First off, UMe touts this reissue as "...newly remastered from the original 1949 analog tapes for the first time since 1957." That's nonsense: Bernie Grundman cut this from the original analog tapes for Classic Records back in the 2000s. And I believe the RVG CD did as well (correct me if I'm wrong). Facts matter.

Following "Making Vinyl Berlin" and a week before "High End Munich 2019" AnalogPlanet editor Michael Fremer visited high performance Switzerland-based electronics manufacturer CH Precision (among others). This is the first posted video from that trip.

Hours before its release, Tyler, the Creator tweeted a set of listening instructions to anxious fans about to hear his new magnum opus IGOR. “This is not Bastard. This is not Goblin. This is not Wolf. This is not Cherry Bomb. This is not Flower Boy. This is IGOR. Pronounced eee-gore. Don’t go into this expecting a rap album. Don’t go into this expecting any album. Just go, jump into it. I believe the first listen works best all the way through, no skips. Front to back. No distractions either.”

Any resemblance between Sumiko’s $899 “Songbird” high output moving coil cartridge and the rest of the Reference line’s “bird” cartridges—the $1249 Blackbird (available in both low and high output versions) and the new $1899 “open architecture” flagship Starling is strictly intentional. Sumiko has been in the cartridge business for decades and these are all made in the same reliably high-quality factory that I visited a few years ago.

Mobile Fidelity's double 45rpm reissue of Aretha's Gold (originally issued in 1969 as Atlantic SD 8227) gets off to not such a great sonic start because though "I Never Loved A Man (The Way I Love You)" and "Do Right Woman-Do Right Man" are musical classics that belong at the head of the hits lineup, the Rick Hall engineered recordings at his Fame Record Studios in Muscle Shoals, Alabama pale in comparison to everything else in this molten set recorded at Atlantic Studios in New York City.

Though my initial February review of Ortofon’s $999 MC Quintet Black S cartridge was quite favorable, one part of my system wasn’t best optimized for the cartridge: the Rega RB330 tonearm’s lack of adjustability meant that my VTA was off by two degrees (90 degrees instead of the preferred 92-93). To combat this issue, AnalogPlanet editor Michael Fremer and I installed Acoustic Signature shims underneath the back of the Rega tonearm. However, with sufficient shims installed to increase the VTA to 92 degrees, unless the tonearm was raised from the record surface, the dust cover wouldn’t close. Since in my house a dust cover is absolutely necessary, I sacrificed having ideal VTA and we only ended up installing a set of 1mm shims to increase the VTA by half a degree.

The reporter called me "Mitchell" Fremer, and you might not recognize me in the photo taken 27 years ago, but the words will be familiar. I laid it all out in 1992 and I was correct! I had completely forgotten about this story and didn't even have a copy. I found it among my wife's aunt's papers.

Buddy Guy’s 1967 Chess release—his first— has nothing to do with San Francisco, nor was it recorded July of 1967 though the jacket says it was. No big deal. Someone (probably Leonard Chess) chose to reference San Francisco because “flower power” was happening and it seemed like a good way to grab the white kids’ interest. The recording date was chosen close to the original release date so it would sound current but in fact, this is a compilation that includes tracks recorded between 1962 and 1967.

Founded in 1982 by the editors-in-chiefs from five European photography magazines to select the "camera of the year", EISA has grown to international stature and now includes groups covering Hi-fi, home theater, mobile phones, in-car electronics and other categories