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Beginning at the end of 2003, PF established its first annual awards for fine audio. The Brutus Award was established for the best that David Robinson and Dave Clark had heard in their own listening rooms during that year. You can think of it as our equivalent of an "Editors' Choice" award. The Gizmo Award, on the... Read More »

Good friend John Marks of The Tannhauser Gate once again sallies forth to introduce us to another musical worthy:  In this case, the ravishing operatic singer, Frederica von Stade. Her vocal mastery is a wonder to hear, as you'll experience in John's three sample tracks below. I have been aware of Canteloube's Songs of the Auvergne for... Read More »

In which our hero meditates… The Audionet HEISENBERG Monoblock Amplifiers, bi-amped, with the YG Acoustics Sonja XV Loudspeakers and Kubala-Sosna Realization cables. In the fall of 2016 I reported on an extraordinary time that I had when I flew to Newark, NJ, and visited Bill Parish of GTT Audio for the launch of the brilliant... Read More »

Goodly guide and hale-fellow-well-met! John Marks of The Tannhauser Gate once again leads us into fascinating lesser-known musical worlds in this latest essay. Music and painting meet here, to the blessing of all! This possibility is something that I know well; PF artist Dan Zimmerman used to have sessions of listening-cum-drawing at my place many years ago.... Read More »

Wayne Goins, Jazz and Blues Man Extraordinaire, joins Positive Feedback as a Senior Associate Editor and as a Musician in Residence. We welcome Wayne to our creative community with real enthusiasm…I've heard him play! The man has the real bad-ass chops, amigos! Dr. David W. Robinson, Ye Olde Editor Well, hello there! Nice to meet... Read More »

Ye Olde Editor, a portrait. (Photograph by John Robinson; image processing by Ye Olde Etc.) I made a recent trip to Salina, Kansas to catch the 20th Anniversary Acoustic Sounds/Analogue Productions Blues Master weekend. My good audiobud Chad Kassem had been asking me to catch this event for twenty years now, and I had always... Read More »

In which our hero meditates… (Drawing by Robinson at a particularly boring faculty meeting many years ago….) What's the deal with me and German designs? In my later adult life, I've gravitated to a lot of products from our friends in Germania. While I'm not in the market for, say, guns, artillery pieces, or tanks,... Read More »

So it is now 2017, and many of us music lovers and gear nuts have moved into the area of playing back our music files (streamed or downloaded from the internet or ripped from a CD) in some fashion. The world of computer-based audio has evolved from using an off-the-shelf PC or Mac to do... Read More »

Roger Skoff Comments on the State of Music and Our Hobby Most of us will never sit on the stage at a concert of any kind. Neither will we ever have the opportunity to actually see—either by our physical presence or even through pictures—our favorite music of whatever kind being performed or recorded. Even so,... Read More »

Our fellow voyager and good audio friend, the esteemed John Marks, he of The Tannhauser Gate blog site, strikes out in a direction in this article that speaks to me. It's the moving and deeply inward world of Morton Feldman's Rothko Chapel, a commissioned composition both celebrating and creating the spiritual framework for the edifice of that... Read More »

Lynn in the BIG room Last year Lynn and I trekked out to New Jersey for the YG Acoustics Sonja XV speaker press event. That roll out went so well that GTT Audio staged a reprise this year for the launch of the Audionet Heisenberg amplifier and Stern preamp. So, Lynn and I recently returned... Read More »

Brian Hunter of Audiohead volunteered to cover this for Positive Feedback as we could not make it... As always with Schiit Audio, good time was had. Schiit Audio's second live stream event (and IRL event) took place last Friday to address the company's newest 3 products the Magni 3, the Loki mini and a prototype... Read More »

Gold Note might not be familiar to us here in the States as they are a relatively new company from Italy that is rapidly filling its offerings with anything and everything a music loving audiophile could imagine; from amplifiers, preamplifiers, speakers, turntables, servers and DACs, they have it all. And all made with that Italian... Read More »

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 »