Fifty years, man! By the time you read this, the dates will have passed during which promoters had hoped to stage a 50th anniversary Woodstock Festivalsadly, they failed in their effortand Woodstock mania will have peaked and diedeven pieces of the Woodstock stage are available to buy (I have two!). And yet the artifact that will always remain at the center of the era-defining event is this extensive and amazing audio document that the organizers had the foresight to record.
Almost exactly 50 years after the July 1969 release of the first Yes album, Anderson visited my house for an afternoon of talk and listening to music. We listened to some old Yes tracks, some favorites from other artists, and several from his most recent album, 1000 Hands: Chapter One, which was 30 years in the making.
In 1967, the year the Byrds would fire him, David Crosby sits in a rooma small space, from the sound of itwith a cheap microphone and a recorder of dubious merit. He's improvising some jazzy, open-tuned acoustic guitar strumming, adding nonlexical vocables on top. He then files away the resulting tapeclearly ahead of its time and of no use to his bandmatesfor 50 years.
Sure, why not? Go ahead and send me the DAC, I thought. I'd love to hear what something covered in audio fur sounds like.
The sound of Steve Tibbetts's guitar music is uniqueone need hear only a measure or two of his new album to identify the distinct tang of his playing. Common wisdom is that a guitarist's sound is in the hands and fingers, but Tibbetts has another trick: his weathered, 50-year-old Martin D12-20 12-string acoustic guitar.
First, for the entry level, is the new Sundara planar headphone which will retail for $499. Josselin Marvie from HiFiMan explains that "We spent some time designing this headphone to be more reliable and comfortable, so we have a new headband design which is more lightweight as well. We also have new cups, and everything has been redesigned to make the headphone last longer."
