Online used record seller AudioPhileUSA offers a few accessories on its website including Mobile Fidelity Original Master Sleeve, but until now, the company, which was founded in the U.K. decades ago by online record selling pioneer John Turton, who brought it to America before selling it to the current owner Mark Hoover, didn't offer record cleaning accessories. That's now changed with the introduction of the GrooveWasher record cleaner line.While the basic... Read More

The comment feature is back up. For now, it's the slower format we attempted to replace with something faster, which created a problem. So please post comments. However, hit the button once and wait for it to post rather than hitting it repeatedly, which will repeatedly post your comment. Thanks! The photo shows the first Mobile Fidelity reissue of Music From Big Pink (MFSL 1-039) mastered 1/2 speed by the late Stan Ricker on the Ortofon cutting system, released... Read More

Top shelf U.K. journalist Allan Jones second collection of pieces from Rock's front lines

What is pop music? A never-ending cycle of repackaging the past? Or a portal to infinite possibilities? High art, or insipid, assembly-line bubblegum confections? What if it’s all of the above?Charli XCX’s 2017 mixtape Pop 2 decides that pop music can be anything and everything—or at least, that’s the meaning that many have assigned to it. After her prospective third studio album proved too much a logistical hurdle to release (only for all the tracks to leak), within... Read More

Tracking Angle's exclusive visit to Universal Music Group's Iron Mountain tape vault outside of Pittsburgh includes a tour of Iron Mountain Entertainment Services' facilities. The two companies work together. You'll get to go deep within the former limestone mine where Universal Music Group has one of its worldwide tape storage facilities and see how, with the help of Iron Mountain Entertainment Services, the company catalogues and keeps track of... Read More

“Funky” is not a word routinely linked to the Art Ensemble of Chicago, the pioneering avant-garde jazz group of the mid-1960s and beyond whose music tends more toward the cryptic and tangled. But put the needle on “Theme de Yoyo,” the first track of their 1970 album, Les Stances à Sophie, and you’ll be dancing in your head and on your feet in no time.The album was produced as the soundtrack to a French film of that title, and “Theme de Yoyo”—which has vocals by the... Read More

In 2019, Acora Acoustics burst onto the audio landscape with a line of granite enclosure-based loudspeakers and quickly gained a reputation as a top-performing brand, receiving positive reviews and winning "Best of Show" at various audio events. The company seemed like an overnight success, but like so many "overnight success" stories the journey took years of hard work and dedication. Valerio Cora, the co-owner and designer of Acora Acoustics,... Read More

(Below is the press release from UMe regarding the "Aja" release and subsequent Steely Dan reissues. While the second paragraph is forthcoming about the source—"analog non-EQ'd tape copy" (the master tape is MIA)— you have to get to paragraph four to read that the Geffen edition is from Grundman mastered high resolution digital files. While paragraph five lauds the UHQR edition it doesn't reference its "cut from tape" source).... Read More

Sparks, the duo of brothers Russell and Ron Mael is a true chameleons in the world of art-pop. Over decades, Sparks has musically shape-shifted through the realms of glam rock, disco, new wave, electronic music and chamber pop. Refusing to stick to one singular musical identity, Sparks kept a brave artistic face as music trends came and went. Thanks to Edgar Wright's documentary, a fresh demographic exposed to The Sparks Brothers are now beginning to appreciate... Read More

Back in June, Michael Fremer and I discussed my next Tracking Angle piece, and we agreed that I should do something I hadn’t done in a while and review a new album. I did some research and decided that Lucinda Williams’ Stories From A Rock n Roll Heart would be a good choice. Michael agreed, and so it was decided.I hadn’t heard the album, but I’d admired Williams’ music dating back to the time before her 1998 breakthrough Car Wheels on a Gravel Road. Her... Read More

If you want to talk about musicians who embodied the very best in quality, originality, versatility, craft, and sheer showbiz pizzazz, then you have to talk about Carl Davis, the great British composer and conductor, who just passed away at the age of 86.  Born and raised in America, Carl spent most of his life living and working in Britain, and there he was something of a national treasure on the music scene. Several of the TV shows he wrote music for were amongst the most popular of their time and are now acknowledged classics.  Equally at home conducting James Bond or unusual classical Pops repertoire, his greatest contribution was in the revival of interest in silent films.  Here I offer a personal appreciation and remembrance of a musician who resides in the pantheon of film composer greats, along with his American contemporaries John Williams, Jerry Goldsmith, and Elmer Bernstein.

Often, when a label has a tape out of the vault for a 33 1/3 rpm reissue, it uses the opportunity to also cut it at 45rpm, plate it, and hold onto it until a later 45rpm release. That's clearly the case here. Verve/Acoustic Sounds reissued A Love Supreme at 33 1/3 a few years ago cut by Ryan Smith from the master tape copy Rudy Van Gelder had sent to the U.K. shortly after the album was recorded. When the original tape was found to be plagued with drop outs, Van... Read More

In Chicago, February of 1959 while playing at The Sutherland Hotel as members of Miles Davis's now classic "Kind of Blue" sextet, the group, minus Miles assembled at Bill Putnam's Universal Recording Studio at 46 E. Walton Street and laid down this album led by Cannonball Adderley. It was only a month before "Kind of Blue" but there's nothing modal about this almost corny by comparison set of "chipper" tunes taken post-bop... Read More

Sonny Clark's 1958 Blue Note release "Cool Struttin'" (BLP-1588) is rightly a Blue Note classic that epitomizes the label's musical heritage and ethos. The mono original is among the most sought after, collectible and costly original Blue Notes—an original went for almost $4500 on Discogs— (but I think the sonic signature forced upon it—dynamic compression and low bass attenuation with mid-bass boost —so it would track the inexpensive... Read More

Recently, Mark Ward and I joined "Original Source" producer Rainer Maillard, mastering engineer Sidney Meyer, DGG Heritage Director Johannes Gleim and Thomas Mowrey, former DGG producer and U.S. Marketing Director and "godfather" of the original quadrophonic recordings sourced for this series for a lively and very informative discussion about this exciting new project. Read More