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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 »

Blank tapes:  Not usually the topic of an article in a high-end audio journal! But Greg Beron, he of United Home Audio fame, with its treasure trove of RTR tape recorders, knows whereof he speaks. He has lots of experience with tapes, and here shares a few comments about two tapes that are currently available.... Read More »

I've always enjoyed visiting with Richard and Sue at Sophia Electric about their vacuum tubes and amplifiers, so when Dr. David contacted me about Sue's inquiry to see if I'd be interested in writing about the new Sophia Electric EL34-ST and Aqua 274B vacuum tubes, I said, "You bet!" I'll start with the new Sophia... Read More »

This is the third installment of John Marks' very helpful series that guides our readers through various aspects and considerations for digitizing their LPs. In it, John...he of The Tannhauser Gate blog site...is seeking to help you by providing recommendations for quality components in a cost-effective way.  Could other components be used? Of course. But by... Read More »

Herein we have part two of our good audio friend John Marks, he of The Tannhauser Gate blogging fame, in which he continues his series on transferring and digitizing LPs in a cost-effective way. Many PF readers will find this series to be of assistance, as they seek to archive their valuable, but so very fragile, analog records.... Read More »

This is a fascinating new series from our good friend John Marks, editor of The Tannhauser Gate. In it, John proposes to provide a reasonably simple and affordable method for converting LPs to digital files for playback on computer-based systems. I think that his comments will be quite helpful for those of our readers here at PF who... Read More »

Back in Issue 88 of Positive Feedback I wrote about the Duelund Coherent Audio DCA16GA tinned-copper audio cable that I've been using for building interconnects, loudspeaker cables, and for the internal wiring of my Tannoy Westminster Royal SE loudspeakers' Duelund CAST external crossovers. That was a scant seven months ago, and now due to popular... Read More »