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Mike Bovaird, the owner of Suncoast Audio in Sarasota Florida, held an event at his store on October 14, 2017 to provide a premier demo of the new Pacific flagship DAC from LampizatOr for his Sarasota customers. I flew in on 'lucky' Friday the 13th to Sarasota in order to cover the event. Suncoast Audio... Read More »

On Sunday October 15, 2017, the Los Angeles and Orange County Audio Society held its monthly meeting at the beautiful Weinhart Design audio emporium in Bel Air, CA. The main draw for this meeting was an opportunity to audition the Carver Amazing Line Source (ALS) Speakers from the Bob Carver Corporation. But, not only would... Read More »

John Marks of The Tannhauser Gate favors us with some reflections upon Bernadettes, Leonard Cohen of remarkable memory, the exceptional Jennifer Warnes, and a certain haunting song. This is a bracing little essay, taking across time and space to one of the great tandems of recent decades:  Cohen and Warnes. He's gone now, to my heart's... Read More »

This is the sixth and final installment of John Marks series on putting together a system to digitize your LPs. Republished from his blog site, The Tannhauser Gate, John's comments are a useful introduction to the process of going digital with your analog records. The links to the entire set of articles is referenced below, should... Read More »

Sizing Things Up Straight out of the box, the new Von Schweikert Audio Unifield 2 Mk III Loudspeakers (a replacement for the highly regarded Mk II version that came out several years ago) remind you that they are no ordinary compacts. For starters, these hefty beasts tip the scales at just over 50 pounds—each. Speakers in... Read More »

Technics is on a roll. Leave it up to the brand which helped define consumer HiFi in the 70s, to continue delivering the goods in 2017. That's quite the stretch, in a competitive industry like the entry level consumer HiFi market. Looking though their luxe, visually bold website, nay, experience portal, one can't help reminisce... Read More »

Experience, Direct Witness, Astonishment What It Is Across more than forty years I've recorded live jazz in many locations. The list of venues and places has grown long. The number of musicians—great, very good, extraordinary, iconoclastic and, on occasion, startling—has grown even longer. Jim Merod with Ornette Coleman (photograph courtesy of BluePort Records) Early on,... Read More »

Below you'll find part five of John Marks' six-part series describing one method for digitizing LPs. John, he of the blog site The Tannhauser Gate, gives our readers a cost-effective and reasonably simple method for transferring your albums to PCM files for archiving and playback functions. As he points out in his footnote, this method does... Read More »

The Bybee iQSE (photograph courtesy of Bybee Technologies) iQSE Disks or Quantum Signal Enhancers by the legendary Jack Bybee is quite a tweak at an affordable $150 per 4 inch x 2 inch disk. You can read a full report on these from Larry Cox in Positive Feedback. I found all new uses for these that I feel... Read More »

This is Part 4 of John Marks six-part series on digitizing LPs. This series is re-published from John's blog site, The Tannhauser Gate. In this set, he is providing his readers and ours with a solid and reasonably-priced way to archive their precious vinyl to digital format.  I commend John's care and attention to detail. Read... Read More »

Back in Issue 92 of Positive Feedback, Bob Levi did a review of the Unique Innovations Technology (UIT) Perfect Music Purifier Series of audiophile cables that he had recently discovered. According to Bob, the UIT cables provided quite a substantial percentage of top-notch performance at sub-$1000 pricing. In his summary, he stated, "The Unique Innovation Technology... Read More »

The GamuT Lobster Chair in the sweet spot at the PF listening room in River City. "And now," said Monty Python, "for something completely different!" When planning, setting up, or upgrading their listening rooms, audio folks don't usually spend too much time considering furniture. After all, loudspeakers. Electronics. Turntables. DSD. RTR tape. Racks. Cables. For... Read More »

The coincidences were uncanny. Exactly a year ago to the date we first visited Distinctive Stereo. Plus two weekends before that we had gone to Mezzrow, a small jazz club in the West Village, to hear clarinetist Ken Peplowski. Guess where we were and who we saw two weekends before this year? The outing was... Read More »

PrimeSeat Presents the NHK Orchestra in DSD 11.2 MHz (Photo: PrimeSeat Software) While many were celebrating Independence Day this 4th of July, a different celebration was happening in Japan and on the Internet. July 4, 2017 was the launch date of 11.2MHz DSD (also known as Quad DSD or DSD 256) Streaming Audio from PrimeSeat. ... Read More »

A gift, a sudden gift from audio compadre John Marks, proprietor of The Tannhauser Gate blog site. John is also the driving force behind John Marks Records, which was active in the 1990s but is now lamentably no longer producing recordings. His work moved me so much that he was featured on the cover of one of... Read More »

Like my good friend John Marks, proprietor of The Tannhauser Gate, I am a profound lover of Bach. But I was unaware of Nicholas Bruhns, and the other choice tidbits of musical history that John so adroitly shares with us here. I envy him the ability to attend the Bard Festival, and take in such focused wonders of... Read More »

Shaded dogs that is! This isn't the first time these absolutely legendary RCA Living Stereo recordings have appeared on reel-to-reel tape (Scheherazade (FTC2017) was according to Discogs released in 1960 on four-track tape). This is, however, the very first time this pair of now close to 60 year old recordings are available on real time... Read More »

This is a brief note to all our readers worldwide, letting you all know that as of late August, 2017, Positive Feedback has shifted to secure Web operations. We have done so by engaging a large and well-known company in the computer/network security industry, Symantec, and its VeriSign secure site certification. You'll notice the difference... Read More »

Unless you're a 'phile who lives under rocks, listens to CDs, and thinks that eclipses happen because someone didn't pay the power bill, you're aware that reel-to-reel (RTR) tapes have been going through a quiet renaissance over the past few years. There's an incredible romance that goes along with RTR machines, one that is deeply... Read More »