Priced from $99 to $1500, these 5 phono preamplifiers offer fine build quality and sound to match. Equally important: they are from stable companies that will exist when in the future you might need customer support. Of course, there are many others worth noting but we want to avoid a laundry list here. 

Meanwhile, as in “Miracle on 34th Street”, where Macy’s Santa sent people to Gimbel’s, please visit my “former endeavor” and scroll through the phono preamp reviews. I’m...Read More

Ry Cooder, in 1959, when he was 12 bought a copy of a ten inch record on an odd label with an amateurish paste-on cover and mimeographed liner notes tucked inside. The record was Get On Board by Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee, two middle aged Black men who had been playing blues for Black audiences for more than two decades, but now, probably to their own surprise, were becoming popular with young white people. Cooder began listening and woodshedding and we know the rest of his...Read More

With disbelief I deciphered the writing in the dead wax: A Porky Prime Cut it read, not etched in some old Led Zeppelin or Mountain record from the '70s, but on this circa '98 seven-inch from the Silver Jews, the recording project of late poet and songwriter David Berman. Porky Prime Cut!, I thought to myself, that means George Peckham, the legendary mastering engineer whose work for Led Zeppelin, Black Sabbath, T. Rex, and others is brain-bendingly beautiful!...Read More

The year was 1976, long before "hot stampers" were even a thing. John Lennon presided over a good old-fashioned record pressing shoot-out-- in federal court, no less. The pressings played in the Southern District of New York's federal courthouse had songs familiar to lovers of Lennon's ROCK 'N' ROLL album, his beautiful homage to early rock and roll, but the two albums' quality couldn't have been farther apart. The first contender in the...Read More

Woburn, MA September 2022—U-Turn just announced the new Orbit Theory turntable, which the company describes as its “…next generation turntable, engineered for uncompromising playback."

The new turntable includes the “easily adjustable” OA3 Pro tonearm featuring a tapered one-piece molded magnesium armtube fitted with Ortofon 2M Blue cartridge. An upgraded gimbal bearing with both shaft and housing machined from stainless steel allows for what U-Turn says is “near-frictionless...Read More