From the opening notes of “Atomic Number” it was clear that in the six weeks they’ve spent on the road playing the material from their debut, Case/Lang/Veirs, the trio of kd lang, Laura Veirs and Neko Case have gelled in powerful ways. At a recent Celebrate Brooklyn tour stop at the bandshell in Prospect Park the…
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Some musicians play new material live before they record it. In other cases, the records are made before the material is quite worked out, before it’s been tested in front of an audience, before it’s come out of a PA system and echoed across a gorgeous July night in Brooklyn.
"The days grow short when you reach September," sang Frank Sinatra and Tony Bennett, but not so short that you won't have time to enjoy our September issue, which hits newsstands, mailboxes, and tablets this week. Technologies vintage and modern are featured, with Ken Micallef's review of the Music Hall MMF-7.3 turntable and Jim Austin's interview and MQA's Spencer Chrislu taking pride of place on the cover. And there is more on MQA inside, with John Atkinson writing about his listening comparisons between MQA-encoded files and the hi-rez PCM originals.
And there's more: reviews of the…
After living in NYC for nearly two decades, and having traveled to most of the cities of Europe in that time, a hard realization has become apparent. If it’s LP record shopping you seek, vintage or new, singles or full albums, the best in the world lies right here in the USA. How did Chuck Berry put it: “A juke-box jumping with records like in the USA.”
The only slight exception to that rule is the whole of the UK, and London especially, where if you dig and spend time negotiating the Tube, you can actually uncover things like original purple and orange label Atlantic pressings of early…
It is more than fair to say that In C (1964), a repetitive composition of unpredictable length by California native Terry Riley (b. 1935), forever changed the course of modern music. If you want to have a fabulous time learning why, listen to In C on Four Four Three: The Music of Terry Riley. The new DSD-native recording from Channel Classics by the Ragazze String Quartet, percussion quartet Slagwerk Den Haag, and genre-redefining drumkit/French horn/guitar trio Kapok, can be purchased in either CD format or as a stereo or multichannel download in resolutions up to Quad DSD. This collective…
In 2002, I conducted a lengthy interview with Terry Riley for andante.com (footnote 1). The following dialog reveals the drug-induced genesis of In C:
Jason Victor Serinus: Let's set the context for In C. May I assume that you were very conscious of making a statement?
Terry Riley: In C was kind of a gift to me. I wasn't trying to write a piece; it just came to me one night on a bus when I was riding to work.
JVS: And you weren't stoned at the time?
TR: I was [laughter]. My Rainbow In Curved Air and all my recordings for CBS were done when I was stoned. In the…
It's a Sunday in suburbia. Sunny, 95°—"sweltering," some would say. The kind of heat where, you grab that cold can of Guinness, and the moment it leaves the cold comforts of the fridge, it's dead on impact.
You invite your good ole non-audiophile pal Stan (footnote 1) over. You use a ruse you know Stan will fall for, like "Let's flip some burgers and listen to the cool commercials on Spotify's free tier," or "I just mastered the piña colada and torrented David Bowie's entire discography" (as if the piña colada alone wouldn't be enough to lure that sucker Stan), or "You left your phone at…
A recording engineer's choices of microphones to record singers, guitars, horns, bass, drums—or an entire orchestra—are absolutely crucial. Those very subjective choices are, in large part, what separate the best recordings from the also-rans. When I contacted some of the best engineers in the business to talk about mikes, I got an earful. I was told that mikes have a more profound impact on reproduced sound than does any other link in the recording chain. Yes, the acoustic of the recording venue also plays a huge role, and post-session mixing and mastering can of course improve or ruin the…
Most people who have heard music recordings encoded with Master Quality Authenticated agree that it sounds really goood (footnote 1)—but even they recognize that at least one major challenge remains: ensuring that listeners can actually get, in MQA format, the music they most love. I spoke with Spencer Chrislu, MQA's director of content services, about the company's efforts to meet this challenge.
Jim Austin: Please tell us about your background.
Spencer Chrislu: Wow, where do I start? I've been a music fan all my life, and fell in love with high-end audio as a teenager. I've…
Van Morrison: . . It's Too Late to Stop Now . . . Volumes II, III, IV & DVD
Exile/Columbia/Legacy 88875134742 (2 LPs, 3 CDs, 1 DVD). 2016. Van Morrison, Ted Templeton, orig. prods.; Donn Landee, orig. eng.; Myles Wiener, Biff Dawes, Jack Crymes, Gabby Garcia, asst. engs.; Guy Massey, new remix; Andrew Sandoval, compilation prod.; Vic Anesini, remastering. ADA/ADD? TT: 3:33:58
Performance *****
Sonics ****
Exile/Columbia/Legacy 88875134742 (2 LPs, 3 CDs, 1 DVD). 2016. Van Morrison, Ted Templeton, orig. prods.; Donn Landee, orig. eng.; Myles Wiener, Biff Dawes, Jack Crymes, Gabby Garcia, asst. engs.; Guy Massey, new remix; Andrew Sandoval, compilation prod.; Vic Anesini, remastering. ADA/ADD? TT: 3:33:58
Performance *****
Sonics ****
In the otherwise silly 2002 film The Banger Sisters, one line has always stood out. When the children of a groupie turned suburban Phoenix housewife (Susan Sarandon)…
Last June, Jim Austin briefly discussed the operation of MQA in his review of the Meridian Explorer2 USB DAC, but you can find a more detailed explanation on Stereophile's website here and here. MQA involves two fundamental concepts, discussed in a paper presented to the Audio Engineering Society in October 2014 (footnote 1). The first is responsible for a large reduction in the bandwidth required to store and stream high-resolution files, the second for a potential improvement in sound quality:
With files sampled at 2x, 4x, or 8x the baseband rate of 44.1 or 48kHz, the information in…