search

Miracle At Merkin

On Saturday, February 10, collaborative improvisation band Attention Screen gave its debut at Manhattan's Merkin Hall at Kaufmann Center to a packed house. The event was recorded by John Atkinson for release in May as a Stereophile CD, possibly followed by a limited-edition DVD-A.

All four musicians in Attention Screen are composers as well as consummate instrumentalists. As a result, each "song" is an investigation into sonic possibilities; the group might discuss a direction, but the pieces evolve completely in the moment. As John Atkinson observed onstage, during an…

Was Joyce Hatto the Greatest Pianist Almost Nobody Ever Heard Of?

Many people remember the 1990 Milli Vanilli scandal, in which Rob Pilatus and Fabrice Morvan were stripped of their Best New Artist Grammy award when it was revealed they hadn't actually performed on the disc. Of course, "borrowing" has long been a part of the pop music world, as George Harrison's "My Sweet Lord," Led Zeppelin's "Whole Lotta Love," and almost any sampled recording can attest; however, most listeners have probably assumed things are a lot more straightforward in the world of classical performance and recording.

Perhaps not, as waves of speculation erupt over allegations…

Grammy Rewards Audiophile Efforts

Recordings that deliver the benefits of the high-resolution SACD format scored big at the 49th Grammy Awards Ceremony, held February 11, 2007 in Los Angeles. Telarc, which issues virtually all its classical titles and some jazz/blues releases in both DSD-native CD and hybrid SACD surround formats, won two Grammys in classical categories and three in jazz. SFS Media, the in-house label of the San Francisco Symphony conducted by Michael Tilson Thomas, received two Grammys for the seventh release in its ongoing Mahler series of live, DSD-native hybrid surround SACDs. Last but not least, Harmonia…

Soundkeeper Recordings Debuts

Like most Stereophile readers, we have grown accustomed to seeing Barry Diament's name on superb-sounding recordings, since he has mastered albums by artists from AC/DC to Warren Zevon—and every letter in between. When the magazine still had its editorial offices in Santa Fe, Diament dropped by one afternoon to say hi, so now we feel like we can brag, "Hey, we know that guy!"

Recently, we received an email from Diament, announcing his new label, Soundkeeper Recordings. Diament wrote: "Soundkeeper is something I've dreamt about since my earliest days as an engineer. Although many know me…

The DRM Beat Goes On

We wrote last week about the increasingly heated debate over DRM copy protection, with everybody from Steve Jobs to the RIAA weighing in on the subject. This week was just as wild and whacky on that front.

On February 7, Eli Harari, CEO of SanDisk Corporation, published his own "open letter", which said, "the answer is to protect the interests of everyone involved, not to chastise rights holders for trying to safeguard the entertainment they create and support." Surprise, surprise, SanDisk has a solution to proprietary DRM protection systems: "Its Sansa line of MP3 players… connect to…

Wisdom Hires Herron

Carson City, NV loudspeaker company Wisdom Audio has been aggressively reorganizing itself lately. The first part of the program was re-uniting founder Tom Bohlender with erstwhile partner David Graebner to refine and perfect the magnetic planar speaker technology used by Wisdom's hybrid planar/dynamic loudspeakers. Then, in October 2006, the company appointed industry veteran Mark Glazier president. On February 8, Glazier announced that Jon Herron would join the company as vice president of sales.

Long-time industry watchers will remember Glazier and Herron as significant contributors to…

AMG: Full of Surprises

It's funny how things sometimes have to hit you in the head before you actually notice them. When Jon Iverson and I were cruising CES 2007 in January, we were stopped in our tracks by Sooloos's media server technology. Sooloos got the whole no-compromise audiophile approach, but what really knocked us out was how thoroughly it utilized the metadata from AMG (All Media Guide): Feed the the Sooloos server a disc and it would access AMG's database and collect artist name, album title, track names, cover art, genre, mood, side-man information, and even "associated concepts."

When Rob Darling…

Milwaukee Symphony Goes Binaural

The Milwaukee Symphony Orchestra, which last June became one of the first orchestras in the US to launch its own e-label, has now become the first orchestra to offer download-only binaural recordings. The binaural process, whose benefits are most apparent to those who listen through headphones, is based on the concept that the best way to reproduce the concert experience is to make sure that the recorded sounds that go into the listener's ears are as close as possible to what would be heard during an actual concert.

The MSO's binaural venture is the brainchild of Robert Levine, cochair of…

M&K: End of Story

John Atkinson forwarded a message to me on February 26 from reader Peter Clissold: "The Miller and Kreisel website is indicating that operations there are closed."

Sure enough, when I went there, the page had little more than the following message: "As of Thursday, Feb 22, the M&K Factory is closed. For more information regarding Ken Kreisel's recent decision to close the M&K Chatsworth factory after 34 years, please email Ken Kreisel directly."

Having spent some extremely pleasant hours interviewing Kreisel in 1997, I emailed him, asking what was going on.

In…

Updating Two Classics

Audiophiles of a certain age may very well have first tasted high-end sound by way of Linn's 1972 Sondek LP12 turntable and/or Naim's 1982 Nait integrated amplifier. There aren't many audio manufacturers that have managed to keep components in production for 25 years (35 for the Linn), but the two venerable British designs have been continuously upgraded over their lives, keeping them competitive.

Linn's approach to the LP12 has been to offer component upgrades to the original design. Over the years, the company has offered new motors, bearings, suspensions, power supplies—just about…