“I have seen the future in pop music, and it is a band called Queen” - Jac Holzman, Elektra RecordsThe beginnings of Queen came from the remnants of guitarist Brian May and drummer Roger Taylor’s former group, Smile. The two bounded together and recruited vocalist Freddie Mercury, who pushed to rechristen the group Queen, and they added bassist John Deacon. The group gigged around England’s college circuit before cutting a demo at De Lane Lea Studios to test the... Read More

Rockville, MD, November 7th, 2024— Musical Surroundings debuts two significant new products at this year's Capital Audio Festival. The first, pictured above, is a vacuum tube-based equalizer for DS Audio optical cartridges. The TB-100, available December, 2024 is a dual mono, single-ended design with RCA jack outputs. It features four selectable bass curves and uses "quad-matched" ECC82 (12AU7) dual-triode tubes, measured and classified using a special... Read More

Day three began with a return visit to the PGE Narodowy stadium to visit a few big rooms I was unable to access day one, including the big Avant-Garde G3 speakers driven by Kondo electronics sourced with Kondo's turntable and phono preamp and a Studer A80 tape deck.In another big room Magico demoed for the first time ever at a show the big M7s driven by Pilium Cronus mono blocks and sourced via an MSB DAC. I hit the room twice and both times the music being... Read More

I spent day two at the Radisson Blu Sobieski hotel where most of the Polish manufacturers displayed and demonstrated their products. Others were there too of course, including some of the bigger players who took the larger first floor rooms. Aavik, part of Audio Group Denmark, debuted a major $60,000 phono preamp at the show that Michael Børresen demoed and explained in a detailed interview (photo at the top). That starts the video. It has multiple inputs including... Read More

What with having to stare down pension plans and reduced bone density, it’d be reasonable to think that the release of a new Cure album might not have flicked across the radar of their original fan base. But anyone who caught one of the sold out gigs on their last live go around knows that’s fairly unlikely. Especially since the band did their part by opening all of those shows with the lead cut from the record everyone knew for some time would be called Songs of a... Read More

I needed a box of It All Comes Down to Mood—Patrick Leonard's new double LP—to sell at the Capital Audio Festival, which starts this Friday November 8th. I asked Patrick to UPS down a box but he said he and his pilot wife Anna would instead fly them down in their plane and take me for a tour of Manhattan. They arrived this Sunday morning well before the New York City Marathon would close off some airspace. I put the records in my car and off we went in the Cirrus... Read More

Bassist-composer Ben Wolfe is one of those “musicians’ musicians,” little known even among aficionados but a staple on the New York scene, adept at jazz and classical, rarely straying from the straight-ahead, but carving melodic lines and harmonic colors well outside conventional boundaries. His latest album, his 11th as a leader, is called The Understated (on his own Resident Arts Records label), and that’s one fair description of the music. Of its 10 tracks, all... Read More

We break down the latest Original Source releases announced by Deutsche Grammophon, plus a Video Request from Emil Berliner Studios to send in your questions to Rainer Maillard and Sidney C. Meyer about all things Original Source. Send in your question(s) to oss@ebsberlin.com and you will get a chance to win a Test Pressing signed by Rainer and Sidney (Deadline is November 30th).

By now everyone reading this knows the story of Bob Ludwig's first cut of Led Zeppelin II. Bob put everything on the tape in the grooves and Atlantic released it. The story goes a copy went to Ahmet Ertegun's niece and it wouldn't play on her kiddie phonograph. Fearing it wouldn't play on the average teenagers's turntable either, Atlantic issued a recall and it was re-cut by someone at Atlantic Studios with bass attenuated and dynamics... Read More

Mistelbach, Austria – October 28th, 2024 – Pro-Ject Audio Systems introduces The Classic Reference turntable. Consider it a supremely upgraded Classic EVO or an enhanced version of the VPO (Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra) 175 limited edition turntable, The Classic Reference merges aesthetic appeal with the latest and greatest hi-fi implements by Pro-Ject. For this latest innovation, the brand used the EVO 9 AS HG tonearm. High-precision ABEC 7 bearings are housed in a... Read More

With Freddie Freeman and the rest of the Dodgers having gutted the Yankees hopes of claiming their first World Series title in eons, it’s mildly tempting to think of a teenaged Steve Wynn, hooked on baseball and not bothering to get back to the guitar he abandoned in junior high.“Almost overnight, around the time I turned fourteen, my interest and focus and obsession shifted from music to sports…I was still a music fan. But following and eventually writing about... Read More

Good design rests upon - and often wrestles with - the timeless ideals of form vs. function. It’s an age old debate that grapples between the way an item actually works against the way it looks. Architecture, automotive design, and - of course - the hifi industry all create products bragging fantastic looks, but do they always excel at doing the thing that they were designed to do?Once upon a time, during a period between newsprint and television - and way way before... Read More

WFMU's annual and always fabulous record fair returns this year to the Metropolitan Pavilion in Manhattan after a one year detour to the Knock Down Center in Maspeth, Queens where parking was absolutely impossible and public transportation is poor (nice space for a record fair "tho" and a decent concert venue too).The Metro Pavilion's address is 125 West 18th Street, between 6th and 7th Avenues. Visit the FMU website for more details.Hours:Friday:... Read More

This year's Warsaw Audio Video Show was well attended as always and because the biggest crowds show up on Saturday I spent almost all day Friday covering the stadium exhibits, which are mostly, but not all, the larger corporate participants like Technics, Pro-Ject, JBL, Marantz, Denon, McIntosh, Senheiser, Focal, Yamaha, etc. plus many smaller "high end" brands like Hegel, Pro-Ject, Transrotor, Dali, Unison Research, Clearaudio and many others... Read More

The long-awaited third edition of Blue Note's acclaimed vinyl boxset series, returns November 1st with a celebration of Blue Note legend Lee Morgan. Curated by Blue Note President Don Was, the limited-edition set encapsulates the continuum of the legendary jazz label’s 85-year legacy, showcasing both its storied past and auspicious future. “Tone Poet” Joe Harley supervised vinyl mastering and manufacturing, with vinyl mastering by Kevin Gray at Cohearent Audio... Read More