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Margaret Glaspy is a Brooklyn-based singer/songwriter with a spare style and skill on acoustic guitar. I'd never heard of her before discovering this remarkable album on Qobuz.

I say "discovering," but it didn't require a deep dive; this was one of a small handful of albums Qobuz chose to feature with its August 7 releases. If the other streaming services feature it as prominently, it…

The Sharp Notes is owned by Evan Toth. It carries new and pre-owned vinyl as well as CDs, a curated selection of books, a few T-shirts, and a small selection of audio equipment: a couple of turntables from Audio-Technica, including the Bluetooth-equipped AT-LP70XBT (the…

Mack Avenue/Two Lions is a small, specialized imprint that puts out previously unreleased recordings from the Oscar Peterson estate. The label's most ambitious project to date is World Tour, available in six-LP and four-CD sets containing over four hours of music. The title is metaphorical. The collection draws upon…

Fig.27 Jitter Spectrum, Bitwise System Zero processing 1kHz sinewave at 0dBFS (linear frequency scale, 0dB = 226.8ns).…

I finally…

I pose a lot of questions to my friend Michael Trei, and whenever I ask one, I preface it by saying, "And here's my dumb question." What I mean is, I am sure the answer is so obvious that everyone except me knows it.

Today I asked two turntable gurus, Chad Stelly of Acoustic Sounds and our own Spin Doctor Trei, "How much should a remastered recording sound like a…

While many of those setups are now kind of a blur, I still clearly remember my very first cartridge installation job back in 1973, when I was 11. A new cartridge wasn't something my dad and I had planned on, but when we decided it was time to upgrade from our ancient Monacor SMX-50A tube receiver to…

The Rockport Lynx loudspeakers were measured in a large conference room 11'11" H × 25'3" L × 15'8" W, on an Outline ET250R2-3D turntable with a loudspeaker stand, and with an accelerometer. The first reflection was off the floor at about 6.5ms, or 150Hz. The loudspeaker was measured at tweeter height, at a distance of 1m. From the center of the tweeter to the floor was approximately 72".

The equipment used for the measurements was a GRAS 40BD ¼" microphone and a 26CB preamp, with an SCM2 measurement ¼" microphone, a seven-microphone array at 15° vertical…

Drummer Cindy Blackman Santana sings along to music from Herbie Hancock, Davis, John Coltrane, Tony Williams, and Wayne Shorter to get her creative juices going. "I do that all the time!" she exclaimed. "It's like breathing to me. It's second nature." Blackman Santana was sharing some of the methodology behind her not-so-secret sonic sauce during a Zoom interview conducted just a few hours before she headed out to a soundcheck for one of her other gigs, as the drummer in her husband Carlos Santana's band.

"Listening to the masters influences my playing,…

Toward the end of this column, Herb writes, "My current new-production Western Electric 300Bs have strong blue clouds and have worked perfectly since 2021. These Ray Tubes Reserve 300Bs have blue clouds just above the smoked part of their glass; I take that as a good sign."

Is it a good sign, or isn't it? Yes, it's a good sign, but it's worth thinking about why.

When something glows inside a vacuum tube, it's because electrons are colliding with atoms, ions, or molecules. Energetic electrons bump into them, putting them in a higher energy…