LATEST ADDITIONS

Ariel Bitran

Getting Back into Vinyl, Part 2

Ariel Bitran Aug 13, 2012

“Hi, Ariel? This is Steve Cohen at In Living Stereo. I just opened up your turntable box. There are some sweatpants in here. Oh, and the tonearm cable is missing.”

“MISSING?”

“Yes.”

Ariel Bitran

Getting Back into Vinyl, Part 1.5

Ariel Bitran Aug 10, 2012

Kyle studied Film and TV at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts. He had a freakish obsession with penguins and spent hours at a time glued to his Macbook watching downloads of Aaron Sorkin’s The West Wing. I studied marketing at NYU’s Stern School of Business, counted down the days till the release of Guitar Hero I for Playstation Two, and once paid $20 for a broken drummer monkey known as Trick Star because I wanted to feel free and alive. In the summer of 2006, Kyle and I decided to start listening to vinyl. Why? Because vinyl was cool, and we were not.

Stephen Mejias

U-Turn Audio’s $150 Orbit turntable

Stephen Mejias Aug 10, 2012

Stereophile’s editorial assistant, Ariel Bitran, directed my attention to this USA Today article on an interesting turntable from U-Turn Audio, a company founded by three close friends&#151Ben Carter, Bob Hertig, and Peter Maltzan&#151all in their early 20s, who were tired of playing records on cheap USB turntables.

Fred Kaplan

Ella & Louis Again, Quality Records Pressing, 45rpm

Fred Kaplan Aug 10, 2012

Last December, I posted a swooning review of Acoustic Sounds' two-disc, 45rpm, 200-gram Quality Records Pressings of Ella & Louis, the 1956 Verve album of duets with Ella Fitzgerald and Louis Armstrong (backed by Oscar Peterson, Ray Brown, Herb Ellis, and Buddy Rich), which may be the most delightful vocal album everand, in this pressing, perhaps the most amazing-sounding.

Now Chad Kassem, the reissue house's proprietor, has come out with the 1957 sequel, Ella & Louis Again (same cast, but with Louis Bellson replacing Rich on drums, for the better). It's swoon time all over. . .

Headphone Reviews InnerFidelity

The Inexpensive and Terrific Noontec Zoro

Tyll Hertsens Aug 10, 2012

This story originally appeared at InnerFidelity.com

Out of the blue I get an email from an operations and logistics manager at an electronics distribution company I've never heard of about a headphone made by a company I've never heard of claiming these $100 Chinese Beats Solo look-alike headphones will likely make it to my Wall of Fame. Yeah, right.

Then I heard them.

The Fifth Element Music and Recording Features

The Fifth Element #73

John Marks Aug 09, 2012

Don't waste yourself in rejection, nor bark against the bad, but chant the beauty of the good.Ralph Waldo Emerson

The Fantasy Symphony Season competition, announced in this column in February, has been a smashing successas far as I'm concerned, it's the most worthwhile write-in competition yet. The 13 winning entries and one hors-concours laureate are posted in the follow-up to February's column on Stereophile's website. The update lists the compositions in each winning Fantasy Symphony Season entry. I created a spreadsheet to determine the most popular composers and works in the winning entries.

Stand Loudspeaker Reviews Budget Component Reviews Headphone Reviews The Entry Level

The Entry Level #20

Stephen Mejias Aug 09, 2012

It was another flawlessly beautiful spring morning, and I was in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, to help John Atkinson pack up the Lansche Audio 5.1 loudspeakers ($41,000/pair). John had only just completed his listening and bench tests (see his review in the July issue), and was not ready to let go of the lovely Lanschesbut the speakers would be picked up by a trucking company that afternoon and sent to our cover photographer, Eric Swanson, in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Each Lansche measures 40.9" tall by 10.1" W by 19.3" D and weighs 167.5 lbspacking them and securing them to a shipping pallet is definitely a two-man job. In our case, that job required a lot of wheezing, a little bleeding, and just the right amount of cursing. And because it was only 11am when we met, we were obliged to accomplish the task without the aid of beera crying shame, if you ask mebut we handled it in our usual, manly fashion.

Fred Kaplan

The Thelonious Monk Quartet: The Complete Columbia Studio Albums Collection

Fred Kaplan Aug 08, 2012

In a sense, I understand why Thelonious Monk's albums on Columbia, recorded between 1962 and 1968, have been neglected. His earlier sessions, on Blue Note, Prestige, and Riverside, were the ones where he introduced his classic songs, developed his eccentric style, and played with star-studded rhythm sections. The six quartet albums for Columbia feature a total of just six new Monk songs. And they find him playing with a working band of accompanistsno John Coltrane, Coleman Hawkins, Johnny Griffin, Art Blakey, or Roy Haynes here.

CAS 2012

CAS 3: Coming Home

Jason Victor Serinus Aug 08, 2012

You can interpret the title of this blog in many ways. Speaking personally as a Bay Area resident, it means coming into the home stretch of the California Audio Show knowing that there are a host of dealers, distributors, and manufacturers in Northern California who are in love with music and dedicated to high quality music reproduction. It also means, in the literal sense, that CAS 3 included a number of systems that got to the heart of music reproduction.

One of those was Bob Hodas' room. Shown in part with recording, mixing, and mastering engineer Piper Payne. . .

CAS 2012

CAS3: It Just Got Better

Jason Victor Serinus Aug 07, 2012

I beg your indulgence. CAS 2012 gave Northern Californians their first opportunity to hear Wilson Audio's imposing Alexandria XLF loudspeaker ($199,500/pair). The latest and grandest statement of Dave Wilson's engineering acumenhe designed the crossover and supervised the voicing, for startersthe 97dB-sensitive Alexandria XLF powered by the 600W VTL Siegfried Series II Reference monoblocks ($65,000/pair), together with the not-really-necessary but it sure makes its mark in such a large room Wilson Audio Thor's Hammer subwoofer ($21,500) and a front end whose cutting-edge technology and pocket-cutting pricing could make many a grown woman and man weep, produced some of the most stunning sound I have ever heard at an audio show.