I've praised some of Hollenbeck's earlier albums in this space, especially his Large Ensemble's Eternal Interludes and his Claudia Quintet's Royal Toast, but I have to say I admired them more than I liked them. His arrangements were heady, his feel for harmony nearly peerless, but some of the pieces…
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Shut Up and Dance, on the French label Bee Jazz, should catapult John Hollenbeck into the pantheon of living big-band composers, along with Maria Schneider, Bob Brookmeyer, Jim McNeely, and (if his debut works are matched by what's to come) Darcy James Argue, among perhaps a very few others.
I swear: Music Hall’s Roy Hall was cracking jokes and smiling wide just moments before I snapped this shot.
“Are you enjoying the show?” he had asked.
“Very much. This show has a certain grace and a natural sex appeal that shows in the States seem to lack,” I said.
Roy nodded. “Ah, you get it. So you’re not just a pretty face.”
Then he walked me over to his new MMF-11 turntable (around $4500, including Pro-Ject 10cc carbon-fiber tonearm). First seen in prototype form at January’s Consumer Electronics Show, the 43-lb MMF-11 is a two-motor, flywheel-driven turntable…
Music Hall’s new plug-and-play dac15.2 ($299) has USB, coaxial, and optical inputs and is capable of handling resolutions up to 24-bit/96kHz.
“It’s just fucking amazing,” Roy Hall said simply.
Available this fall.
Let me hear your body talk.
—Olivia Newton John
—Olivia Newton John
But first a confession: I'm not the hip young man you might like me to be (or the one I might like me to be). I'm actually sort of old-fashioned. While my taste in music is nearly as uninhibited and adventurous as that of anyone I know, I prefer to enjoy that music in ways far more restrained and much less modern. I think I would have been right at home in the 1950s, wearing Ray-Bans and Levi's, listening to (and loving, equally and deeply) the music of both Jack Scott and John Cage, and playing my records on a record player.
I…
Overall, the HM-602 has a handsome, rather serious appearance: With its gold controls and its fine metallic finish, which at times seems a deep green and at others takes on a smoky charcoal, the HM-602, like its predecessor, exhibits an air of elegance and sophistication. And while the HM-801 proudly takes after Sony's famed Walkman—Fang Bian once owned every available model of the now-discontinued portable cassette player—the HM-602 much more closely resembles Apple's iPod Classic. On its front panel, below the 2" LCD screen, the HM-602 has a four-way control ring similar to the iPod's…
In any case, I was impressed. From the rich acoustic guitars and old-school drum-machine beats of Dominant Legs' Young at Love and Life (LP, Lefse 010) to the live drumming and heavily layered synth textures of Four Tet's There Is Love in You (LP, Domino WIGLP 254), I feasted on a steady diet of recordings with deep bass and thrilling stereo imaging. But placing the Audioengine 5s so far into my room proved impractical for a few reasons. First, because the A5s are internally powered, you need simply connect the speaker cable from the left channel's binding posts to the right channel's binding…
Sidebar: Contacts
Audioengine. Tel: (877) 853-4477. Web: www.audioengineusa.com.
Head-Direct. Tel: (347) 475-7673. Fax: (718) 766-0560. Web: www.head-direct.com.
Music Hall, 108 Station Road, Great Neck, NY 11023. Tel: (516) 487-3663. Web: www.musichallaudio.com.
Like most people who are neither radio talk-show hosts nor members of the Westboro Baptist Church, I'd rather be known for my loves than my hates. And after wandering this audio wilderness for umpteen years, I can stand before you and say without shame: An unlovable phono transformer has yet to step into my path.
No surprises there. After all, a phono transformer requires only a primary-coil impedance that's electrically right for the cartridge in use, and a gain capability—itself determined in part by the transformer's turns ratio (see "Listening" columns passim)—that likewise suits the…
That reminds me to remind you to use numbers as a guide, but not to let them be The Decider. Don't cheat yourself out of hearing some amazing combinations, such as using the Hommage T1 transformer—the input impedance and turns ratio of which are very low and very high, respectively—with EMT's highest-output pickup heads: Like bumblebees and copious amounts of second-order distortion, it shouldn't fly but it does. Bear in mind, too, that the greatest of all modern ironies takes root in the world of fashion: The garments most associated with the axiom one size fits all are the ones we wear…
Electrical Measuring Technology (EMT), based in Mahlberg, Germany, is nothing if not a company with a point of view. Established in 1940, first as a designer of test equipment and later as a manufacturer of transcription turntables, EMT entered the cartridge business by supplying their broadcast clients with Ortofon pickup heads. Soon thereafter EMT began making their own Ortofon-inspired mono pickups, such as the very high-output, very low-compliance, and altogether wonderful OFD 25. Then, in 1965, EMT produced a broadcast-quality stereo pickup head of their own design, the TSD 15 (…