Classic Records Founder Mike Hobson and Acoustic Sounds/Analogue Productions/QRP Founder Chad Kassem reminisce about the "old days", and the beginnings of Classic Records, which in 1993 when almost no one was making vinyl, decided to manufacture great records—and maybe even sell a few.
On December 9, 2010 at about 11:30 pm, I was standing in front of Johnny D’s, a now defunct and demolished Somerville, Massachusetts club, alone with Bert Jansch who about an hour earlier had finished an hour plus set. It was cold, in the twenties and sleet was becoming snow. Bert was holding his guitar, uncased, by the neck in his right hand.
Tracy Nelson is such a great singer that you have to wonder why she never became a major, “you still hear her on the radio” star. Her deep, powerful, soulful voice is instantly recognizable whether she is singing, rock, country, r&b or blues. The usual vocal comparison is to Janis Joplin, which I’m sure Ms. Nelson got tired of hearing by the late 60s or sooner, but I’d say Nelson, while lacking the Joplin charisma, is a more subtle and technically, a better singer.
When Chet Baker died in 1988, he wasn’t an icon of “cool,” he was a has-been. The biopic with the Hollywood star and the consistent ranking among the top-selling jazz CDs on Amazon was far in the future and long after he was gone. The New York Times obit was perfunctory, misstated his age, and devoted two sentences to his career post-1950s. Baker, in the 1980s, had been the same unrepentant, narco-ssistic junkie mess that he had been since the mid 1950s, but he was working in Europe, playing mostly small clubs, driving from gig to gig, and sleeping on couches instead of the way it had been in the ’50s in the U.S.—playing concert tours, fielding movie offers, topping the jazz polls and charts, his popularity making even Miles Davis jealous.
Stereophile reviewer Ken Micallef visited (mask on) recently to pick up a turntable for review. He asked if I'd do a video with him showing some of my best sounding records. I agreed and picked a bunch out that I show in these three videos shot during his visit.
In mid-January, 2020—just as the Covid-19 pandemic began its stealthy American death grip— the subscription based vinyl-only Newvelle Records embarked on an ambitious four LP New Orleans recording project at spacious Esplanade Studios, formerly the Third Presbyterian Church in the Treme neighborhood, destroyed in 2005 by Hurricane Katrina.
Let’s head off at the pass what will surely be in the comments section under this review of a remarkably compact, full-featured, remote-controllable music playback system that includes in a single box, a high quality Pro-Ject Debut Carbon Esprit 3 speed turntable with dustcover, fitted with an Ortofon 2M “Silver” cartridge (incorrectly identified as OM2 on the Andover website—it’s similar to the Ortofon 2M Red but with fewer winds of the same silver-plated copper wire found in Ortofon’s 2M Bronze and 2M Black) that alone sells for $599 and includes an acrylic platter and 8.6” carbon fiber tonearm, an A/D converter, a 192/24 bit DAC, analog and digital inputs plus a subwoofer “out”, Bluetooth ( Qualcomm APT-X) streaming and built in amplification (2 x 70 Class D watts to woofers and 2 x 30 watts to tweeters) and of course multiple (6) high quality speakers (4 “long throw” aluminum diaphragm woofers and a pair of Air Motion Transformer tweeters originally invented by Dr. Oskar Heil that uses metal-etched folded polyethylene sheets to move air in process we won’t go into here!).
Yes, I’m gonna get me religion
I’m gonna join the Baptist Church
I wanna be a Baptist preacher so I won’t have to work
In June 1964, Nick Perls, Dick Waterman, and Phil Spiro, three young white men from the North, traveled to Mississippi in search of Son House (1902-1988), a blues singer/guitarist whose career had been so abject a commercial failure that he was completely forgotten and unknown, except to a small group of perhaps two dozen country blues collectors who, based upon the recordings available, maybe twenty minutes in total, had proclaimed him to be the greatest of all the Delta Blues singers.
“You are committing audio reviewer suicide” friends insisted when towards the end of 2018 I told them I was going to review some inexpensive Hearing Aids. Guess what? All of the comments under the review were positive and my reviewer creds are intact. Plus, my now 91 year old mother-in-law can now hear much better since I’d really bought them for her benefit.
(Vinyl Reports is an AnalogPlanet feature aiming to create a definitive guide to vinyl LPs. Here, we talk about sound quality, LP packaging, music, and the overarching vinyl experience.)
Unlike many of their competitors, Schiit Audio seemingly intends to guide hi-fi beginners up the quality/price ladder. Their direct-to-consumer standalone components, some advertised for gaming and office setups, start at just $99. Schiit’s products appear feature-packed, but does the sound live up to the specs? Or are Schiit products, well, total shit?
I grew up and went to school in Hereford in the 1980s and 90s - a small, old, and averagely average rural English cathedral city with a bit of a leftie/peacenik 'muesli belt' that definitely included my family. Since a few biggish musicians or bands have had some connection with the town over the years, maybe also because of its hippy side and its proximity to the legendary Rockfield Studios (just down the road near Monmouth), the Herefordshire of my youth seemed to be full of people with tenuous and exaggerated claims of involvement with the music business. Anyone who had ever helped the band that became The Pretenders to unload their van (all of them except the American Chrissie Hynde were local, but had long since fled), played bagpipes on a Mike Oldfield album (he briefly lived just inside the county at the height of his fame) or soldered a jack plug for Mott The Hoople's keyboard player dined out on it for years. It was all a bit tedious and you learned not to be particularly impressed.
Leaving aside for the moment the numbskulls who are so certain that A.C. power cords cannot possibly affect the sound of their audio systems that they can’t be bothered to actually listen for themselves—never mind that science is predicated upon observation— (plus of course they don’t believe anything they see, hear, taste, smell or touch unless it’s done under controlled “double-blind” conditions), there’s a big problem with heavy power cords: because of their heft, they often partially or sometimes fully pull out of the wall jack.
A vinyl-loving physics professor at Florida State University emailed to tell me that William Stead, a "brilliant film student" was in his astronomy class and came up to the prof one day and told him he was a huge Bowie fan and that he loved vinyl. Stead made a short documentary about Doug and Michelle Allen, owners of Banana Records who I profiled in my Banana Records video, which you can find on the AnalogPlanet YouTube channel.
(Vinyl Reports is an AnalogPlanet feature aiming to create a definitive guide to vinyl LPs. Here, we talk about sound quality, LP packaging, music, and the overarching vinyl experience.)
As the world moves to reopen, record stores are slowly allowing customers back in. Here in Portland, OR, Music Millennium recently held a week of appointment-only personal shopping experiences (charitable donation necessary), then subsequently reopened with a 10 person limit and new safety measures. I shopped during the “be the only customer inside!” period and reviewed below are four recent acquisitions.