It's nice to have a tonearm like the TA-1 where all the adjustments are clear and intuitive and everything moves smoothly and precisely. Tracking force is adjusted using a static-balance counterweight and dial, and the VTA/SRA adjustment uses a basic sliding arm pillar with a locking screw in the arm collar—no fancy on-the-fly VTA adjustment tower here. The antiskate bias is controlled with a calibrated screw-in knob on the side of the bearing housing, so there's no fiddling with weights dangling on fishing line. The supplied tonearm cable plugs into a 5-pin DIN plug at the base of the…
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Harvey Diamond/John Lentz: how strange the road should be so easy
Diamond, piano; Lentz, vocals
Orchard of Pomegranates 006 (CD). 2025. Ayelet Rose Gottlieb, prod.; Craig Welsch, eng.
Performance ****
Sonics ****
Diamond, piano; Lentz, vocals
Orchard of Pomegranates 006 (CD). 2025. Ayelet Rose Gottlieb, prod.; Craig Welsch, eng.
Performance ****
Sonics ****
If there was ever a sleeper album, this is it. This is John Lentz's recording debut, at 76. He has been involved with music his whole life but has never quite had a professional career until now. Harvey Diamond makes his recording debut as a leader, at 82. He was one of Lennie Tristano's last students and has been an underground figure on the Boston jazz scene for…
Why should we worry about the conservation and preservation of old analog master tapes when they've long ago been transferred to digital? It's a reasonable question—especially since AI-powered digital signal processing is on the horizon, promising perfect repair of bad-sounding digital audio files. Musicians and many audiophiles are skeptical that DSP could ever perform authentic correction on natively analog domain-transferred music files, the way (eg) Plangent Processes can (footnote 1). A forceful argument for better preservation of the surviving tapes is that when they're gone, we'll have…
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December 8, 2006
• Chinese Whispers Are Now Shouts, by Ken Kessler
• Tower Records R.I.P., by Wes Phillips
November 7, 2006
• New from Nagra, by Ken Kessler
• You Shall Knows Us By Our Trail of Unfiled Discs, by Wes Phillips
• This Month's Audio URL, from Wes Phillips
October 10, 2006
• Compared to What? by Wes Phillips
• Acoustic Energy WiFi Internet Radio, by Wes Phillips
• Soundmatters FULLstage Hd, by Wes Phillips
• Audica MPS-1 Personal Audio System, by Wes Phillips
• This Month's Audio URL, from Wes Phillips
September 28…
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