Modern Recordings
Format: 24-bit/48kHz FLAC download
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Daniel Lanois lets inspiration take him wherever it leads. Last year he released Heavy Sun, an album of soul and gospel music that Lanois presented in his own sonically adventurous production style. In 2018, he collaborated with Aaron Funk (aka Venetian Snares) on Venetian Snares x Daniel Lanois, a provocative and bracing collection of keyboard- and effects-based instrumentals. Goodbye to Language (2016) paired Lanois and Rocco DeLuca on steel guitars for a series of ambient songs that yielded great rewards, with each play revealing tremendous emotional and musical complexity.
Normally, the Noachian weather we’re having here in central Alabama at the moment wouldn’t be a matter of concern for SoundStage! Access readers. It seems relevant, though, given that our recent flooding threatened to derail my upcoming review of the Technics SU-G700M2 integrated amp ($2699, all prices USD). Or so I thought.
On a recent episode of the SoundStage! Audiophile Podcast, I mentioned to Brent Butterworth that we need an Audiophile Baloney Detection Toolkit. If you’re not familiar with the reference, it comes from “The Fine Art of Baloney Detection,” an essay by Carl Sagan from his final book, The Demon-Haunted World.
At one time—in the 1970s and into the 1980s—Dual automatic turntables were in probably half the entry-level stereo systems in the US. But when the CD came along, and turntables became yesterday’s story, Dual went through some very rough times.
Read more: Dual CS 429 Turntable with Ortofon 2M Red Cartridge
Polydor / Track Record / UMC ARHSLP014
Format: LP
Musical Performance
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Released in December 1967, The Who Sell Out fulfilled the promise of the band’s first two albums, moving it into the front ranks of the great British Invasion bands. When MCA reissued the album on CD in 1995, Who biographer Dave Marsh penned the liner notes. “For me,” he wrote, “The Who Sell Out is the greatest rock and roll album of its era and, as the years go by, seems more and more to me The Who’s consummate masterpiece.”
The automatic turntable, absent from audio dealers’ offerings for years, is definitely making a comeback. The first unit I reviewed was the Andover Audio SpinDeck Max ($599, all prices USD). There are at least three more automatic turntables coming to me for review, and many more I haven’t reviewed or arranged to review. In this article, I’m looking at the Thorens TD 102 A ($1099), a fully automatic unit from the renowned Swiss/German company.
Read more: Thorens TD 102 A Turntable with Audio-Technica AT-VM95E Cartridge
Having written primarily about home theater for the last decade or so before joining the SoundStage! family, I’m still adapting to just how different the two-channel world is in many respects. Take Sound United’s output, for example. Tell a typical home-theater enthusiast that Denon just dropped a new integrated amp, and the first question a cynical AVR guy will ask is, “What’s the Marantz equivalent, and how do the two products pretend to be different?” In the two-channel domain, though, the Sound United sister brands have done a really good job of differentiating themselves in everything from form factor and ergonomics to circuitry and presentation.
The nightmare fuel you see in the preview image for this story was created when I asked a sophisticated neural network, “What would a malevolent artificial intelligence think about high-end audio?”
Read more: What Do Our Future A.I. Overlords Think About Hi-Fi?
Note: for the full suite of measurements from the SoundStage! Audio-Electronics Lab, click this link.
There’s this pervasive notion in the world of hi-fi that if a box does more than one thing, it simply must perform worse at its multiple functions than separate boxes performing the same tasks. In other words, there are people who argue that a separate amplifier and preamp will by definition sound better than an integrated amplifier with identical specifications, and that an integrated amp and standalone DAC will certainly sound better than an integrated amp with a DAC built in. The argument, as I understand it, is effectively: “something’s gotta give somewhere.”
Read more: Cambridge Audio Evo 150 Streaming Integrated Amplifier
Ozella Music OZ100CD
Format: CD
Musical Performance
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Ten years ago, I wrote about Ozella Music, a record label in Germany that releases well-recorded jazz albums, instrumental music that often defies category, and a few singer-songwriter titles. Recently, I was listening to some of the recordings I had previously reviewed and realized I hadn’t heard any news from the label for a while. I popped over to Ozella’s website to see what was going on there. A few days later, I opened my mailbox to find some new releases from the label. The three discs in the package were all worthwhile, but Villingsberg, an album of duets by pianist Helge Lien and guitarist Knut Hem, caught my ear immediately.