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Van Morrison: "Roll with the Punches"

Details: Written by Joseph Taylor; Category: Recording of the Month; Created: 01 November 2017

Exile Productions/Caroline 2557718515
Format: CD

Musical Performance: ****
Sound Quality: ****
Overall Enjoyment: ****

Every few albums, Van Morrison releases something that stands out just a little from the rest of his 15 recordings of the last 20 years. Magic Time (2005) had a good batch of songs played by a terrific band, and Keep It Simple (2008) was stripped down and soulful, with a nod to Morrison’s blues side. Last year’s Keep Me Singing benefited from a Morrison who seemed more at ease, perhaps because his previous CD, Duets: Re-working the Catalogue (2015), included appearances by some of his contemporaries. He clearly enjoyed singing with P.J. Proby, Chris Farlowe, and Georgie Fame.

Paradigm Persona 7F Loudspeakers

Details: Written by Aron Garrecht; Category: Full-Length Reviews; Created: 15 October 2017

Reviewers' Choice Ever since 1982, when Scott Bagby and Jerry VanderMarel founded Paradigm, the company’s name has been synonymous with such words as quality, value, and, most notably, performance. This reputation, in combination with Paradigm’s being one of the first to adopt and build on the loudspeaker-performance guidelines established by work at Canada’s National Resource Council (NRC), helped fuel the company’s growth into one of the world’s most prominent makers of loudspeakers. As of the day I submit this review, Paradigm offers four different collections (as Paradigm calls them) of speakers comprising 12 individual series that themselves encompass 22 different models, from passive speakers to active subwoofers and wireless speakers. Their latest collection, Persona, eclipses the venerable Signature as the brand’s highest-priced family, but Persona models aren’t merely evolutionary derivatives of Signature counterparts. The Persona collection took more than five years to develop, and Paradigm claims that it reflects everything they’ve learned about designing and building speakers over the past 35 years. They say that the Personas constitute a revolutionary leap forward for the brand in both sound and technology.

Jeff's Getting a New Stereo System: Part Four

Details: Written by Jeff Fritz; Category: Opinion; Created: 01 October 2017

I don’t have all of this figured out yet, but I know where I’m not going, and that establishes some upper price limits for the components that will eventually comprise my new stereo system. To review where I’ve come from:

Dynaudio Contour 60 Loudspeakers

Details: Written by Jeff Fritz; Category: Full-Length Reviews; Created: 01 October 2017

My colleagues at SoundStage! have accused me of being a by-the-pound guy. There’s some truth to that. By any reasonable standard, my speakers have always been heavy, and so have the amplifiers that have driven them. For the most part, heavy gear is just a fact of life in ultra-high-end audio. The upper-end speaker models from Magico, Rockport, Wilson, et al., have always been heavyweights. Same goes for amps -- the Boulders, Gryphons, Soulutions, etc. With these companies, I always knew that the fact that they made their products with heavier materials and parts was a good thing: lots of bracing inside speaker cabinets, and big power supplies inside amps, were what we were told made great sound possible. It meant you were getting your money’s worth.

Joan Osborne: "Songs of Bob Dylan"

Details: Written by Joseph Taylor; Category: Recording of the Month; Created: 01 October 2017

Womanly Hips WHRC001
Format CD

Musical Performance: ****
Sound Quality: ****
Overall Enjoyment: ****

Although Joan Osborne has written her share of good songs, she has from the beginning shown a talent for sensitive interpretations of work by others. Relish, her 1995 breakthrough, included tunes by Bob Dylan and Sonny Boy Williamson, and her strong feel for classic soul and blues was obvious on How Sweet It Is (2002), Breakfast in Bed (2007), and Bring It on Home (2012).

VAC Signature 200iQ Stereo Amplifier

Details: Written by Garrett Hongo; Category: Full-Length Reviews; Created: 15 September 2017

Reviewers' Choice When I was a kid growing up in the pre-statehood Hawaiʻi, three generations of my family would spend each Sunday night after dinner watching The Ed Sullivan Show from New York, a magical city an ocean and an entire continent away from our islands. On the stage of CBS Studio 51, in the Maxine Elliott Theatre, at Broadway and 39th Street, all manner of clowns, comedians, magicians, and musicians would cavort and play, inspiring us provincials into laughter, tears, or quiet admiration. Besides the big stars -- the singers and actors of the day -- there were novelty acts like the Spanish ventriloquist Señor Wences with his talking, lidded box; the Little Italian Mouse, Topo Gigio, a hand puppet that bantered with the host; and Borscht Belt comedians galore who kept us in stitches.

Jeff's Getting a New Stereo System: Part Three

Details: Written by Jeff Fritz; Category: Opinion; Created: 01 September 2017

The Dynaudio Contour 60 loudspeakers had just landed in the Music Vault and the Soulution 711 stereo amplifier was on its way out the door. A second set of speakers, the TAD ME-1 compact standmounts, were inbound. I had an amplifier lined up for review that would have given me a smooth transition from the Soulution, but, as often happens with these things, that shipment was delayed. Now my concerns were that there’d be a gap between power amps, and that I was running the risk of changing so much in my system in so short a period of time that I would muddy the waters of which outswapping of gear had caused which change in the sound.

Synergistic Research Galileo UEF Speaker Cables, Interconnects, and IFT Jumpers

Details: Written by Howard Kneller; Category: Full-Length Reviews; Created: 01 September 2017

Reviewers' Choice One of the first makers of audiophile cables, Golden Enz, began business in the 1970s. With conductors of ordinary electrical-grade copper and connectors of gold-plated nickel, Golden Enz cables now seem archaic. However, they were undoubtedly better than the lamp-cord wire then available at the local RadioShack.

Charles Lloyd New Quartet: "Passin' Thru"

Details: Written by Joseph Taylor; Category: Recording of the Month; Created: 01 September 2017

Blue Note B002681502
Format: CD

Musical Performance: ****1/2
Sound Quality: ***1/2
Overall Enjoyment: ****

Last year, tenor saxophonist and flutist Charles Lloyd released I Long to See You, a quintet recording with guitarists Bill Frisell and Greg Leisz; it was challenging and musically satisfying, but still accessible. His new disc on Blue Note, Passin’ Thru, is credited to the Charles Lloyd New Quartet, though this group -- pianist Jason Moran, bassist Reuben Rogers, and drummer Eric Harland -- has played together since 2007. The quartet lineup and approach are more traditional than on I Long to See You, but the music is bracing and alive, crackling with energy and creativity.

Mytek Digital Brooklyn DAC-Phono Stage-Preamplifier-Headphone Amplifier

Details: Written by Vade Forrester; Category: Full-Length Reviews; Created: 15 August 2017

Reviewers' Choice Mytek Digital has been a pioneer in digital audio reproduction. Their Stereo192-DSD was one of the first DACs capable of playing DSD files, and their Brooklyn was one of the first non-Meridian DACs to play Meridian’s new Master Quality Authenticated (MQA) files.

MQA is a system of encoding audio files that its developer, Meridian Ltd. (MQA Ltd. has since been spun off as a separate company), claims sounds better than such high-resolution encoding methods as DSD and DXD, while resulting in file sizes much smaller than those formats. The small files mean that MQA encoding can be used to stream hi-rez audio over standard Internet connections -- and indeed, Tidal is currently streaming MQA files. I’ve seen Tidal stream files of resolutions up to 24-bit/352.8kHz, and I understand that MQA can handle up to 768kHz.