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Gather around, audiosports fans! It's that time of year again…Positive Feedback's Brutus Awards season. Here is 'Part The Second' of Robinson's Brutus Awards 2016. Part The First can be found HERE and Part The Third HERE. Electronics, Part 1 Gryphon Audio Kalliope Quad and Qcto (256fs and 512fs) DSD DAC The Gryphon Audio Kalliope DSD DAC upon arrival…... Read More »

Gather around, audiosports fans! It's that time of year again…Positive Feedback's Brutus Awards season. You can find Part The Second HERE and Part The Third HERE. At the end of each year, my unindicted co-conspirator Dave Clark and I give our Positive Feedback awards. These are our annual "best stuff we heard this year" plaudits. No padding, crap, junk food, or... Read More »

Johnny Hartman - Once In Every Life Reissued by Analogue Productions APJ 105 originally released in 1981 by Bee Hive Records BH 7012 A very difficult record to review! So much to say and so little room to say it. In 1995 Clint Eastwood directed and starred in The Bridges Of Madison County. In September... Read More »

No. Not the streaming media service. Turns out, there's a major high-end audio company in Germany, TIDAL Audio, which is joining the ranks of world-class audio design. In fact, TIDAL Audio, founded in 1999 by Jorn Janczk with the stated intent of building the finest audio systems on the planet, has been around years longer... Read More »

Rush Paul is an audio friend of mine, who happens to share my passionate love for LPs and Lloyd Walker's wonderful Walker Audio Proscenium Turntable, arguably one of the very best reference turntables on this humble rock. He's deeply into getting the best out of his albums. Rush recently sent me his notes summarizing his... Read More »

So here I am again, returning to one of the touchstone companies for DSD and digital audio:  Playback Designs. Am I surprised? Should anyone be surprised? Heck no. In fact, according to Andreas Koch, he and I first saw each other at the original DSD demonstration at Mobile Fidelity in Sebastopol, CA, back in September... Read More »

There's glory for you! In which our hero meditates… This isn't going to be anything like a standard review, which is something that I don't do anyway. No short-term romance…no quickie relationship…no three-months-and-done. No "Wow, what the hell was that?!" No "of all the turntables I've ever heard, this is another one." No, this is... Read More »

In which our hero meditates… What a year it's been. As I observed in the first of these "Brief Impressions" articles, on the Oppo Sonica (HERE), there have been so bloody many products and projects here at PF Central in 2016 that I'll be writing from here until the end of the year to cover... Read More »

Funny thing. You'd think that there wouldn't be any enormous mountaintops in Newark, New Jersey. And you'd be wrong…. Let me explain. Bill Parish of GTT Audio A couple of months ago I got an invitation from Dick Diamond of YG Acoustics, Bill Parish of GTT Audio, and Joe Kubala of Kubala-Sosna to attend a... Read More »

[UPDATED VERSION with new purchase links for NativeDSD.com included at the end of the review.] For quite a while now I've been sitting on an advance copy of an important Quad DSD recording, waiting for it to be released commercially. Now, I'm glad to say, the time has come…at last! The album is music by... Read More »

Great news! Positive Feedback and NativeDSD (http://www.nativeDSD.com) announce the release of a joint music project, the PF DSD Sampler, Volume 1. This project was done to celebrate NativeDSD.com's amazing achievement of passing 1000 albums at its site in early September of 2016. The PF DSD Sampler, Volume 1 is a collection of ten selections from... Read More »

Brief Impressions:  From an Editor's Notebook In which our hero meditates… What a year it's been. There have been so many products and projects here at PF Central in 2016 that I'll be writing from here until the end of the bloody year to cover them all. Some of these will require a more extended... Read More »

Well, right on, John Marks! Here's a real classic from the trove of audio loot. This week's album from The Tannhauser Gate (http://www.thetannhausergate.com) brings back a pile of memories from my junior year in high school, which was a time of ferment and fervor in my life, there with friends and life in the East Bay sprawl-town of... Read More »

Oh damn!! There goes my new dedicated power supply!

David W. Robinson, with John Tucker Winston Ma at his garden:  A portrait. Bellevue, WA, 2001. There seem to be a number of passings in 2016 already. Sure, that's always true, statistically. But this has already been a bad year for notable music figures dying…David Bowie, Prince, Natalie Cole, Glenn Frey, John Berry, Merle Haggard,... Read More »

In which our hero meditates… Some plaudits where plaudits are due I have several items that have been accumulating in my notebook for a couple of months now. One was a notion for a full review that didn't need to be done, since another PF reviewer (Marshall Nack) did the main lifting; the others were candidates for... Read More »

A portrait of the artist at play:  David W. Robinson with EveAnna Manley (photograph by Dave Clark) The second part of my THE Show report from Newport Beach 2016 shifts the focus (so to speak) from the event, the rooms, and the equipment, to the people in our high-end audio community. As an artist, I... Read More »

Already! Already THE Show has come and gone! Where did June 9-12 go? The first post-Richard Beers event is in the books now, and the results are in. According to Maurice Jung, the new president of THE Show, and his staff, total attendance was nearly 10,400 over the four days. The “Industry Day” was Thursday,... Read More »

I have had a long acquaintance and friendship-at-a-distance with John Marks of John Marks Records, and, until recently, a contributor to Stereophile. Music lover, producer, writer, reviewer, audio designer, and a very cogent, trenchant thinker, John is a person that I have a very great deal of respect for. I first encountered John around the time of... Read More »