Last Record Store Day Sony/Legacy released four mono LPs: Miles Davis's Miles Ahead and Porgy and Bess, The Fabulous Johnny Cash (released by IMPEX last year in stereo) and Cheap Thrills by Big Brother and The Holding Company featuring Janis Joplin.

A reader alerted me to the fact that some online sites are selling a variety of "Pink Moon" reissues including one from the aptly named "Phantom" label. Be careful!

For a company whose initials stand for “Scale Model Equipment” the massive turntables SME builds are anything but. The company, founded in post WW II England, began as a manufacturer of scale models, then popular in the engineering trade.

SME founder Alastair Robertson-Aikman was an audio hobbyist who one day decided to apply his engineering acumen and put to work the talented designers and machinists in his employ to produce a tone arm for his own use.

It's time to put to bed a long standing record myth: that UK Decca and UK-pressed London records are different pressings, even if they have the same matrix numbers, mother numbers and stamper numbers. This myth has persisted for a very long time, fed by people who claim to hear differences between such records even when the information in the lead-out groove area is identical.

In the June "Analog Corner" I wrote written that "Baby You're A Rich Man" on the US release of the Beatles' Magical Mystery Tour LP was originally issued in electronically reprocessed stereo because "Capitol back then didn't really give a shit." (MMT was first issued in the UK as a double 7" EP, Parlophone MMT/SMMT-1) Reader Preston Reese responded in a letter ("Letters," September '97 p.17) that while "the original 1967 US LP release [of MMT] was a combination of stereo mixes and mono mixes re-channeled for stereo," the master of "Baby You're a Rich Man" was a processed stereo version "provided to [Capitol] by the Beatles and their producer George Martin in 1967...It wasn't until four years later, in October 1971, that 'Baby You're a Rich Man' got around to its first stereo mix, created for the German LP release of Magical Mystery Tour."

Register to win a set of V-Moda M-80 Headphones (MSRP $230) we are giving away.

"Masterfully tuned by a legion of legendary musicians, producers and DJs, M-80 packs unique materials, professional acoustics, natural noise isolation, ultimate ergonomics and military-level ruggedness into a design 53% smaller than its now legendary, over-ear sibling, Crossfade LP."

[This Sweepstakes is now closed.]

We often talk about "cross-pollination" opportunities in the high performance audio world, like putting a cool system in a high-end furniture store or at trade-shows not associated with audio. It's a good way to interest a different demographic to the hobby.

I was just alerted to this event by a friend who is the oleologist (olive oil specialist) at New York's Eataly, the world's largest artisanal Italian food and wine marketplace, organized along similar lines, at Del Posto, one of New York's premier Italian restaurants—the first Italian restaurant in forty years to receive a four star review from The New York Times (in 2010).

Sexual obsession, ugly betrayals, bitter kiss-offs, working men's tribulations, murder and mayhem— all of the traditional British balladry fare continue to preoccupy Richard Thompson as they have for decades. While he's moved on occasion through musical fashion, he always manages to return, as he does here, to his ground zero (dis)comfort zone.

Everyone knows that composer John Williams cribbed Holst's "The Planets" for his "Star Wars" soundtrack. Fewer know that the main theme and even the arrangement for "Star Wars" is almost a complete rip of Eric Wolfgang Korngold's score for the movie "King's Row" starring Ronald Reagan, Ann Sheridan and Robert Cummings. People absolutely freak out when I play it for them.

The first 27 of the hundreds of Analog Corners written for Stereophile have now been published on this site with many new accompanying photos courtesy of Ariel Bitran, Stereophile's hard working editorial assistant.