Michael Fremer

The Beach Boys reissue project from Analogue Productions has been years in the making. Some of the mono records go on sale this Friday, December 16th. The process from master tape to finished record, packaged, boxed and ready for shipping is shown in a series of videos that make their world debut here on analog planet.

There’s still time to give or get for yourself one or more of these provocative and/or visually opulent books.

Second albums make or break pop artists. If the first one was a smash the second one had also better be or you risk the "one hit wonder" label. That's what happened to Christopher Cross, Marshall Crenshaw and more recently James Blunt, even though Cross and Crenshaw followed up their debuts with many good records—or at least good tunes. They just didn't produce chart hits.

Back in 1999 I reviewed in Stereophile the KR Audio VT 8000 monoblock vacuum tube amplifier. I wrote in the review: "Virtually every part in the amplifier is custom-made in-house or sourced from associated facilities, including the metal fabrication, the transformers, and the circuit boards. The internal wiring is Swiss in origin. And, of course, the vacuum transducers themselves are made in-house by hand, and that includes all of the tiny internal components, which are stamped out one at a time by hand on dies custom-machined in-house. Even the glass for the tubes is turned and formed by hand. If I hadn't seen all of this with my own eyes, I wouldn't have believed it."