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Turnbull has many devotees in the high-end community, and a handful of detractors, as anyone has when they're doing something fresh and new. No matter: When you meet him, it quickly becomes apparent that he isn't driven by praise. Rather, he's driven by a desire to introduce a receptive young…

Jazz and cooking have much in common. Both require fearlessness tempered by restraint, attentiveness married to flexibility.

If one had to assign a culinary counterpart to the vibraphone, it would be paprika: versatile, emphasizing the subtlety of other flavors while bringing its…

There's a quiet irony in Brandi Carlile's decision to release an intimate, inward-looking album after the visibility she's built up over the past several years. Returning to Myself feels like a step inward, her own personal Nebraska. Like that Springsteen album, Returning slows the pace, strips away excess, and allows Carlile and listeners to catch their collective breath.

After spending time with Joni Mitchell…

If not for the skill level of the producers and engineers who ensure recordings are able to get to the finish line, we may never have heard some of the best music of the past century-plus sound as good as it does.

To get us further inside the recording process, the organizers of Studio Confidential, a month-long series of events that have been held at the Loreto Theater in the Sheen Center for Thought and Culture on Bleecker Street in New York City, have been…

The popular Mendelssohn begins forthrightly but uneasily: The main lines ought to stand in sharper relief. As the harmonies become more conflicted, the sonority has nowhere to go. After a minute or so, everyone settles in, though the dry, unalluring tone remains a problem throughout. The players shift moods on a dime, with unmarked Luftpausen effectively separating the sections. The agitated development, wandering into…

I started writing "On the Road Again" pieces for Stereophile in 2022 (footnote 1). They are European jazz travelogues. The motivation behind them is to inspire others to make similar treks. No one needs an excuse to go to Europe. But European jazz festivals are a great thing to build a trip around. There are hundreds every year. Italy alone has more than 150. Many feature American headliners, but virtually all have programs filled with European artists.

In the 21st century, European jazz has exploded.…

Original Quad ESL speakers and KT66-based Quad II amplification are, for me, the starting points of a British sound I have devoted a major portion of my audio life to exploring and continue to find satisfying.

I like British amplifiers because they emphasize drive, palpability, and tonal realism. Tone, transients, textures, and tempi are…

A big hi-fi show is a great…

In common with all recent Quad amplifiers, the Platina is a proven class-AB design powered, in this instance, by a large and compliantly mounted 630VA toroidal transformer that feeds separate PSUs for its left- and right-channel output stages. There's necessarily some protection built in for when the output devices are driving very low-impedance loads. The dynamic power profile (fig.1) shows the 2 ohm delivery reaching 661W but falling back to 405W into 1 ohm as the Platina's 20A current limit is reached.

Otherwise, this amplifier competes head-on with…