While most of the luxury speaker brands don't participate in CAF, Stenheim and especially YG Acoustics made points of being seen and heard this year. YG especially made a play for the ears and hearts—not to mention the wallets—of Capital Audio Festival attendees by demoing a wide range of its speakers from the lower priced to the next to the top XX model. Despite the small rooms in which they showed, the sound was exceptional in every room, but for my ears, it... Read More

November 13, 2024—Boston-based Andover Audio is proud to announce the launch of the SpinBase 2, the next evolution of its award-winning turntable-speaker system (the turntable is not included). Maintaining the clean, classic design of the original SpinBase, the new model dials up the aesthetic with heathered fabric wrap and Andover’s iconic main control knob. This compact and clever design blends convenience with high-quality sound and ease of setup and use,... Read More

Photo credit: TalmyEnterprises. The legendary and influential record producer Shel Talmy passed away yesterday (November 14th) from a stroke at age 87. Talmy arranged and produced the Kinks recordings 1964-1967, My Generation by the Who, and hit singles by the Easybeats, Manfred Mann, Chad & Jeremy, and worked with the Creation and Pentangle. He produced early sessions for a young David Bowie.

Part 1 of Tracking Angle's Capital Audio Festival 2024 coverage is an hour plus long video mostly highlighting turntables and tonearms but also a few other interesting features including an interview with composer/musician/HD Tracks entrepreneur David Chesky's 17 year old son Lucca who introduced a new $995/pr loudspeaker. You're sure to enjoy the interview I conducted with him.The top photo show a The Wand turntable fitted with a newly designed arm... Read More

Los Angeles, CA (November 13, 2024)—Craft Recordings is proud to unveil the next installment in its acclaimed Small Batch series—a meticulously crafted reissue of Bill Evans Trio’s final studio LP, Explorations. Arriving December 13, Explorations marks the series’ seventh installment, which has previously spotlighted jazz luminaries such as John Coltrane, Miles Davis and Thelonious Monk. Strictly limited to 2,500 pressings worldwide and available to pre-order today,... Read More

November 13th, 2024 – Analogue Productions, the world leader in high quality vinyl production, is thrilled to announce the December 13 release of Birth of the Blue, a collection documenting the transformative first session in 1958 by the same band that would go on to record Kind of Blue - the one of the greatest and greatest-selling jazz album of all time - the following year. Featuring Davis’ legendary sextet - John Coltrane, Cannonball Adderley, Bill Evans, Paul... Read More

While driving home from the Capital Audio Festival this past Monday, as I crossed the Millard E. Tydings Memorial Bridge that spans the Susquehanna River between Havre de Grace and Perryville, Maryland I realized I'd left something behind at the Hilton Hotel, Rockville Maryland that I'd not be able to turn around and retrieve, and that is coverage of Doug White's room containing a significant trove of analog gear I'd planned for weeks to be sure to... Read More

Blue Note Records has announced the launch of the Tone Poet Society, a new subscription service dedicated to the legendary jazz label’s Tone Poet Audiophile Vinyl Reissue Series. Blue Note has also announced the 2025 line-up of the acclaimed series which is produced by the “Tone Poet” Joe Harley and features definitive all-analog, 180g audiophile vinyl reissues that are mastered from the original master tapes by Kevin Gray of Cohearent Audio, manufactured at RTI, and... Read More

In the spring of 2021 a few years into my journey as an audio writer, I was on the hunt for my dream turntable. I'd previously owned some very nice ones : a VPI Scout 1.1, a Rega Planar 3, and a Pro-Ject Debut Carbon to name just a few. But at last I decided I was ready for the big leagues, and wanted to step into the true high-end. There were assuredly some great contenders out there at the time. The Technics 1200G was very appealing for both its sonic... Read More

On October 28th Rega co-founder Roy Gandy (the "ga" part of the company name) gifted 100% of his shares (which represents full company ownership) to his employees as part of an EOT arrangement. Read the statement below and be amazed and if you are a Rega turntable owner, a dealer or distributor, be assured. Hopefully other companies will do likewise or follow a similar path. Given the hollowed out, sad states of some other veteran companies have become under... Read More

“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).