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<I>That's It!</I>

That's It! (Sony Legacy) is a hell of a fun album: the Preservation Hall Jazz Band, the treasure of New Orleans music, wailing with cylinders wide open.

Purists might protest. All the songs on this record are new (a first for the PHJB), and the solos tend more toward R&B riffs than trad-jazz polyphony. In short, the vibe seems to pulse more from the rowdy late-night clubs up on Frenchman Street than the band's usual stately sanctuary in the heart of the French Quarter.

Not that there's anything wrong with that, and there's very little wrong with That's It! The octet—a trumpet…

Moderat: <i>II</i>

Moderat is made of Apparat’s Sascha Ring and Modeselektor’s Gernot Bronsert and Sebastian Szary; as the album title suggests, II is their sophomore release. This is no slump, however, and the music these men make together is seamless and true: It does not sound like two distinct visions forced together, but instead reflects a natural progression of shared ideas, a tangle of conflicts, tensions, and parallels brought together to create something exhilarating.

The lead single, “Bad Kingdom,” is built around a wonky hi-hat/snare pattern; flatulent, vibrating bass; airy synths; and…

Record Sale at The Rodgers and Hammerstein Archives of Recorded Sound

Gulp.

All the details, from the website of the New York Public Library, with critical commentary from me:

The Rodgers and Hammerstein Archives of Recorded Sound has 22,000 LPs with your name on them.

Why, thank you!

The records represent decades of unsolicited donations, for which we already have at least one copy in great condition. Now we need the space to bring in more unique materials for you to enjoy and study.

You need the space, I need the records!

Whether you are a hardcore collector of foreign classical releases, lover of 70s…

The Entry Level #32

Even before I'd really listened to PSB's Alpha PS1 powered desktop speakers (see last month's column), I suspected that I'd like them: They're affordable, attractive, small enough to actually fit on my desktop, and designed and manufactured by a true high-end audio company. Besides all that, the PS1s had been highly recommended by a friend, AudioStream.com's Michael Lavorgna. I only needed the speakers to sound good in my home. And they did—clean, clear, detailed, and dynamic, with a surprisingly big and bold overall sound. What I didn't expect, and what consequently convinced me to buy the…

The Entry Level #32 Page 2

I go where the girls go. Getting back to Natalie's problem: We connected her iPhone to the Audioengines and called up Pandora. The music sometimes dropped out altogether, and was otherwise plagued by intermittent buzzing. I guessed this had something to do with the cable, a simple minijack-to-minijack interconnect supplied with the Audioengines, which transmitted the audio signal from Nat's phone. It sounded as if the cable's connector was no longer making proper contact with the speaker's input jack. Though music was momentarily bearable, the intermittent buzzing was terribly annoying;…

The Entry Level #32 Contacts

Sidebar: Contacts

AudioQuest, 2621 White Road, Irvine, CA 92614. Tel: (949) 585-0111. Web: www.audioquest.com.

PSB Speakers International, 633 Granite Court, Pickering, Ontario L1W 3K1, Canada. Tel: (905) 831-6555 Web: www.psbspeakers.com.

Skullcandy, 1441 W. Ute Boulevard, Suite 250, Park City, UT 84098. Tel: (435) 940-1545. Fax: (435) 214-2566. Web: www.skullcandy.com.

Terence Blanchard: Animal Magnetism

Down deepest, beneath everything he does, underlying all the facets of his ever-expanding career in music, Terence Blanchard is still a New Orleans guy. Question that and you can hear his dander rise.

"Even people from New Orleans don't associate me with the music community down here, because they don't see me out and about doing that," Blanchard says via cell phone one afternoon from New Orleans. "But then there will be moments. I did a gig one night at Preservation Hall with those guys, and everybody was shocked. People were coming up to me and saying, 'I didn't know you could do that…

Nothing is Too Wonderful to be True

"Nothing is too wonderful to be true, if it be consistent with the laws of nature . . ."—Michael Faraday

"When a true genius appears in the world you may know him by this sign: that all the dunces are in confederacy against him."—Jonathan Swift

I quoted Faraday and Swift in an essay I wrote in March 1991 discussing how to distinguish effective audio tweaks from those that appear to be more about delusion than about any real change in performance. Back then, it was the Tice Clock (a RadioShack digital clock that George Tice claimed to have treated with a proprietary secret process…

The Fifth Element #80

First, two noteworthy CDs. San Francisco's Cypress String Quartet, whose set of Beethoven's late quartets and high-resolution downloads I praised in the April issue, is back with a new CD (Avie AV2275) that explores their musical roots.

The quartet takes its name from Anton°n Dvorák's early cycle of 18 love songs, Cypresses, which he composed in 1865, between his first and second symphonies. (The title is meant to evoke barren solitude.) Later in his career (1887), Dvorák transcribed 12 of the Cypresses songs for string quartet alone.

One word that often crops up in discussions of…

The Fifth Element #80 Page 2

I think that, following some years of doldrums in the US, Unison and Opera will have a higher profile going forward. After 20 years as president of cable company Cardas Audio, Colleen Cardas left to form, with Marc Phillips, Colleen Cardas Imports, at just about the time that Unison and Opera were looking for new representation for the US. Cardas already had a long relationship with Unison and Opera from those brands' often having used Cardas cables while developing and demonstrating their products.

I got in touch with Colleen Cardas because I wanted to put together a system, based on…