Smoke Sessions released nine CDs and one…
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With so few "major record labels" left standing, the music-loving audiophile stands alert for new venture—indies by the measure of indies—that offer very good music, excellent sound, and (is it too much to ask?) the occasional slab of vinyl. As first reported by Robert Baird in Stereophile's August 2014 issue, there is another worthy prospect worth celebrating: Smoke Sessions Records, the creation of Paul Stache, proprietor of Smoke Jazz Club on upper Broadway in NYC, where most of his discs are recorded live, with Stache himself at the controls.
His last record came out in 1974 so when a musical recluse like Shuggie Otis releases a new record, it’s an event. And while Live in Williamsburg, released on cheapie, left-of-center Los Angeles reissue label Cleopatra Records isn’t particularly well-recorded or intelligently packaged—there’s no recording date, engineer or producer listed— it’s still Shuggie, on the road in 2013, with a new band, The Rite, that includes his son Eric on guitar and his brother Nick on drums.
Shuggie, born Johnny Veliotes, is of course, the guitar virtuoso son of the great R&B bandleader Johnny Otis,…
Meridian's Bob Stuart at the Manhattan launch, showing the law of diminishing returns regarding increasing the sample rate of PCM encoding.
In almost 40 years of attending audio press events, only rarely have I come away feeling that I was present at the birth of a new world. In March 1979, I visited the Philips Research Center in Eindhoven, Holland and heard a prototype of what was to be later called the Compact Disc. In the summer of 1982, I visited Ron Genereux and Bob Berkovitz at Acoustic Research's lab near Boston and heard a very early example of the application of DSP to the…
John Atkinson has asked me to share my impressions of MQA. Currently, the only retail outlet in the United States able to demonstrate Meridian's MQA (Master Quality Authenticated) encoding/decoding system is Audio High in Mountain View, CA. Auditioned, during a return visit to the Bay Area, on the very same pair of Meridian DSP8000SE loudspeakers that I reported on last April, MQA impressed anew with each track.
Since Audio High had sent Meridian specific recordings of varying resolutions that it wished encoded, I mostly confined my auditioning to those tracks. Yevgeny (Eugene) Konnikov…
We all have secrets, and it's about time I came clean with one of mine: I enjoy recorded music more than concerts.
I know, that's a sacrilege—as a lifelong music lover, I'm supposed to relish the live event, with all of the energy and connection between musicians and audience that can happen only when they're all breathing the same air. That may be true for you, but not for me. I've harbored the guilt for years: When I take the plunge and attend a concert, I rarely enjoy the experience enough to justify the effort and expense.
My sense of guilt is magnified when the music is great…
In the 2014 November issue, my good friend Steve Guttenberg ("Communication Breakdown") got his facts mostly right: It's true that most listeners (including myself) accept far more distortion today than we did years ago. Many people have never heard a great stereo system—all they've heard are overdriven boom boxes, cheap stereos, and portable systems, and that's what they expect systems and music to sound like. And distortion is part of the sonic language of such musical genres as hip-hop, rap, and alternative rock.
Technically speaking, distortion is compression is distortion is…
Bob Dylan and the Band: The Bootleg Series Vol.11: The Basement Tapes Complete
Columbia/Legacy 88875016122 (6 CDs). 2014. Garth Hudson, orig. eng., tape restoration; Jeff Rosen, Steve Berkowitz, reissue prods.; Jan Haust, reissue prod., tape restoration; Peter J. Moore, tape restoration, remastering; Mark Wilder, prod., add'l. mastering. A-D? TT: 6:27:56
Music *****
Sonics ***
Columbia/Legacy 88875016122 (6 CDs). 2014. Garth Hudson, orig. eng., tape restoration; Jeff Rosen, Steve Berkowitz, reissue prods.; Jan Haust, reissue prod., tape restoration; Peter J. Moore, tape restoration, remastering; Mark Wilder, prod., add'l. mastering. A-D? TT: 6:27:56
Music *****
Sonics ***
The Basement Tapes are, as musician and archivist Sid Griffin writes in the liner notes, a kind of Rosetta Stone codifying the interface of myths, folktales, and song stories that inform the restless…
There may have been a time when vacuum tubes and microprocessors seemed strange bedfellows. But nowadays—given the countless digital processors with tubed output stages, and an even greater number of tubed amps and preamps whose insides are crawling with the latest solid-state devices—we're more or less used to the idea. Here as elsewhere, hybrids are no big deal.
The South Korean electronics manufacturer Allnic Audio seems determined to shock us out of our complacency with their first digital product, the D-5000 DHT—a 32-bit/384kHz DSD digital-to-analog processor that costs $11,900. Not…
The D-5000 also distinguished itself with the title track of PJ Harvey's Let England Shake (AIFF ripped from CD, Vagrant VR651). Compared with the Halide, the Allnic's frequency range stretched further in the direction of both extremes—although the increase in treble information was a mixed blessing with this selection, exposing the recording's top-end graininess—and the D-5000 presented the music with far greater force, especially in the lowest octaves. (The bass drum sounded much more menacing through the Allnic than the Halide.) Greater force—and dramatic nuance of every degree—was also…
Sidebar 1: Specifications
Description: Single-box digital-to-analog converter. Tube complement: four 3A5, one 5654, one 7233. Formats supported: all PCM and DSD codecs (AIFF, WAV, DSF, etc.). Incoming sample rates accepted (USB, AES/EBU, coax): 44.1, 48, 88.2, 96, 176.4, 192, 352.8, 384kHz; DSD 64 & 128. Digital inputs: 1 optical (TosLink), 1 USB, 1 AES/EBU (XLR), 2 coaxial (RCA). Analog outputs: 1 pair balanced (XLR), 1 pair single-ended (RCA). Output: 2.5V RMS. Output impedance: 150 ohms. Frequency range: 20Hz–20kHz. THD: <0.1%.
Dimensions: 16.75" (430mm) W by 5.85" (150mm)…