The Fantasy Symphony Season competition, announced in this column in February, has been a smashing success—as far as I'm concerned, it's the most worthwhile write-in competition yet. The 13 winning entries and one hors-concours laureate are posted in the follow-up to February's column on Stereophile's website. The update lists the compositions in each winning Fantasy Symphony Season entry. I created a spreadsheet to determine the most popular composers and works in the…
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Don't waste yourself in rejection, nor bark against the bad, but chant the beauty of the good.—Ralph Waldo Emerson
A prodigy who wrote his first oratorio at 11, famed film composer Nino Rota studied with Alfredo Casella at the Santa Cecilia Academy, in Rome. Toscanini encouraged Rota to come to America, where he won a scholarship to the Curtis Institute; his teachers there included Fritz Reiner. Rota's more than 150 film credits include Fellini's 81?2, Zeffirelli's Romeo and Juliet, and two of Francis Ford Coppola's Godfather films. I had been dimly aware that Rota had written "serious" music, but had never sought it out until prompted by a reader's entry. My mistake. Everything on this CD is excellent…
Last December, I posted a swooning review of Acoustic Sounds' two-disc, 45rpm, 200-gram Quality Records Pressings of Ella & Louis, the 1956 Verve album of duets with Ella Fitzgerald and Louis Armstrong (backed by Oscar Peterson, Ray Brown, Herb Ellis, and Buddy Rich), which may be the most delightful vocal album ever—and, in this pressing, perhaps the most amazing-sounding.
Now Chad Kassem, the reissue house's proprietor, has come out with the 1957 sequel, Ella & Louis Again (same cast, but with Louis Bellson replacing Rich on drums, for the better). It's swoon time all over. (For…
Stereophile’s editorial assistant, Ariel Bitran, directed my attention to this USA Today article on an interesting turntable from U-Turn Audio, a company founded by three close friends—Ben Carter, Bob Hertig, and Peter Maltzan—all in their early 20s, who were tired of playing records on cheap USB turntables.
Their first model, the Orbit, forgoes modern-day conveniences like a USB output and built-in speakers, but concentrates on quality and longevity. Unlike the many inexpensive USB turntables prevalent today—models whose low-quality styli are potentially…
Kyle studied Film and TV at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts. He had a freakish obsession with penguins and spent hours at a time glued to his Macbook watching downloads of Aaron Sorkin’s The West Wing. I studied marketing at NYU’s Stern School of Business, counted down the days till the release of Guitar Hero I for Playstation Two, and once paid $20 for a broken drummer monkey known as Trick Star because I wanted to feel free and alive. In the summer of 2006, Kyle and I decided to start listening to vinyl. Why? Because vinyl was cool, and we were not.
I brought three records to our…
“Hi, Ariel? This is Steve Cohen at In Living Stereo. I just opened up your turntable box. There are some sweatpants in here. Oh, and the tonearm cable is missing.”
“MISSING?”
“Yes.”
When I dropped off my turntable at In Living Stereo for repair, six months had passed since the late-night tonearm cable-splitting calamity. I had totally forgotten the extent of damage committed to my Rega P1. To my memory, only a pin had to be resoddered to the cable, as I had told Steve when I dropped it off.
“Lemme see what I can do with it,” Steve put me on hold for a week.
…
Tubes, tubes, tubes.
The amps (and preamps) keep coming.
McIntosh Laboratories is back in the act with a limited-edition revival of the MC275 tube amplifier, the original of which was produced from May 1961 through July 1973—one of the longest model runs in hi-fi history.
New companies devoted to tube gear keep cropping up—in recent years, America's VAC and Cary and Canada's Sonic Frontiers. The same thing appears to be going on in the UK. The pages of British magazines are filled with new tube gear.
I was talking with a few dealer friends. It's not the old farts—…
"It must have been this model," I offered, showing him my recently arrived McIntosh 275 Commemorative Edition, named in honor of Gordon Gow, the late president of McIntosh Laboratories.
"That's the one."
"Best amp you ever owned," I said. "Thirty years of hi-fi, Larsik, and I'm afraid it's all been downhill since your Mac 275."
Lars erupted with one of his strange Scandinavian snorts.
"I didn't know you spoke Danish, Lars," I continued innocently. "Well, here it is—a new Mac 275, with updated components and a few changes in circuitry. Balanced as well as single-…
Be warned. Dennis Had is right: These amps can seriously mess with your head, particularly the single-ended jobs. These amps sound so right and so different from other amps, tube or solid-state, that you have to scratch your head and wonder. You also have to ask yourself some very serious questions about whether the hi-fi industry, such as it was, took a very wrong turn—oh, let's say, some time around 1938.
Why do speaker manufacturers produce such insensitive speakers, requiring muscle amps that don't sound nearly as good as one of these tube amps with a 300B? Why can't more…
There's so much uncertainty and confusion surrounding computer audio and high-resolution downloads. Which hi-rez formats will win out? How do you store the downloads you've bought? (Easy. Don't buy them.) How do you access them? Will digital rights management (DRM) cramp your style, or data-storage fees for cloud computing crumple your wallet?
I don't care. I have never paid to download or stream anything, and I probably never will. My priority is to get the most from the several thousand CDs I already own. As cheaply as possible, without "adopting" anything, early or late. Yet I love…