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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…
The October Stereophile may have featured a retro tubed integrated amplifier on its cover but the November issue, hitting newsstands and mailboxes now, spotlights the hi-tech, solid-state Musical Nu-Vista 800 integrated amplifier. Don't fret, thermionic aficionados, the Musical Fidelity's preamp section is built around classic nuvistor triodes.
And the November issue features plenty of other amplifiers: Arcam's value-for-money P49 power amp; Parasound's Halo Integrated; Allnic's tube integrated; and the extraordinary Benchmark AHB2, which uses patented THX technology to achieve distortion…
Various Artists: Hommage à Eberhard Weber
Pat Metheny, Jan Garbarek, Gary Burton, Scott Colley, Danny Gottlieb, Paul McCandless, Michael Gibbs; SWR Big Band, Helge Sunde, conductor
ECM 2463 (CD). 2015. Martin Muhelis, concert prod.; Doris Hauser, Volker Neumann, Boris Kellenbenz, Pete Karam, Manfred Eicher, engs. DDD? TT: 69:48
Performance *****
Sonics *****
Pat Metheny, Jan Garbarek, Gary Burton, Scott Colley, Danny Gottlieb, Paul McCandless, Michael Gibbs; SWR Big Band, Helge Sunde, conductor
ECM 2463 (CD). 2015. Martin Muhelis, concert prod.; Doris Hauser, Volker Neumann, Boris Kellenbenz, Pete Karam, Manfred Eicher, engs. DDD? TT: 69:48
Performance *****
Sonics *****
There once was a joke about how technology would someday replace troublesome musicians: Instead of putting up with drummers being late to gigs, keeping irregular time, and stealing everyone else's girlfriends, a…
"There are two kinds of music. Good music, and the other kind," Duke Ellington is famously supposed to have said. But that doesn't tell us how to recognize "good music," and it doesn't define good. Nor will this essay. Many have described the music of, say, Mozart or J.S. Bach with such phrases as the music of heaven or the mind of God or—especially Bach's music—that it embodies the basic structure of the universe/existence/reality. I've said such things myself. But if such analogies are to be made, I think they better suit Haydn. Any god I would think worthy of worship would not be pious,…
The British company Chord Electronics has always seemed to me to be audio's crazy uncle: Crazy like a fox, maybe, but definitely marching to their own tune. Their casework design often borders on the gratuitously provocative, challenging audiophiles' ideas about good taste. Yet many of my audio pals swear by the sound of Chord components, and I've heard them shine in many respectable showrooms.
The lineage of Chord's new Hugo TT DAC and headphone amplifier can be traced through several typically idiosyncratic Chord products, including the QBD76 HDSD DAC, Chordette QuteHD DAC, and Hugo…
Then JA asked if I'd like some more DACs to compare. First to arrive was the Auralic Vega, then Ayre Acoustics' QB-9DSD. A few weeks later, Philip O'Hanlon, of distributor On a Higher Note, asked if I'd like to hang out with the Luxman DA-06, which Art Dudley reviewed in the July 2014 issue. Add to that growing stack my trusty Benchmark DAC2 HGC, and I was searching for a way out of the DAC maze.
Relief came in the form of Tony Holt, cofounder of the Central Coast Audio Club. We quickly devised a plan for comparing several DACs with a custom Pipeline set—as in the surf tune "Pipeline,"…