This is great news! Ween's 1994 classic "Chocolate and Cheese" is getting a deluxe, expanded 30th anniversary reissue including original double LP plus fifteen unreleased demos. Bernie Grundman ...well, read the press release below:Since its debut 30 years ago, Ween’s Chocolate and Cheese has become an alternative rock classic and a highwater mark for Gene and Dean Ween’s polished songwriting and irreverent humor. To celebrate the anniversary, Rhino... Read More

Los Angeles, CA (June 18, 2024) – Craft Recordings announces the final batch of 2024 reissues for its Original Jazz Classics series, beloved by collectors and critics alike. The latest reissues include Clark Terry Quartet & Thelonious Monk’s In Orbit, Mal Waldron’s The Quest, Thelonious Monk Septet’s Monk’s Music, Blue Mitchell’s Blue’s Moods, and Cal Tjader’s Latin Kick. All of these titles can be pre-ordered today. As with previous releases, these new reissues... Read More

Taking a lunch break during a mid 1990’s Consumer Electronics Show, Allen Perkins, then working for turntable manufacturer SOTA and I writing for The Absolute Sound, exited The Riviera Hotel, site of the “high end” exhibits, and took a walk along Las Vegas Boulevard, better known as “The Strip”. The west side of the street then was mostly demolished brick rubble behind chain link fencing. Among the few buildings on that side of the street was the old blue backlit... Read More

Deutsche Grammophon’s outstanding, AAA-mastered Original Source Vinyl Series continues apace with four more titles just announced, slated for release on October 4th. 

Like previous releases, these are all mastered and cut directly from the original 4-track master tapes by Rainer Maillard and Sidney C. Meyer at Emil Berliner Studios, incorporating 2-tracks of ambient hall information recorded at the original sessions.  (For the full technical background on this series I refer you to my review of the first batch here).

Musicians from Handel to Jackson Browne to Philip Glass to The Beach Boys, to name but a few, have had water on their minds, which is not the same as having water on the brain. True, Glass only got as far as the beach, but that's close enough. Add bassist/composer Stephan Crump to the list. He's recorded two albums with the Rosetta Trio, an unusual grouping of bass and two guitars. Here, he's composed a sixty seven minute long suite for an... Read More

Handmade in San Diego California, Wrensilva's eye-catching custom cabinetry houses a modernized version of a 50's/60's era console stereo. Revered among the attaché case carrying corporate climbers of the late '50s and early '60s, the form factor lost its hipness as the JFK era gave way to assassination, war and chaos, bringing with it a more austere, raw component esthetic.Wrensilva is one of a few companies riding the vinyl revival wave,... Read More

David Bowie’s self-produced 1974 album Diamond Dogs is undoubtedly the worst of his run from Hunky Dory through Scary Monsters (Pin Ups doesn’t count). As a messy exit from his glam period, it compiles ambitious ideas with less than ideal execution, yet in a sense, it still seems unfairly maligned.Everyone knows the story by now: Bowie, on stage at the Hammersmith Odeon in 1973, “killed” Ziggy Stardust and thus freed himself for whatever came next. Ready for even... Read More

If you’re looking for 35 minutes of riveting calm, this is the album for you. And if “riveting calm” strikes you as oxymoronic, well, the album fits that in several ways. It consists of duets between trumpeter Wadada Leo Smith and pianist Amina Claudine Myers, both 82 years old but as youthful in spirit as anyone around. They’re veterans of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM), known for its avant-garde jazz artists, but Myers has long... Read More

Until 1972, David Robert Jones’ career was a classic case of trial and flaw. After fronting various R&B groups in the mid-1960s with no success and avoiding confusion with the Monkees’ Davy Jones, he changed his last name to Bowie and embarked on a career under his new name. Testing various musical grounds to see what worked, his early output ranged from a music hall-tinged eponymous debut album to a novelty single about a laughing gnome. Bowie hit paydirt in 1969... Read More

Bill Minkowski's excellent annotation sets the stage. For various reasons both musical and otherwise Jaco and Joe Zawinul had a falling out and Jaco chose to devote more time to his Word of Mouth big band project (referred to a few times in the notes here as the "World of Mouth" big band). There's more detail in the annotation but the main result of the falling out was that Weather Report went one way and Pastorious (and drummer Peter Erskine) went... Read More

The "Ben Webster Quintet" was really Webster plus the Oscar Peterson Trio of Peterson, Herb Ellis and Ray Brown—a grouping Peterson once said was "the most stimulating"—plus Stan Levey on drums. It was a busy time for the Peterson Trio, which had played the previous day with Louis Armstrong in a session that probably resulted in Louis Armstrong Meets Oscar Peterson, though for some reason that wasn't released until 1959. The next day the trio... Read More

Jerome Sabbagh's newest album Heart arrived as I was packing for Munich so I couldn't play it before leaving. Upon returning, once my ears had unclogged from the plane flight, I got right to it, playing it on the MoFi Electronics Masterdeck turntable, a review of which is coming right up. First play I found the James Farber engineered at The Power Station live to 2-track analog tape recording wonderfully transparent, timbrally rich, and overall, sonically... Read More

In Part 2 of this look at Giulini's legendary recordings of the late symphonies of Anton Bruckner, we review Symphonies 8 and 9, and talk with Rainer Maillard at Emil Berliner Studios about what made the original recordings so successful (even though early digital), and how he went about freshening up the original masters to create these new vinyl reissues (which include the first ever vinyl release for the 9th Symphony). You can read Part 1 here.

Vera-Fi Audio’s “Vanguard Scout” shoebox-sized (but, which is DEFINITELY NOT an LS3/5A DESCENDANT OR EMULATION) loudspeaker, direct-to-consumer priced at $299 USD the pair, has had me ruminating on quite a few things.

Let’s get it out of the way: Dhani Harrison sounds a lot like his father George, except that he doesn’t sound like him at all. That’s a very "Beatley" way to begin the conversation, which lives within Dhani Harrison’s musicianship: the musical roots of his father are everywhere to be found, however Dhani has his own voice and musical vision.Though Dhani has a new album and project coming, his last solo release - Innerstanding (Hot Records/BMG) - released in... Read More

Carlo Maria Giulini is one of those conductors whose discography yields constant treasure, from his early Philharmonia recordings on EMI to his always surprising DG legacy with American orchestras like the Chicago Symphony and the Los Angeles Philharmonic.  A highlight of his later discography were the three Bruckner symphonies he recorded with the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra in the fabled Musikverein. In the first of two articles we talk about what made conductor and composer so unique in their own fields and time, and review this new remastering from the same team at Emil Berliner Studios responsible for the highly successful Original Source Series of vinyl reissues - this time working from digital master tapes. Part 2 includes an extensive interview with Rainer Maillard about how the original sessions were recorded, and how he went about improving the sound for this landmark reissue.

There was something comforting about espying the large black banner with white lettering proudly waving “Innovative Audio” on Manhattan’s East 58th street, just down the block from the big boys of high end retail like Bergdorf Goodman. At a moment when hifi stores can seem like an endangered species, Innovative, as it’s known, represents a welcome success story. Run by audio veteran Elliot Fishkin, its elegantly spartan showrooms can be quickly reached by taking an... Read More

Within a marathon 12-hour recording session at London’s Regent Sound on October 16, 1969, four young men from Birmingham recorded one of the most influential debut albums ever. There were barely any overdubs and not an abundance of takes, just four guys playing their live set together in a room with enough time to make it to the pub for last orders and head to Switzerland to play a gig (true story!). Black Sabbath figured they were adding an edgier twist to the... Read More

Directly following Munich High End 2024 I drove with a friend to Switzerland and the next day attended along with some of Hi Fiction's international distributors a classical music concert of music by Dietrich Buxtehude performed by a quartet at a small, ancient church hosted by HiFiction's Micha Huber. It was a pleasant respite from the four days of show craziness!The next day at the Turbenthal factory, the company introduced its new Magnifier moving coil... Read More