Space is limited, so if you wish to attend this in-store event, please RSVP by calling (301) 656-7020 or by emailing jsaudio@jsaudio.com…
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Maryland retailer JS Audio (4919 St. Elmo Avenue, Bethesda, Maryland 20814) is having an open house this coming Saturday (October 17, 2–9pm). Special guests will be John Quick, Director of Sales North America for dCS, who will be introducing the new Rossini DAC and disc player; Dave Gordon, National Sales Manager for Audio Research; Michael Taylor, VP Sales North America for Nordost; and Michael Latvis, Chief Engineer for Harmonic Resolution Systems.
Trumpeter-composer Dave Douglas seems to release an album every few months (it helps that he has his own label, Greenleaf Music), and his latest, Brazen Heart, ranks among his best in several years.
The album is dedicated to his older brother, Damon, who recently died of cancer; and among its 11 tracks are two of the most beautiful hymns in the book, "Deep River" and "A Balm in Gilead," both played with passion, grace, and horn harmonies reminiscent of "Abide with Me" on Monk's Music. (When Douglas' mother died a few years ago, he recorded an entire album of hymns, Be Still, including…
Playing the blues gets old fast. Since this most fundamental American popular music, stopped being the African-American party music of choice, and became a traditional music, celebrated as the precursor of rock'n'roll, blues players face a stark choice: change, or be content with playing small clubs and bars.
Perhaps the best example is Robert Cray, whose moment in the sun was in 1986, when his album Strong Persuader was released, and who, ever since, has been stymied in his search for new momentum in a new direction. A more recent example, from Austin, TX, is Black Joe Lewis. Once…
A mastering engineer's job is both to act as the final quality control before a recording goes out for manufacturing and, just as important, to apply to that recording the requisite technical finishing touches. Over the course of his career to date, mastering engineer Robert C. Ludwig has racked up more than 7500 album credits.
Bob Ludwig's recent projects have won eight Grammys in the last three years: in 2013, Album of the Year, for Mumford & Sons' Babel; in 2014, Album of the Year and Best-Engineered Album–Non-Classical, for Daft Punk's Random Access Memories; also in 2014, Record…
I used to get invited to these highly secret audio soirées, held in a basement workshop at the end of a dark, garbage-filled alley in Manhattan's Chinatown. There was no street address—only a wire-glass window in a metal door—and if you didn't know the password (ie, if you weren't carrying some type of audio amplification), you weren't allowed to enter. That said, sometimes nonmembers were allowed to attend, but only when a member needed help carrying monoblocks: There was no parking nearby.
Inside, the air was white with cigarette smoke. Green tea and sake were served in clear plastic…
Compared to the Schiit Mani's yin, the Blue Horizon Profono's sound was conspicuously yang: bright, practical, masculine. Switching from the Schiit to the Blue Horizon was like traveling from 17th-century Baroque Holland to 18th-century Enlightenment England: In contrast to the Mani's romantic leanings, the Profono presented music with neoclassical precision. There were no shadows at the edges of the soundstage, and images within the soundstage were drawn with a sharp-nibbed pen. Unfortunately, the Profono made the Denon DL-103 and Jasmine Turtle MCs sound a bit more "moving-coil" than I…
JM: Now, the flip side of that question—and perhaps it's an unfair one: Of the household-name albums, the gold and platinum sellers you were mastering engineer for, which are your favorites for purely musical reasons? The household-name album from your back catalog that, with due respect to everything else, never fails to pull me into its musical orbit is Roxy Music's Avalon (CD, Virgin 5838712). And I revere Dawn Upshaw's recording of Górecki's Symphony 3, Symphony of Sorrowful Songs, with David Zinman and the London Sinfonietta (CD, Nonesuch 79282)—but there's a limit to how frequently I…
Charlie Haden, the most inventive bassist of his generation, died at the age of 76 a little more than a year ago, but his widow (and producer-manager), Ruth Cameron-Haden, says he left behind many unreleased tapes of live concerts. So it's likely, thankfully, that we haven't heard the last of him.
The first nugget from the archive, Tokyo Adagio (on the Impulse! label)—live duets with the pianist Gonzalo Rubalcaba, taken from a four-night gig in 2005 at the Blue Note jazz club in Tokyo—is a gorgeous album, an auspicious beginning.
As Ruth tells it, Haden listened to a number of…
It’s a question I am asked all the time by people who buy vintage and new vinyl from both places: What’s the difference between the two? I have one full-blown, unrepentant-as-heck, vinyl addict who swears by www.Discogs.com. Says he finds the weirder stuff cheaper there than on www.eBay.com. There is no doubt that Discogs is cheaper both for the buyer and the seller. But in my book Discogs has one massive and so far insurmountable problem—they have not paid someone to write the code that would allow for photos on their site. Until they do they will always be the B, or maybe C team. So I’m…
So maybe I did I love it most for Elizabeth Berridge’s portrayal of Constanze Mozart, which was enhanced enormously, so to speak, in the director’s cut. C’mon, we’ve all heard the stories and suddenly we had a physical presence to go with the tales, good and bad, of Mozart’s wife, who knowing what we know about her husband and his music, must have been something of a…um…yeah, personality.
The winner of eight Academy Awards, Amadeus, the film of the Peter Shaffer’s hit play, did not, however, win for Best Original Score, an omission that boggles the mind—that honor went to Maurice Jarre…