Hana cartridge importer Musical Surroundings and the Excel Sound Corporation/YouTek Partnership launched Hana's new $11,500 Umami Black cartridge at the Hana G-6 Summit/Hana Umami California Fest last October 7-10. Excel Sound cartridge designer Masihiro Okada and YouTek's Hiroshi Ishihara joined Musical Surroundings Garth Leerer who hosted the event that included distributors and journalists from around the world. While the celebration wasn't intended... Read More

LOS ANGELES – Rhino High Fidelity (Rhino Hi-Fi), the limited-edition audiophile vinyl reissue series, returns with two albums that helped reframe rock at the dawn of the 1970s: The Stooges’ Fun House and the Velvet Underground’s Loaded. Each album was cut from the original master tapes by Kevin Gray and pressed on 180-gram black vinyl at Optimalin Germany. Both releases feature glossy gatefold packaging with “tip-on” jackets and newly written liner notes. They are... Read More

In the mid-seventies Philips recorded Colin Davis conducting the Boston Symphony in a complete cycle of Sibelius’s numbered symphonies, beginning with this classic coupling of the Fifth and Seventh. Now remixed and remastered by Rainer Maillard and Sidney C. Meyer at Berliner Studies, it is one of three new releases inaugurating Decca’s new Pure Analogue Project remastering and remixing celebrated vintage titles.

You don’t have to be told that uphill is more difficult than down. It’s true marathoning and it’s true developing lines of hi-fi products. That’s why, often, start-ups begin with the statement and work down to the affordable.It’s no secret that Hana’s parent company, 55 year old Excel Corporation, has been the OEM builder for many costly cartridge brands, Benz-Micro and Etsuro among them as well as Argent, a defunct brand with which some older readers might be... Read More

And while it’s interesting to note all the artists they opted not to sign (Fleetwood Mac, Joe Walsh, Yes, and 10cc for starters…) the extended anecdote here of how they passed on the first Crosby, Stills and Nash record after being given a live audition of the trio’s material is almost beyond belief.

David Bowie fans not from New Jersey first became familiar with musical comedian "Uncle" Floyd Vivino from the reference in Bowie's song "Slip Away" (originally called "Uncle Floyd") from the 2002 album Heathen. Bowie's first encounter with Vivino was at The Bottom Line in New York, when he attended an "Uncle Floyd" performance at the club at the suggestion of John Lennon who also was a fan as was Iggy Pop.Much like... Read More

David Bowie’s artistry and career are pinpointed by not just what genre he was exploring at a given point in time, but by the cities of the world in which he found himself. Glamorous London was the hub for Ziggy Stardust, Philadelphia’s soulful streets influenced Young Americans, debaucherous Los Angeles in 1976 gave birth to Station to Station and the Thin White Duke.The Thin White Duke was an extension of Thomas Newton, an extraterrestrial character that David Bowie... Read More

In 2000, Warning’s prominent acoustic guitars and more nuanced lyrical approach might’ve alienated Green Day's core fanbase, as it sold significantly less than their previous major label LPs and seems comparatively forgotten in the popular memory. Now, however, a lavish 25th anniversary 5LP or 4CD super deluxe box set presents Warning as the excellent power pop record it’s always been.

• Officially Sanctioned Concord Music Group, Inc.
ALL VALVE Heritage pressing cut directly from the original analogue master tapes.
• No equalization, compression or any other processing undertaken during the cutting process.
• Cut in TRUE monaural using 1960's Lyrec SV8 all valve cutting system and Ortofon DS522 mono cutter head.
• Hand-crafted sleeve artwork faithfully recreated using a vintage letterpress procedure.
• Released in strictly limited, individually - numbered edition of 345.

Recorded in 1957 and released in 1959 on Norman Granz's new Verve Record label, this makes a fitting debut for the new Verve Vault series produced by Verve exec Ken Druker. It arrived a while back along with a Antonio Carlos Jobim The Composer of Desafinado Plays and I'm finally getting around to writing about it Two more disparate albums from the Verve catalog I cannot imagine, which is why they made such a good choice to inaugurate the new Verve Vault... Read More

(January 21, 2026 - Los Angeles, CA) Tentative Decisions: Demos & Live offers an unprecedented look at Talking Heads’ earliest years. Arriving March 6 from Talking Heads and Rhino, the 3CD collection charts the rapid evolution of the original trio—David Byrne, Chris Frantz, and Tina Weymouth—through a trove of newly unearthed demos and live recordings.

Analogue Productions announced this box set reissue earlier in the month and we missed it. This is an essential Miles set. Here is the press release: One of Analogue Productions' most successful and collectible projects has been the Miles Davis Quintet/The Great Prestige Recordings deluxe box set on 33 1/3 LP. Now, that beautiful five-album set is being reintroduced. Featuring a 12" x 12" 12-page gorgeous booklet, packaged with the LPs (each housed in a... Read More

When people think of KISS without context, Gene Simmons, the fire-breathing, blood-spitting demon who convinced shocked parents that the group’s name was an acronym for ‘Knights in Satan’s Service’, first comes to mind. Nonetheless, the group’s biggest hit was sung not by Simmons, but by the group's drummer, Peter Criss. Criss played in numerous Brooklyn area bands before becoming the Catman in the world's hottest band. His jazz-rooted drumming (he was a... Read More

Mark Ward and Michael Johnson recently participated in a video conference call with the Decca Pure Analogue Vinyl Series execs and tech teams. Of course everyone interested already knows Rainer Maillard and Sidney C. Meyer, the team responsible for the highly successful and great sounding DGG Original Source Series as well as the DGG label exec Johannes Gleim who's participated in more than a few video calls published here since the inception of the DGG... Read More

Decca - one of the oldest and most storied of classical labels - joins Deutsche Grammophon in revisiting its fabled back-catalogue to breathe new sonic life into legendary recordings.  With Rainer Maillard and Sidney C. Meyer of Emil Berliner Studios once more flexing their all-analogue, direct-from-the-mastertape-to-lathe mastering and cutting skills, is sonic and musical nirvana once again being visited upon vinyl collectors?

Acoustic Sounds today (January 15th, 2026) announced its new 40th Anniversary 45rpm Warner Records series so Chad Kassem and I Zoom called about it and about much, much more. We go back to the mid 1980s and had a lot to talk about generally, and specifically about the new series as well as the recent Atlantic 75th anniversary series. We also talked about the upcoming October 16th weekend "Vinyl Summit" at Chad's Salina, Kansas headquarters, open to the... Read More

Analogue Productions unveils a new partnership with Rhino Records for 2026 and beyond: The Acoustic Sounds 40th Anniversary Series. Building on the success of the Analogue Productions Atlantic 75 Series, Analogue Productions and Rhino have partnered once again to bring iconic recordings from Warner Music Group’s storied catalog to vinyl, pressed at Quality Record Pressings (QRP) in Salina, Kansas.Beginning this January, the series will deliver two meticulously... Read More

When the audiophile houses started reissuing Blue Note jazz albums on vinyl (Classic Records in the late 1990s, Analogue Productions and Music Matters Jazz 20 years later, a decade after Classic had gone out of business), they focused almost exclusively on the storied label’s mainstream titles from the 1950s and early ‘60s, by the likes of Horace Silver, Hank Mobley, Donald Byrd, Dexter Gordon, early Sonny Rollins and Miles Davis, and, of course, John Coltrane’s sole... Read More

In Pt. I of the 2025 year-end ‘Original Source’ round up, I looked at two recordings a bit off the beaten path in terms of repertoire. Well, now we get to some more well-trodden territory.Today we’re looking at a disc of orchestral war horses from Italian conductor Carlo Maria Giulini leading the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, an ensemble for which he was once principal guest conductor. The majority of the LP is taken up by Pictures at an Exhibition, Modest Mussorgsky’s... Read More

Colin Escott writes in the liner notes to this remarkable reissue that Carl Perkins met The Beatles at the wrap party for his first British tour before the fFab Four broke big in America and he accompanied them to the studio the next day where they recorded "Matchbox". Months later they recorded "Everybody's Trying To Be My Baby" and "Honey Don't". Over time the group or individuals in the group recorded every song on this... Read More