While filming and touring High Water Sound, I learned that Herb and Jeffrey go way back— in fact, so far back that Jeffrey knew Herb before…
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This video is about Jeffrey Catalano and his shop High Water Sound, located in Manhattan's South Street Seaport, right under the Brooklyn Bridge. Though it was my first time meeting Jeffrey, I had long been familiar with his name—often associated with good sound at audio shows and a true appreciation for music. He distributes a selection of artisanal, analog pieces, including TW-Acustic turntables, Cessaro horn speakers, and Tron Electric amplifiers.
New Age. Most of it was acoustic. While there were vocals here and there, much of it featured instrumentalists playing solo or in groups. Some of it was meant to alleviate stress. Some of it was marginally connected to a similarly named movement in spirituality. Environmentalism and respect for nature were constant themes. Some New Age artists created moody, ambient sounds that were intended as background music, to promote healing and relaxation.
As the genre grew, some might say by attracting marginally talented musicians who were searching for musical direction, record labels…
Sometimes I feign interest in living in the Soviet Union of the 1950s and '60s. This happens mostly when I'm shopping for toothpaste at my local supermarket, where the toothpaste aisle is as long as a football field. "I don't want so many choices," I say in my Abe Simpson voice, "because all these choices are stupid. I wish I lived in the USSR: Shopping for toothpaste wouldn't take so long." But I'm only kidding.
Now I see dozens of high-end audio manufacturers popping up every year, with new turntable companies leading the charge. Virtually all of them offer at least a half-dozen…
To help answer that last question, Winston has formed a close partnership with sound engineer Howard Johnston, who's recorded Van Morrison, Gene Clark, Bill Frisell, and Primus, among many others. It's been crucial to his career. When I pose questions about how he records his music, Winston's standard answer is "Ask Howard." Johnston has been recording Winston since the 1984 piano-and-voice recording Winston made with actress Meryl Streep telling the children's story The Velveteen Rabbit. Johnston says he uses an analog path to record Winston, but digital gear and software for editing and…
The very last chore was to fit the platter with the supplied cork platter mat, which brings me to the second thing that impressed me about the Kubrick: Its platter bearing and platter are so beautifully machined that, looking at the platter from the side, I couldn't tell when it was spinning. I could detect no platter wobble—zero. To put into proper context this often underemphasized aspect of turntable construction: Lack of unwanted movement in a device whose sole job is to measure, at correct and steady speed, bumps in the record groove that range in size down to that of dust-mite feces…
Geri Allen, one of the great jazz pianists, died on Tuesday, of cancer, at the terribly young age of 60. She made wondrous, rousing, deeply felt music from all eras and styles, with collaborators of all stripes or solo. She could be raucous or elegant, bluesy or lyrical, sometimes all four at once.
Ornette Coleman played with only a handful of pianists through his long and adventurous career (he didn't want to be bound by chords), but in the mid-1990s, he made an album, Sound Museum with a quartet that included a piano part (for the first time in nearly 40 years), and he asked Allen to…
Kalman Rubinson previewed Roon 1.3 in July 2017 (Vol.40 No.7):
The Roon Music Server ($119 for a one-year subscription, $499 for life) is a flashy and fascinating product with a good bloodline. The minds behind it developed the Sooloos Music Server System, which became the Meridian Sooloos and blew many of our minds. I've played with the Roon software on and off since its release in 2015, but found it unintuitive in many ways. That surprised me—I'd thought that the original Sooloos system was the epitome of logical and intuitive operation. But the world of music streaming has changed. Our…
Friday June 30, 4pm until late, Toronto dealer Angie's Audio Corner/American Sound of Canada (12261 Yonge Street, Richmond Hill, ON L4E 3M7, Canada) is holding its 5th Annual Party.
We have lots to celebrate, says Angie:
5 years in the store's corner location with the newly remodeled annex.
40 years for Angie in the audio industry and still loving it.
60 years. Yes, Angie is now 60 years old, but still doing what she loves and having fun.
4 years: Stella, Angie's dog, turns 4 this month.
150 years for Canada—Happy Canada Day.
There…
It has been said that the high-end audio industry has a weakness which perversely has also helped to maintain its growth. The evolutionary process whereby designs are improved, upgraded, and supplanted at regular intervals keeps everyone interested, and of course affords reviewers useful employment. On the other hand, once a purchase has been made there may be resentment on the part of owners who find that, by the time their choice has become established and awarded sufficient review recommendation, a product upgrade is already in the pipeline.
Announcements of such improvements are…
It's been going on for a while now: Despite support for multichannel in audio/video receivers and A/V processors priced from as little as $200 to $30,000, there are still very few offerings that cater to the music listener. They may offer stereo-only streaming features through their USB or Ethernet inputs, but these inputs don't see your multichannel files. To handle such files, they would require you to add a music server with HDMI output. However, I know of no turnkey music servers that will output multichannel audio via HDMI. Sure, servers based on PCs and Macs will output lossless, high-…