Several years ago, I described Sullivan Fortner’s piano style as “Erroll Garner channeled through Chico Marx.” Since then, his range has widened, his virtuosity deepened, his wit sharpened.On the opening (and title) track of his new trio album, Southern Nights, he begins with breezy strums of the strings inside the piano, follows with some syncopated sparkles on the keyboard, then angles into the song (written by his fellow New Orleansian Allen Toussaint) with a... Read More

Reliable Corporation's UberLight® Flex became a big hit in the audiophile world a few years ago. It's among the best ways to illuminate a turntable or any piece of audio gear. They are ubiquitous at audio shows worldwide. Reliable just introduced the new Frame UberLight® that's a radical departure and a major esthetic and functional upgrade from the Flex. The sophisticated looking Frame offers more than 100 lighting combinations with six brightness... Read More

Clearaudio's Unity tonearm, originally developed for the Master Jubilee turntable that celebrated the company's 45th analog manufacturing anniversary is now available in either black or silver finish as a "stand-alone" product for use with Clearaudio and other turntable brands. Price is $20,000. Clearaudio Universal tonearm owners receive 100% trade up allowance when upgrading to the Unity.The Unity combines classic Clearaudio features such as... Read More

A musical and sonic spectacular, k.d. lang's free-flowing, daring explorations of unrequited love/lust and liberation sound today as daringly personal, sometimes painful and always fresh as they did in 1992 when Ingénue was originally released to enthusiastic reviews, commercial success and multiple Grammy nominations and the well-deserved award for Best Female Pop Vocal Performance. Freed from her "country roots" on earlier records, Ingénue was a mix... Read More

The Flat.Duo's outstanding warped record flattening ability was the highlight of the previous Flat.Duo video. The noise added to two records I "relaxed" using the Flat.Duo's "Relax" mode's standard settings were the lowlights. Naturally, the manufacturer in Germany and the importer were disturbed by the results and who could blame them? Both said that customers (including some industry insiders I know) had no such experience and they... Read More

Batch #7 of the Original Source Series of AAA vinyl reissues concludes with one of the gems of the 70s DG catalogue in a stunning sonic refresh, courtesy of Emil Berliner Studios, mastered and cut directly from multiple 8-track master tapes.  Don’t miss this one - even if you do not normally buy classical.

Batch #7 of DG’s Original Source vinyl reissues, mastered and cut directly from 4-track master tapes at Emil Berliner Studios, gets up close and personal in Scriabin’s masterpiece of sensual overload, and Tchaikovsky’s evergreen ode to forbidden love.

These two new works, "Fillmore Street" and "Little Wordstar", scored for jazz orchestra and studio orchestra respectively, recall people places of personal significance to the composer and reference ecological themes of climate change, global warming, and endangered species.

Ortofon celebrated its 90th birthday with the release of the now legendary and truly revolutionary MC A90—the first cartridge to use SLM (Selective Laser Melt) technology to build up from metallic powder (stainless steel for the MC A90) a cartridge body shape that would have been impossible to "machine away" from a block of stainless steel, aluminum or other materials. The shape was about self-damping and resonance control, not to create a fanciful... Read More

On January 15, 1959, when John Coltrane recorded the album Bags & Trane at Atlantic Studios in New York City with Milt Jackson, he was nearly at the end of the sideman-apprentice stage of his career. For two years, he had been playing with the Miles Davis Quintet/Sextet, one of the most successful groups in jazz. His time with Miles had been controversial. Part of jazz's audience and its critical establishment were never happy with the innovative nature of... Read More

As a record, Ray Charles’ Modern Sounds in Country and Western Music holds up just fine. But as an idea? It may be one of the most beautiful we ever had.The story is a familiar one, as far the American musical mythos is concerned: Back in 1962, at the flashpoint of the civil rights movement, Charles recorded 12 standbys originally by Hank Williams (“You Win Again,” “Hey, Good Lookin’,”) Don Gibson (“I Can’t Stop Loving You”), and other luminaries of the tradition.Six... Read More

The Electric Recording Company (UK) release of Lightning Hopkins' «Goin' Away», recorded by Rudy Van Gelder in 1963, is not the kind of reissue that will impress all audiophiles. Other, far cheaper versions have more dynamics and a more brightly lit soundstage. But the ERC version is a very convincing, and very expensive, time machine.

Oakland, CA. Feb. 10, 2025—Musical Surroundings is excited to announce the appointment of Chris Thompson as Service and Product Manager. Chris was the Quality Control and Special Projects Manager at Parasound in San Francisco for 11 years. One of Chris’ many responsibilities was developing and supporting the Parasound line of John Curl designed phono stages.Moving across the bay to Oakland, Chris now works with Mike Yee, designer of the Musical Surroundings’ Phonomena... Read More

Batch #7 of the Original Source Series from Deutsche Grammophon turns to a long established classic of the DG catalogue. Karl Böhm was the great Mozartian of his age, and his many recordings of the composer's orchestral, choral and operatic music have been mainstays for decades. Remastered and recut directly from the 4-track master tapes, this handsome reissue casts Böhm's account in a new sonic light.

Jason Palmer isn’t as well-known as he should be, perhaps because he’s lived and taught in Boston for the last 20 years or so, whereas jazz, to the extent it’s promoted at all, tends to be New York-centric. He’s a trumpeter at once fiery and smooth-toned, dexterous and contemplative, equally emotive and virtuosic with chromatic flurries and balladic whole notes.He's in high demand when he’s not teaching at Berklee and the New England Conservatory, having... Read More

Got warped records? Warped records are a problem, though I have to say I really don't get too many of them. In fact, finding a warped record to flatten was not that easy for me. Finally one came along as a gift—a 180g Japan-pressed reissue of Happy End's Kazamachi Roman. Sometimes warped records come directly from the factory as a result of insufficient cooling time, but many a well-pressed record warps as a result of bad handling by the usual suspects:... Read More

Mack Avenue Music Group announced last month its partnership with Strata-East Records, the influential jazz label known for artistic freedom and high production standards founded in 1970 by Charles Tolliver and Stanley Cowell. The series will be released over time on AAA vinyl cut by Kevin Gray at Cohearent Audio, pressed on 180g RTI vinyl and deluxe laminated gatefold packaged— paper on cardboard— by Dorado. Strata-East: The Legacy Begins—a digital-only anthology... Read More

Batch #7 of the Original Source deluxe vinyl reissue series from Deutsche Grammophon (all mastered and cut DIRECTLY from 4 and 8-track master tapes by Emil Berliner Studios) kicks off with an established catalogue classic. The young firebrand conductor Michael Tilson Thomas, protégé of Leonard Bernstein, made his mark early with a series of acclaimed recordings for DG in the 1970s, and this Tchaikovsky 1st - at the time a work that was rarely recorded - may be the most celebrated of them all.

While in California last week working on a project for Mack Avenue Records (more about that soon) I visited Kevin Gray's Cohearent Mastering. That interview related to the Mack Avenue Records project will appear soon but for now, while at Kevin's I asked to see his home-based recording studio, inspired by Rudy Van Gelder's Prospect Avenue, Hackensack home studio in use until he moved in 1959 to the big one in Englewood Cliffs, NJ. He obliged. It's... Read More