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I've long felt no need for a power conditioner. When we moved to our current house, back in 1995, on the advice of a fellow audiophile I had an electrician install hospital-grade outlets, wired to a discrete 20-amp circuit for all my audio gear. It was the most cost-effective improvement to my system that I've ever made, and I would advise anyone to take this step before doing anything else to treat your AC power.

Over the years, I've tried a few devices to cleanse the dirt that ConEd was zapping…

dCS Puccini CD player, VPI Classic turntable, Mobile Fidelity record clamp, Ortofon Cadenza Black cartridge, PS Audio Stellar phono preamp, Simaudio Moon 740P line-stage preamp, Simaudio Moon 860A power amp, Revel Ultima Studio 2 speakers, AudioQuest Wild Blue Yonder and Nirvana S-X Ltd. interconnects, AudioQuest Robin Hood speaker cable, AudioQuest Hurricane power cords (AQ Thunder power cord for the Niagara 3000), Audiodesksysteme Vinyl Cleaner Pro record-cleaning machine.—Fred Kaplan

In his November 2020 review, Jason Victor Serinus found that Audio Research's REF 6SE tubed preamplifier $17,000 was very sensitive to system tuning. John Atkinson took a listen to the REF 6SE and compared it with three topnotch preamplifiers: the MBL N11 ($14,600), the Pass Labs XP-32 ($17,500), and the Benchmark LA4 ($2599). He decided that the Audio Research was indeed a…

However, as the growth of the vinyl market exceeded even the most…

Accessories include the mat, a 45rpm adapter, three auxiliary screw-on counterweights, an overhang gauge, tools, a dustcover, a power cord, and a very well-organized, multi-language manual.

Setup and Use
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Does the package justify its lavishness? Is it worth the $100 price tag?…

Black Sabbath's sixth album was birthed amid legal warfare between the group and their management. In an all-too-familiar music-biz story, management skimmed large sums and the group was left in deep debt, despite a half-decade of endless touring and rapidfire release of an oeuvre that invented and defined heavy metal music.

Slogging through 1973–75, the group battled in court, toured…

Out of the Cool is nearly as striking an album now as it must have been when it hit the bins in 1961. Not only is…

Here, skilled musicians take a back seat and the recording takes the wheel: five LPs of solo (and near-solo) Bach recorded with a single stereo array of tubed, AKG C12 clones (by Flea), vintage Focusrite pres, and a Sony reel-to-reel connected up with Nordost cable. Lacquers were cut on a Neumann VMS 80 lathe and…

Recently, when Marc Gomez, head of…