Music and Recording Reviews

Adam Birnbaum: Preludes; Simón Willson: Good Company; Joshua Redman: Where Are We.

Weinberg: Dawn, Op.60, Symphony No.12, Op.114; Nielsen: Violin Concerto, Flute Concerto, Clarinet Concerto; Walker: Sinfonias 1–5.

Richard Rodgers & Oscar Hammerstein: Oklahoma!; Postcards From Italy: Italian Music for Film; British Piano Concertos: Works by Jacob, Addison, and Rubbra; Bruckner: Symphony 7; Tan Dun: Buddha Passion.

Johnathan Blake: Passage; Mark Turner Quartet: Live at the Village Vanguard; Darcy James Argue's Secret Society: Dynamic Maximum Tension.

To misquote Morrissey, some knobs are better than others. The Manley Neo-Classic 300B amplifiers that I've been listening to, for example, have a knob marked "feedback" that goes from 0 to 10. I've learned so much from using it that I've come to believe that if your amp doesn't have such a knob, it should. You see, the higher you set this control, the better the amp will measure. Applying more global negative feedback to these amps lowers their nonlinear distortion and noisefloor, increases their bandwidth, renders them less sensitive to the speaker's impedance variations and otherwise makes them more stable and efficient. In fact, by applying lots of feedback to an amplifier, it's possible to reduce distortion to barely measurable levels.

So what's the problem? Well, a few turns of the knob suggest that negative feedback isn't as useful as it appears on paper.

ABC: The Lexicon of Love; Buddy & Julie Miller: In The Throes; Juliana Hatfield Sings ELO.

Hermitage Piano Trio: Spanish Impressions; Mahler: Symphony No.1; Maurice Ravel: L'Heure espagnole • Bolero; Melody Moore: Remembering Tebaldi.