If you're looking for something completely new and/or different in a turntable design, you won't find it in Musical Fidelity's new $5000 M1 turntable. The M1 uses tried and true mechanical concepts, design strategies, and materials, with an emphasis on precision machining. The goal, according to MF's press release, was "very low mechanical and electrical noise, excellent mechanical isolation, speed accuracy and stability, [and] pitch control."

Joan Baez recorded this Vanguard debut in 1960 at age 19. With her impossibly high and pure quavering voice and matching pristine finger picking guitar, she and this album created a sensation that helped shift the "folk-revival" back to authenticity from the commerciality into which it had drifted. Though while she sounded like a barefoot waif recently arrived from the Appalachian mountains, she was born on Staten Island. Her Mexico-born father who grew up in Brooklyn, the son of a minister, was a Stanford PhD credited with co-inventing the X-ray microscope. Her Scottish mother's father was an Anglican priest.

Last year when AnalogPlanet visited Furnace Record Pressing in Alexandria Virginia it was an enormous, mostly empty building. The vinyl pressing plant infrastructure installation had just begun.

"What's this? The new Thorens turntable? It doesn't look like a Thorens turntable."

That's what I thought as I unboxed the new Thorens 850—part of the new 800 line from the rejuvenated company. Sure, I'd seen mockups at trade shows, but until I get the finished product in my hands, I really don't pay careful attention.

AnalogPlanet recently posted 3 96/24 "John Wesley Harding" files recorded from original, Sony Legacy and Mobile Fidelity mono records and asked readers to weigh in on what they heard and which they preferred (if any).

At the L.A. and Orange County Audiophile Society's annual GALA last Sunday, AnalogPlanet editor Michael Fremer was given the society's prestigious Founder's Award. It was also the Society's 25th anniversary so many of the past Founders award winners were on hand including Tim DeParavicini, EveAnna Manley and Richard Vandersteen, among others along with more than 200 of the society's 2600 members.

Nabisco recently announced a turntable that plays Oreo cookies. Pop any Oreo cookie onto the platter and it will play a tune. Take a bit out of it and it plays a different tune. Apparently it's been on the market for a few weeks and the company is sold out for now. It sells for $19.99. Sweet deal hopefully back in stock for Christmas.

In 1987 Wilson Audio Specialties launched the WATT (Wilson Audio Tiny Tot), its first loudspeaker. This Wednesday evening December 5th, the entire line of "retired" WATT speakers will be on display and played at a special Audio Salon event hosted by Wilson's Peter McGrath. The event also celebrates the introduction of the new SashaDAW (David. A. Wilson) loudspeaker that produced among the best sound at the recent Warsaw Audio Video Show.

Billed as “The Expanded 1963 New York Studio Sessions”, Resonance Records’ Black Friday offering Eric Dolphy Musical Prophet is anything but one of those RSD repackaged assemblages of cast off secondary material meant for fanatical completists. The phrase “connective tissue” kept running through my head as I listened to the 3 LPs and read “mouth agape” the vital annotation that threaded together the confused recorded history.

During last fall's "Blues Masters at the Crossroads" concert weekend at Chad Kassem's Blue Heaven studios, attendees were invited to tour Quality Record Pressings where workers were busy assembling the just-released Electric Ladyland box set containing a Bernie Grundman all-analog remastering from the original analog tapes of the double LP set, a double LP of early takes, a double LP of Jimi Hendrix Experience Live at the Hollywood Bowl, a Blu-ray disc containing a 96/24 high resolution version of the original double LP, a 5.1 channel Eddie Kramer mix at 96/24 resolution and an expanded documentary including interviews with the late Chas Chandler, Mitch Mitchell and Noel Redding and in-the-studio footage. There's also a full-sized 46 page booklet in the box. I'm working my way through the box for a review.