LATEST ADDITIONS

There are more choices in outboard phono preamps today than there have ever been, and they're lining up here like planes waiting to take off from Newark/Liberty.

Suppose a group of exposition amateurs produced an audio show. What do you think would happen? The crew that created last week's Florida Audio Expo had no show producing experience and did not know what to expect when they went into this dicey venture. They succeeded beyond what must have been their most optimistic projections. From left to right in the photo are Bart Andeer (President of the Suncoast Audiophile Society and of Resolution Acoustics), Ammar "A J" Jadusingh (owner of Soundfield Audio), AnalogPlanet editor Michael Fremer, Mike Bovaird (proprietor of Suncoast Audio, a Sarasota high end store) and John Chait (a longtime DIY audiophile and member of both the Suncoast and Sarasota audio clubs).

A young reader who's been a Stereophile subscriber since junior high, and an "Analog Corner" fan for nearly eight years, sent me a copy of "A Vinyl Farewell," by David Browne, which appeared in the October 4, 1991 issue of Entertainment Weekly. In the article, Browne kisses the LP goodbye, lovingly, nostalgically, and not at all dismissively. Accompanying the article is a photo, perhaps unintentionally suggestive, of an unusually large stylus floating above a record and about to make contact with a hairball of dust. The caption reads, "Playing an LP suddenly feels as foreign as a druidic ceremony."

You know those records that “got away”? The ones you saw in the bins when they first were released that you mean to buy but somehow didn’t? One for me was Peter Walker’s Rainy Day Raga on Vanguard. I’ll pick up a copy eventually (I said that before, back in the ‘60s, but this time I mean it!) but for now there’s this old-time/modern psych-drone fest with the recently resurfaced Walker, now in his 80s, collaborating with Harmony Rockets (better known as Mercury Rev along with Wilco’s Nels Cline, Sonic Youth’s Steve Shelley and Martin Keith.