Rhino announced on October 24th an impressive lineup of RSD "Black Friday" 2014 vinyl releases including the MONO version of Iron Butterfly's classic Heavy album cut from analog tape on "heavy" 180g vinyl for $24.98.

A recent comment posted under the story "Anonymous Mastering Engineer's Take on The Beatles MONO Box Set" prompted me to check out a recent post by AIX's Dr. Mark Waldrep on his site real HD Audio. I've appropriated the site's logo without permission but I can't imagine he'd object to the publicity and if he does I will take it down.

This November 11th Concord Music Group will release a four 180g LP box set The Complete Village Vanguard Recordings 1961”. As all fans of Waltz For Debby and Sunday at The Village Vanguard well know, the two LP’s worth of material were culled from afternoon and evening performances on Sunday June 25th 1961 and represented a heavily edited version of what transpired that eventful day—days before 25 year old bassist Scott LaFaro died in a car accident.

Vinyl simply wasn't a major event at this show, though it was there. When I noticed the Pure Music Group was demoing the TechDAS Air Force One turntable with the Thales Simplicity II tonearm I figured the room might have some other interesting analog gear.

The "one man" Osborn Loudspeaker Company displayed only a small part of its 40 model range, including the top of the line Grand Monument Reference a very large monolith of a speaker weighing in at approximately 385 pounds each.

The venue for the 3 day Australian Audio & AV Show was the stunning Intercontinental Melbourne The Rialto Hotel a former wool storage facility turned into a glass covered atrium with dual antique brick facades and gothic style glass windows facing and connected to one another via cross-bridges. An elegant ground floor restaurant is on the lower level.

Kyron Audio's Kronos system consisting of a pair of open baffle 3 way speakers and a dedicated amp/preamp in a single box is everything I can honestly say I hate about audio: the amplifiers are Class "D", the system uses DEQX™ digital room correction and there's enough processing going on here to befuddle a mainframe.

Jasmine, better known for its phono preamp has recently developed a cartridge line.