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What hooked me then, when these bands were…

How does Make More Noise sound? It sounds like it should sound, or as near as it could come without ticks and pops.

This music ranges from the late analog era through the early CD era—from five years before the first commercial CDs were released, in 1982, to five years after. Some tracks sound good; a few aren't very good at all. It's all pretty flat and in-your-face. You wouldn't mistake any of it for perfectionist audio.

This is primitive music, in the best sense, much of it made and recorded with a DIY aesthetic. It's not supposed to sound polished, and…

This double album, and the accompanying film, were recorded at Alexandra Palace in June 2020, when London was in full lockdown. Ally Pally, as it's affectionately known, sits in grandeur atop a hill, looking out over glorious panoramic views of the city—now deserted because of a fear of a microbe. It was a scene repeated across the world, as everywhere fell silent.

This sense of isolation is…

Albums with such diverse provenance (three studios, three engineers, six ensembles) often lack aesthetic and sonic continuity. Not here. Diana Krall and engineer Al Schmitt mixed and sequenced these recordings from 2016 and 2017 into a memoir with a single emotional atmosphere. Krall's intimate voice is always the focus, telling secrets into your ear.…

Bartók's string quartets trace the composer's stylistic evolution from rhyth-mically fluid dissonance to a more aggressive, fragmented idiom, taking in musical gestures that, through overuse and in lesser hands, would later become new-music clichés. Interpretively, the Jerusalem Quartet has the full measure of these scores, pivoting across their tricky rhythmic scansions with assurance…

As I became familiar with audio measurements, it struck me that the equivalent of the skid pan test was…

Attending the two-day Making Vinyl Berlin B2B conference on May 2 and 3, 2019 was an obvious decision for me, even if Day 1's "Physical Media World Conference" panel discussion was more about optical digital media than it was about analog vinyl.

The two previous Making Vinyl Detroit conferences I'd participated in had been successful, well-attended events. This year, organizers Bryan Ekus and Larry Jaffee invited me to participate in a music journalist's panel discussion on Day 1 and then to run two vinyl-related panels on Day 2. The venue was the famous Hansa…

In the September 1988 issue of Stereophile, I wrote a rave review about the first speaker, the AE1, from what was to me a totally unknown English company, Acoustic Energy. Though tiny, and possessing an intrinsically limited low-frequency response, the $1500/pair AE1 was one of the most musical loudspeakers I have ever used, throwing a deep, beautifully defined soundstage, and possessed of a clean treble and a sweet, if rather…