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The Sacred Veil is a commissioned piece but also a labor of love. The cantata sets poems by Whitacre's friend, Charles Anthony Silvestri, who was coming to terms with the premature death of his wife, Julie. The score also sets three of Julie's writings and two of the composer's own poems.

Whitacre's "modern Romantic" idiom takes in agreeable dissonances for expressive effect. His vocal…

Maria Schneider, the most acclaimed jazz composer of our time, has been an impressionist, devoted to preserving moments of her life when the sensual and the spiritual became indivisible. Her new double album, Data Lords, is different—or rather, half of it is. The title refers to big-data companies whose binary…

Releasing a second album so soon after a Mercury Prize–nominated debut is the kind of action a band from a previous decade would have taken—no waiting three years between releases as is common today. But then, the brand of rock produced by Dublin's five-piece Fontaines D.C., which received much positive press for last year's debut, Dogrel, has been compared to the post-punk of the late '70s, when frequent releases were common.

Speed…

Though complicated and time-consuming, Wayne's methodology produced outstanding results. His goal was not just to clean a record but to restore it to as-new condition by removing from it every contaminant found on and, in some cases, in the vinyl—impurities baked into the groove…

Obviously, this half-hour procedure is not a casual record-cleaning process to be used after returning from a garage sale with a nice haul!

According to Kirmuss, even though new records are assumed to be free from baked-in cleaning fluids, the heat and pressure of the pressing process can cause mold-release compound—a chemical added to the PVC to make records easier to remove from…

What I remember most from that period was how much I loved Phil Rizzuto and Yankee baseball on AM radio and how often I burned myself on the soldering iron.

Except for each brand's unique wiring layout, chassis construction, and finish, the tube amps I repaired were mostly boring. Circuit…

The Sunvalley SV-EQ1616D uses a simple, conventional, capacitor-resistor (CR) RIAA equalizer with two switchable inputs and six selectable presets to match the various equalization curves used in past and…

Krystall is a veteran of hundreds of recording sessions, in all music genres and media types. You have heard his playing even if you don't know it; in this respect, he's typical of other world-class musicians you may not have heard of:…

Krystall: We started out in 1979, and we would book four hours of studio time and record a whole album. If you could edit, you could make a record—razor blade, cut the tape. The greatest records ever made were done by people with watches. The session is called, people show up at the same time, they record it, and they leave. Everything that's done is done to the clock. When you have three hours to do it, all of a sudden you become really focused. Money is at stake, and everyone's career, so…

Krystall's home is also a studio, with a Steinway L piano and a 1964 Ludwig drum kit in the living room. The adjacent music library serves as his mastering room, recording booth, and office. There, Krystall has a pair of Klipsch RP-600M loudspeakers driven by a Schiit Vidar amplifier, his most recent hi-fi purchase. In the living room are a pair of BC Acoustique floorstanders, driven by a Counterpoint SA 220 hybrid amplifier. Preamplification is Conrad-Johnson's PV-11. For a small-speaker viewpoint during mastering, Marty uses a pair of small, self-powered PSB…