Michel Petrucciani Trio: Jazz Club Montmartre - CPH 1988
Petrucciani, piano; Gary Peacock, bass; Roy Haynes, drums
Storyville 1038541 (CD; available as LP). 1988/2025. Christian Brorsen, prod.; Ole Matthiessen, Lars Palsig, engs.
Performance ****½
Sonics ***½
If you saw Michel Petrucciani live, you came away changed. To witness this tiny, severely disabled person (who had to be carried to the piano bench) unleashing torrents of brilliant piano extravagance and grinning with joy was to believe anew in the invincibility of the human spirit. Osteogenesis imperfecta, a rare…
Wet Leg: Moisturizer
Domino Recording Company (auditioned as CD). 2025. Dan Carey, prod.; Alexis Smith, Adele Phillips, engs.
Performance ****
Sonics *****
Wet Leg—the duo of Rhian Teasdale and Hester Chambers—made a splash in 2021 with the viral success of their debut single "Chaise Longue." Much of the early conversation focused on their playful irreverence, in sound and persona. With the release of their sophomore album Moisturizer, that image begins to shift toward something more layered and musically ambitious.
For this outing, Teasdale and Chambers expanded Wet…
At the beginning of last month's As We See It, I wrote that I've lately been focused on "analog things." I proceeded to write about refurbishing and modding my old McIntosh tuner. That's "analog thing" #1.
So, what other analog things have I been focused on? Here's #2: I looked around and found no truly satisfying explanation of the skating force. In the wild—in hi-fi discussion forums, for example—you should expect most of what you read on this topic to be wrong, but it's not just that: Even tonearm manufacturers are often vague on this point.
The skating force cannot be…
Vivid Audio announced the Giya Cu (Copper), a third-generation update to the Giya loudspeaker line that adds copper-capped upper and lower midrange drivers and revised enclosures.
The company says the copper caps lower second- and third-harmonic distortion, with a 20dB reduction in the latter. The enclosures are described as lighter, stiffer, and smoother than prior Giya models; in the G3 Cu and G4 Cu the tapered tubes now sit within the main enclosure, yielding a simpler profile consistent with the G2 and G1 Spirit.
The series comprises four four-way, five-driver models: Giya…
PSB Speakers just launched the SubSeries BP7 powered subwoofer, a compact sealed model with a bipolar driver array and a 350W Universal class-D (UCD) amplifier. Pricing is $1199 USD (tariff adjusted) and $1399 CAD.
The design targets clean, controlled low frequencies in small spaces. A sealed, portless cabinet is specified to avoid port noise and resonances, while opposing drivers leverage the benefits of force-canceling to reduce cabinet vibration and distortion.
Compact dual-opposed subwoofers suit living rooms and two-channel systems. The small footprint format favors placement…
Mola Mola has announced the Ossetra, a full-bridge class-D monoblock rated at 350W/8Ω in a half-size chassis. The world premiere is October 10, with shipping slated for early December.
Positioned as the next step for the company’s Trajectum platform, Ossetra adds a redesigned power supply said to cut noise and boost both dynamic and continuous output power. Increased output-stage current aims to drive practically any load, and the full-bridge topology keeps the signal path fully balanced from input to output.
Mola Mola cites new discrete class A gain stages…
Photo: Shane Buettner.
I was in Seattle last February to take part in one of the popular "Music Matters" events promoted by retailer Definitive Audio. Definitive's Mark Ormiston and Craig Abplanalp and their crew really know how to produce a memorable evening for both their customers and the manufacturers who fly in to demonstrate their gear. I was there to talk about . . . guess what?
Rather than fly home the next morning, I stuck around for a few days to do some serious record shopping.
My friend Shane Buettner, former editor of Home Theater magazine and currently…
There are faster ways to start an online fight, but not many. Say "$10,000 DAC" and watch audio-forum commenters descend like pigeons on a dropped hot dog, flapping and furious. They'll tell you the designers are crooks, the buyers are dupes, and anyone not DIY-ing with AliExpress kits is a poseur.
Building high-end hi-fi equipment costs serious coin, but you wouldn't know it from the Anger, Smugness, and Rigidity found on certain objectivist audio forums, where anything north of, say, $5000 is deemed a ripoff or a status buy. To posters in those snark-infested waters, expensive equals…
Zack Lober: So We Could Live
Lober, bass; Jasper Blom, tenor saxophone; Suzan Veneman, trumpet; Sun-Mi Hong, drums
ZenneZ ZR2025015 (CD). 2025. Ben Van Gelder, prod.; Alessandro Mazzieri, eng.
Performance ****
Sonics ****½
Jazz people often hear about the vitality of the Netherlands jazz scene. But if they are American jazz people, they may not hear a lot of evidence. So We Could Live is the evidence.
The leader, bassist Zack Lober, is actually from Montreal. He holds a master's degree from the Manhattan School of Music and had a 14-year career as a sideman in…
Forty years ago, when I was a much younger man, I was a strong dude. I recall one day in 1986, soon after I started working at Sound by Singer, when Krell cofounder Dan D'Agostino drove down from his factory in Connecticut to deliver a load of amplifiers and preamps for us to sell. As the new guy, I was expected to do the grunt work. At the time, Krell only made about a half-dozen products, and the KSA-100 was the biggest and heaviest, at around 120lb in the box. After watching me pick up a few KSA-100 amplifiers, heft them onto my shoulder, and carry them downstairs to the stockroom, Dan…
