By the time the 1980s rolled around in Japan, rock music had gone through numerous cycles of boom and bust, starting with Beatles-inspired pop in the 1960s (aka “Group Sounds”), to Hendrix-tinged blues covers, to the Japanese language folk rock movement active in the mid 70s. The youth of Japan, now beginning to feel the downstream effects of the postwar economic miracle were clamoring for a new creative artistic movement to supplant the faded glory of globalized... Read More

It makes sense that in 2010 Tom Petty would want to go back to basics. What does a rockstar do when he’s attained the heights that a wistful bedroom troubadour could only dream of? It was time for Tom and the Heartbreakers to tune up the expensive vintage instruments, make some noise in their famed Los Angeles rehearsal studio, “The Clubhouse” and capture the no-frills results. It was a return to their roots, an experiment to make sure the magical mojo was still... Read More

On this video I tell the story behind the new vinyl record I'm releasing along with my friend Robin Wyatt, on newly formed Liam Records. Bob Ludwig mastered the Duke Markos engineered recording that we collectively mixed with input from "Tone Poet" Joe Harley. Caelan Cardello is an exciting young pianist. Only after we decided the live performance deserved to be released on record did we find out that Caelan has quite a following in the New York area... Read More

October 20th, 2023—Deutsche Grammophon today announced the next releases in its highly regarded and well reviewed "The Original Source" series. The titles are "Tchaikovsky Symphony No. 4" with Claudio Abbado & The Vienna Philharmonic, Richard Strauss "Tod und Verkärung/Vier letzte Lieder", Gundula Janowitz, soprano, Herbert von Karajan & The Berlin Philharmonic and a three LP set of recordings by William Steinberg and the Boston... Read More

In 1957, Robert "Mack" McCormick began working as a cab driver in Houston, Texas. He was twenty-seven, and to that point, his life had been one of debilitating depression, rootlessness, dissatisfaction, and failure. He and his mother had moved twenty times before he was sixteen. Listening to jazz and big band broadcasts was the joy of his drab and lonely life. At fifteen, he hitchhiked to New Orleans to meet Orin Blackstone, who was compiling Index To Jazz,... Read More

From its late '60's beginnings to today, progressive rock has always had cult status. Musical boundary pushing lengthy arrangements replete with elements of jazz and classical provide challenges for mainstream audiences. Therefore, a prog rock band's desire for commercial appeal then and now is often at odds with its creations and with the execs at the labels to which they are signed.

Analog Solutions SL, Fuerteventura, Spain, October 16, 2023- Analog Solutions SL (formerly Swedish Analog Technologies AB) is thrilled to announce it has chosen MIBS Distro NA to manage all aspects of SAT's distribution, marketing and brand management in North America, effective immediately.SAT is among audio's most coveted and exclusive brands. Since the introduction of its original Pickup Arm in 2015, SAT has cemented its place at the pinnacle of the audio... Read More

In his liner notes for the new Vinyl Me, Please reissue of Iggy and The Stooges’ 1973 album Raw Power, Andy O’Connor says it’s “not a record for audiophiles.” Then why give this record a sumptuously packaged all-analog reissue?Because despite the somewhat rough recording quality, few records are as historically important as Raw Power. It’s not even the best Stooges record, but it’s inarguably their most influential. Forget proto-punk; Raw Power was the first punk... Read More

Martin Scorsese's 2008 film Shine A Light concert film documented a 2006 Rolling Stones Beacon Theater engagement, but Jack White's "Loving Cup" performance with Mick Jagger almost stole the show. White appeared to be having the rock'n'roll time of his life, hardly able to contain his pleasure in an almost "I can't believe I'm here doing this! Growing up, it's what I dreamed about one day doing." Maybe that's... Read More

Clint J. Holley III's Well Made Music mastering studio opened in Cleveland, Ohio in 2010 and began cutting lacquers. In 2021 the company moved from the birthplace of Rock 'n' Roll and home of The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, to Bristol, Virginia, known as "the Birthplace of Country Music". The studio currently cuts on two restored Neumann VMS-70 lathes (the number refers to the year of manufacture). Both have been in service since the early 1970s. One was obtained in 2009 from somewhere in New Jersey. The second was shipped over in 2013 from The Netherlands.

Here are notes on a selection from my favorite books on the history of recording technology, the history of the record business, and the interactions between recording technology, the record business, and the art of music. One example of what I mean by all that is, in the late 1920s, piezoelectric “crystal” microphones supplanted carbon microphones for radio broadcasting. Crystal microphones had a better signal-to-noise ratio than carbon microphones. Therefore, the... Read More

At the bottom of every page is the site's "housekeeping" and indexing area where you can select and go directly to content columnized into "Features", "Music" and "Equipment". The contents are further broken down beneath each header. It's all there neatly segmented as hyperlinks. A newly added link under "Tracking Angle Information" takes you to the Meet the Writers page. In case you don't often head... Read More

Schiit Audio's new $399 Skoll MM/MC phono preamp features fully discrete, differential Class A zero feedback gain stages and a fully passive RIAA network. No op-amps are in the circuit. Skoll’s gain stage is a compound JFET-BJT pair running on "massive" 64V rails for enhanced linearity and freedom from overload. The result is over 100dB signal to noise ratio for 40dB of gain, and up to 70dB of gain available.Additional features are relay switched inputs... Read More

Chasing the Dragon returns with another superbly recorded classical music "warhorse" performed by the National Symphony Orchestra, U.K., this outing conducted by the orchestra's current musical director Anthony Inglis, with Leader Katerina Nazarova playing a Del Gesu violin valued, the annotation says, at 7 million pounds. The venue for this "Scheherazade" was Henry Wood Hall, an unused church turned into an orchestral rehearsal and recording... Read More

A new video on the TrackingAngle YouTube channel has gotten thousands of views in a few hours. It lets viewers hear the same record playing back on two different turntables using the same arm, cartridge and phono preamp. The goal was to put an end to "all turntables sound alike" trolls it certainly did that! The turntables are the OMA K3 prototype I own and a TechDAS Air Force III Premium both fitted with the same SAT CF1-12 arm and Lyra Atlas Lambda SL... Read More

After my last harrowing adventure through Deutsche Grammophon’s “Original Source Series”, I was hoping this next batch would prove less problematic and more up to the standards of what I had appreciated about the first few releases in the series such as the excellent Abbado Rite of Spring. Fortunately, with these two particular titles set to release officially on October 20th, my fears were abated. My colleague Mark Ward has already reviewed the romantic era thrillers... Read More