You axed for it: tomorrow, November 30th at 4 PM on YouTube, Acoustic Sounds' Chad Kassem will moderate a "lively" hopefully friendly and informative discussion with "The stereo Mikes" Fremer and "The In Groove"'s Esposito. The main subject will be our two videos regarding lacquer longevity and its appropriateness as a sellable format.

Acoustic Sounds' Chad Kassem recently hosted in Salina, Kansas an event I labeled " Vinyl Y'Alta" that featured Stoughton Press's Jack Stoughton and RTI's Don MacInnis for a wide-ranging discussion about the state of the vinyl record industry in 2021. Kassem asked me to moderate from home and I gladly obliged.

Credit The In Groove's Mike Esposito. To his fans he can do no wrong. Clearly he's got a great record store and he usually provides in his videos useful information. To his fans, for daring to criticize him I am a "con man" (in the words of one of them) and I owe him "an apology". For what, I'm not sure, but for them he owes none to The Electric Recording Company though his seriously flawed video trashing of the company I think requires an apology.

How long do lacquers really last? The recent Supersense announcement that it would be releasing lacquers cut sourced from 1:1 master tape copies (the original announcement made it seem as if the company was claiming to be using actual master tapes, which made zero sense and was obviously not the case), produced a torrent of objections and outrage on this website under the original post and on the YouTube channel of record dealer The In Groove.

Romanel, Switzerland – Wednesday 24th November 2021—Nagra celebrates 70 years with a limited edition Reference Anniversary Turntable. According to the press release, the new turntable is the result of four year’s worth of R&D by a team of designers and engineers in the fields of applied physics, mechanical and electronic engineering and material science.

In June 1968, to record their second album Wow/Grape Jam, San Francisco psych rock band Moby Grape traveled to Columbia Records’ New York studios. Towards these sessions’ end, guitarist Alexander “Skip” Spence vanished with an acid mystic known only as “Johanna.” Her LSD induced a three-day trip, during which a paranoid Spence turned against his bandmates. Two days later, Spence reappeared at the band’s hotel with a fire axe; when he didn’t find them there, he hailed a cab to the studio, ready to attack. “His eyes were like one-arm bandits,” producer David Rubinson recounted in 2009. Police arrested Spence, who then spent five months in Bellevue Hospital’s psychiatric ward.

High performance loudspeakers are a trekking pole in an audiophile’s lifelong, arduous journey to “audio nirvana”; without them, one won’t reach the destination. And while controversy surrounds the discussion of whether one should first stride into high-fidelity audio via spectacular loudspeakers or an exceptional source, one undeniably cannot ignore loudspeakers. If this is news, don’t fret. Designed by the renowned Andrew Jones (Jones announced last July 18th that he was leaving ELAC but he's yet to divulge his next move_ed), the ELAC Uni-Fi 2.0 UB52 bookshelf loudspeaker meets a growing audiophile’s needs. It’s a high performance reasonably priced loudspeaker.

The demand for new under $1000 turntables remains impressively robust. There are widespread shortages in some but not all markets around the United States with wait times for some models up to 6 weeks and for some even longer.