It's early Thursday morning Bangkok time. Today is day one of the Thai magazine What Hi-Fi?'s big audio show (the magazine is not related to the U.K. magazine of the same name, started around the same time).
Unlike the previous hotel show I attended here, this one takes place in the sprawling Bi-Tec Exhibition Hall well away from downtown Bangkok.
Last week, McIntosh Group Inc. CEO and chief visionary Mauro Grange invited a few hundred guests to Forte Village a luxury resort on the Italian Island of Sardinia for five days of work and fun.
"Why would you fly to San Francisco for one day?" friends asked when I told them recently that I was visiting Elite Audio Systems for a one day in-store appearance and flying home the next day.
More of an informal sampler than a comprehensive look, James P. Goss’s “Vinyl Lives” offers a fascinating glimpse into the mindset of folks both sufficiently crazy and persistent to own record stores in the face of the Internet download juggernaut.
The $399 iFi iPhono phono preamp first spotted at the 2012 Rocky Mountain Audio Festival is the result of a joint venture between ifi micro (ifi-audio.com) and U.K. based Abbington Music Research, also known as AMR. ifi micro also manufactures a fits-in-the-palm-of-your-hand 192/24 bit USB DAC, a headphone amp and a USB power supply but the phono preamp is of the greatest interest around here.
The one on the right is part of a set of 4 rollers Audio Desk sells for $99.95. In reality, it's a readily available microfiber mini-paint roller into which someone has drilled a tiny hole that fits into a peg on the machine's spinning mechanism. The one on the left is a 1/4" nap microfiber mini-paint roller purchased at Home Despot. BUT THERE IS ONE KEY DIFFERENCE!
Comments following the review of the mono reissues of the American version of Are You Experienced? and Axis: Bold As Love indicated some dissatisfaction with the reissue of the U.K. version of the album, also mastered by Bernie Grundman.
Nothing a clean mind and heart can't cure. Actually it's an album cover for a 1950s David Oistrach violin recital album on Parliament records (PLP 118) that includes Prokofiev's "Love For Three Oranges."
Compilations are an ugly concept on vinyl. Either analog copy tapes have been strung together to create a cutting master or digital copies of masters are electronically assembled to produce the same cutting master. Once in a black and blue moon, original masters are removed from their reels and strung together to produce cutting masters made from original master tapes, but those are few and few between and almost impossible to make. They’re rare because few companies allow precious masters to be cut up and because unless the tunes were recorded in the same studio on the same impeccably maintained recorder, it’s very difficult if not impossible to cut a lacquer where the record/playback head’s azimuth changes from track to track.