrate Roberto Bolaño’s 2666, which I am deep into:
Roberto Bolaño’s 2666 is tremendously good. I’ve never read something so consistently, so powerfully beautiful, horrible, and enthralling. I adore it and abhor it, and when it’s within my grasp I feel like a stronger person. It’s like being at a Sonic Youth show, like being in punch drunk love, like listening to your favorite record on your hi-fi and knowing the experience couldn’t be better, no matter what: With 2666, Bolaño fools you into thinking he is the only writer and his is the…
It’s a truism that writers naturally do not want to swallow, but dammit it’s true: a picture like the one above can be worth more than a thousand words.
Last Sunday night, at B.B. Kings in New York City’s answer to Hades and Hiroshima, Times Square, Stereophile contributing editor David Sokol, his lifelong friend David Simons and a cast of thousands including a horn section of very talented teenagers, staged a very wonderful musical tribute to the Kinks album, Muswell Hillbillies. The intrepid Mr. Sokol proudly wore his Stereophile cap throughout the set as he sat behind his kit…
On Tuesday, September 14th—two days before my 33rd birthday—Anti- Records will release Grinderman 2, the second studio album from Nick Cave’s heathen child, Grinderman. And we are in for a treat. The review will appear in our October issue, but I’ll just let you know now: The album is violent, powerful, horrifying, and hilarious.
I’m almost afraid of bringing it into my home.
You wouldn’t just bring some sort of a hungry, horny dingo/bear/wolf/dog into your home, would you? I feel like I have to Grinderman-proof the apartment first. Put up…
I have an article in the Arts & Leisure section of this past Sunday’s New York Times about vinyl reissues of Blue Note jazz albums mastered at 45 rpm.
Yes, you read that right: an article about such audiophile labels as Music Matters Jazz, Analogue Productions, and Classic Records was featured in the paper of record, and quite prominently so: 1,500 words, spread out on two pages, with four photos, including one of a Blue Note 45 spinning on my own VPI Classic.
Is it a sign that the MSM are beginning to take all this seriously—or just an editor who agrees that a narrative…
Today is my 10th anniversary with Stereophile. Hmm…on the way home today, maybe I’ll buy myself a nice beer. Or a record…
Or maybe I’ll go crazy and buy myself a beer and a record. Woo!
And look who’s back: It’s Ariel Bitran! Ariel worked as our part-time editorial intern, enabling us to complete the 2008, 2009, and 2010 editions of the Stereophile Buyer’s Guide, before departing for a full-time gig with Mini-Circuits.
Ariel and I kept in touch, and, one winter day, prior to an Open End show at the Iron Monkey in Paulus Hook, during which I was crazily infatuated with a beautiful, vinyl-loving girl (another story altogether), Ariel mentioned that he’d be interested in a full-time position with Stereophile. I was happy to hear this, and I told Ariel to hold…
Well, I just got off the phone with Steve Daniels of The Sound Organisation, US importer for Rega, and while I don’t have a ton of information on Rega’s new RP-1 turntable, I do have some good news:
The RP-1 is scheduled to be available by the end of September and will not be considerably more expensive than the P1. The company hasn’t set a final US retail price, but they’re targeting somewhere around $445, or just $50 (or so) more expensive than the old version. Which I think is great. My eyes tell me the cosmetic upgrades alone are worth that much.
Rega says the RP-1…