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On Keep Your Courage, Natalie Merchant sounds like a 59-year-old woman who has been through some rough health. But that reflection of reality is what makes Keep Your Courage so good: Merchant refuses to hide her humanity and openly celebrates her distinctive, poetic mind while pondering the mysteries of love and the innate strength of women.

It's been almost 30 years since Merchant fronted the band 10,000 Maniacs. She has…

Almost five years after they released the first recording in their Prism series, the Danish String Quartet gives us Prism V. As in previous installments, the DSQ has paired a late Beethoven string quartet—here the extraordinary, final String Quartet No.16 in F major, Op.135—with a related fugue by J.S. Bach and a quartet by a later master.

What has changed is maturity.…

Sasha Matson is a unique thinker. Among the things he thinks about are jazz, rock, classical music, blues, film scores, and opera, to name just six of the genres he frequents. Sometimes he visits several genres in the same composition. His pivots can be jarring.…

The Prime was fitted with a Lyra Helikon SL cartridge (ca $2500, discontinued), driving a reasonably priced phono preamplifier: the…

Those who, like me, hauled ourselves through college music courses will remember being told that the Byrd Mass for five voices is a masterpiece, a claim soon belied when we were played a performance by some desiccated, monochromatic chorus. Had a recording like the new one by The Gesualdo Six been played instead, we might have agreed more readily with the academic judgment.

Simply by singing…

When my wife and I got engaged, we each bought each other a "bubble-back" Rolex watch from an antique shop in San Francisco. Mine was a 1939, hers was a 1940; both watches still run fine, though I am not sure for how much longer, as Rolex no longer services watches that old. My respect for Swiss engineering is based in part on my experience with the Rolexes. So I readily agreed when Editor-in-Chief Jim Austin proposed that I spend some time with the current version of the I1 Universal integrated…

The grandest perk of being a reviewer is when sniffing through the grass leads me to a high-performance product capable of wide-ranging appeal at a price point that shouldn't scare anyone. In my sniffing, I have encountered a few products of this type, whose success I've applauded because it is so much fun to see legions of happy audiophiles united in their approval of a product so unusual that they may not have considered it had it not been ardently championed in the audiophile press.

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SME's history is well-documented. The company started out, in 1946, as an engineering company for hire. In 1959, after a few years supplying parts for the scale modeling and various other high-tech industries, company founder Alastair Robertson-Aikman wanted a better tonearm for…