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In its day, the Muse label featured a roster of significant artists including Sonny Stitt, Cedar Walton, and Kenny Barron. Muse never acquired cult status like Blue Note and ECM. Why? For starters, it lacked their sound quality and collectable cover art.

But time changes everything. Fifty years on, Muse now looks like a repository of…

Richard Ashcroft, the opening act for the new global Oasis reunion tour, remains forever linked to The Verve. That band's blend of Brit pop and neo-psychedelic haze gave Ashcroft a wide emotional canvas to explore. But when he struck out on his own in 2000 with Alone with Everybody, his music took on deeper resonance. That record was a critic and fan favorite, full of sonic things to explore.

In the years since,…

Capitalizing on the modest buzz created by their debut, Talking Heads: 77—"Psycho Killer" got some FM airplay and notoriety—the band hit the…

I used my Audio Precision SYS2722 system to examine the M10 V3's measured performance. Other than the maximum gain being 8dB higher than that of the original M10, at 37.5dB into 8 ohms, the analog line-input performance was very similar to that of the original M10. The source impedance was still impressively low. The maximum power was 150Wpc into 8 ohms (21.75dBW) and 290Wpc into 4 ohms (21.6dBW) compared with the M10 V1's maximum power of 155Wpc into 8 ohms (21.9dBW) and 295Wpc into 4 ohms (21.7dBW). These powers were obtained at 1% THD+noise; the specified continuous…

In vinyl's heyday, Roy Matthews ran EMI's record-pressing plant in Hayes, Middlesex, in the UK. He even had a hand in designing and building new presses for the company. But when EMI, like most other record labels, shut down their plant and scrapped most of their presses, Matthews retired. In 2000, when Matthews was in his 80s, he was lured out of retirement and found himself once again, to his surprise and delight, running a pressing plant using refurbished presses, many of his own design. You can read my interview with him here, and see photos of the facility,…

Between the record grooves and the sound coming out of the speakers, everything is electrical, but music always ends—and usually…

In practice, the core design and performance metrics of the 600.2 integrated amplifier show closer parallels with Musical Fidelity's four-box Nu-Vista PRE/PAS pre/power combination, itself inspired by the legacy Titan amplifier, than it does with its larger sibling, the Nu-Vista 800.2 integrated.

The 600.2 may be the lower-powered model, but, with power ratings of 160W into 8 ohms and 300W into 4 ohms and in practice delivering 200Wpc and 325Wpc into those loads, respectively (ref. 1kHz at <1% THD), it could never be described correctly as low-powered…

In his introduction to this review, Martin Colloms describes nuvistors as "small, metal-clad vacuum tubes introduced in 1959 to compete with bipolar-junction transistors." Martin's description is perfectly accurate, but there is more to be said. The nuvistor was created to overcome the shortcomings inherent in run-of-the-mill vacuum tubes: size, reliability, microphony, and so on. If you've heard of vacuum tubes on fighter jets, they were probably nuvistors. The Russian MiG-25, which was famously flown to Japan by a defecting pilot in 1976, used…