LATEST ADDITIONS

Cassette tapes are in the midst of enjoying a major comeback — and perhaps it has been a somewhat unexpected development, at least to some. Read Leslie Shapiro’s insightful feature on the history of the longtime leading cassette manufacturer Maxell, the true origins of the infamous Blown-Away Guy, and the bigger-picture reasons for why the cassette format lives on (and on). . .

The O.G. has returned to the fold — or rather, to the spindle. In conjunction with BBC engineers in London in the late 1960s, Keith Monks developed the first commercially produced electric device to clean records in order to meet the “exacting standards” of FM radio broadcasting — and thus, what we now refer to as a record cleaning machine (RCM) was essentially born. Fast-forward to the modern era, where the late company founder’s son Jonathan Monks has just seen fit to introduce the company’s latest RCM model, the ReduxTwo. Read on to see all the features and specs for the ReduxTwo RCM, and when it will hit the marketplace. . .

The challenge of writing a review about a band you are admittedly not intimate with — one that some interwebs sources consider to be “the most successful group of the 21st century,” having sold more than 100 million albums and counting — has upsides, as well as down. Such is the case with Coldplay’s new 140g LP Moon Music, which was released by Parlophone on October 4, 2024, on a new vinyl alternative called EcoRecord. Read Mark Smotroff’s review to see if the songs on Moon Music spoke to him, and how well the EcoRecord format got across the band’s intentions. . .

Many of us use platter mats to dampen resonances and minimize other vibrations whenever we play our LPs. For those not entirely in the know, these mats are typically “waffer-thin,” to borrow the enunciation of a quite specific Monty Python bit, and they go directly underneath the LP that’s spinning and in turn reside right on top of the turntable platter beneath it. Seeing how I’ve been getting, shall we say, a bit restless with my current mat rotation, I wanted to take a fresh look at and listen to something new, and that led me to the Mat Chakra Limited — a cool, current platter mat from the Italian manufacturer Sublima Audio Research. Read on to find out more about company founder Alessandro “Alex” Cereda’s philosophy behind the design of the Mat Chakra Limited, and how this platter mat just might work for enhancing the performance of your own LPs. . .