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Affordable Integrateds (with phono!)

The Cambridge Audio Topaz AM10 has a phono stage.

Today I’m working on the Integrated Amplifiers section of the Stereophile Buyer’s Guide. Have I ever told you that I love integrated amplifiers? I do. I love integrated amplifiers because they make my life easier&#151they add convenience, that is&#151without necessarily sacrificing quality.

I remember the day I walked into Jonathan Scull’s office&#151Jonathan was our senior editor at the time, and I was Ariel Bitran’s age, just starting out as editorial assistant&#151and I asked Jonathan what an integrated…

A Welter of Polyrhythms

On the train this morning, deep into Aaron Copland’s classic, What to Listen for in Music, which Art Dudley discusses in our November issue, I read a bit about rhythms and polyrhythms. Copland is giving a brief history on the use and evolution of rhythm in modern Western composition, explaining how we got from basic two-four time marches to much more complex combinations of two or more independent rhythms in varying times. This is what I read:

Don’t imagine for an instant that such rhythmic complexities were unknown until our time. [Copland is writing in the 1930s.] On the…

John Zorn's Book of Angels

John Zorn’s rep as the angry bad boy of the downtown avant-garde has always been a bit of a caricature. His music has long stressed wit and beauty as much as squeals and hollers. But in the last few years, he’s tapped into a buoyant, almost gentle lyricism while still sounding distinctively Zorn.

It may have started in 2005 with a new series of compositions that he called “Book of Angels: Masada Book Two.” Masada was the quartet he formed in the early ‘90s (one of that decade’s most exciting and signature jazz bands). More to the point here, it was a book of eventually over 300…

The HiFiMAN HM-801 portable music player:<br>Big is the new small

Photo: HeadRoom.

Fang Bian, designer of the Head-Direct HiFiMAN HM-801 portable music player, is a 31-year old audiophile, music lover, and student of Nanotechnology at Hunter College in the City University of New York. In the early 1990s, Fang bought his first CD player, and, with it, discovered his curious attraction to audio.

It was 1993, and a Sony ad running in a Chinese audio magazine caught Fang’s attention. The ad was for one of Sony’s portable music players. Fang was so impressed by the looks, obvious convenience, and promised performance of this thing that he…

Sonny Rollins at 80

A few thousand jazz fans are feeling lightheaded this morning. They saw Sonny Rollins’ 80th-birthday concert at the Beacon Theater in New York City last night, and they’re still marveling (especially those too young to have witnessed giants walking the earth in great number) that, finally, they’ve seen a concert that made them tremble and that people will be talking about years from now.

In the past decade or so, we’ve come to expect 10 or 15 magical minutes from a Rollins concert, a long passage, maybe two, of transcendence—when the saxophone colossus unlocks a new passageway into the…

Killing the Blues: John Prine at Governors Island

The two Big Eye IPAs I had enjoyed with dinner were doing the trick. I was feeling weightless even before stepping onto the ferry. Beautiful people crowded the front, holding onto railings and each other, while some sat inside the old, wooden frame. Lower Manhattan was soft, quiet, and blue, and two towers of light shot high into the night sky. Suddenly, imperceptibly, the unreal city became smaller and more distant: I hadn’t noticed that the ferry had departed. We could just as easily have been riding a magic carpet. Robert Baird and I were on our way to see John Prine at…

It's an Angry World

Stereogum premiered the video for Neil Young’s “Angry World” from his upcoming solo album, Le Noise.

Interesting.

The song begins and ends with looping guitar and voice, creating a nice circular structure; the song is endless, perhaps. The thick, crunchy guitar tone, balanced as it is with fine high end light, is extremely cool and expertly handled by Young, and the video&#151especially the hot girl parts&#151is intriguing. But I’m less impressed by Young’s vocal delivery and the lyrical content, which strike me as being a bit weak and lazy. It’s an angry…

Grinderman Day

Grinderman 2, by Grinderman (don’t click that link), is October 2010’s “Recording of the Month,” and it’s available today. Go out and buy it, before it buys you. Bwhahahahahahahaha.

Awhoooo! (That's the sound of the wolfman.)

Jack White's Triple Decker Record

When I initially read about the Triple Decker Record on Pitchfork.com, I thought to myself, “Maaaaan, that’s stupid.”

But, then, after I watched the video, and saw Jack White cutting open the 12” with a knife to extract the 7” single from its outer casing, I thought to myself, “Oh, damn, now I have to post another blog entry.”

The Dead Weather’s new single, “Blue Blood Blues,” will be released on September 17th, in three very different versions: a 7” backed with a live version of “Jawbreaker;” a 12” backed with a live version of “No Hassle Night”/“I Just Want to Make…

Now On Newsstands: <i>Stereophile</i>, Vol.33 No.10

The October 2010 issue of Stereophile is now on newsstands. On the cover, you’ll see a pretty much life-sized image of Logitech’s Squeezebox Touch, a real dandy of a hi-fi product that costs just $300 and seems to captivate everyone who comes into contact with it. The normally unflappable Kal Rubinson ends his review (page 118) by advising, “Get a Squeezebox Touch right now. You’ll never look back.” Even our cover photographer, Eric Swanson, fell in love with the little thing. He bought his sample. We chose the Mobile Fidelity version of Beck’s Sea Change for the cover art…