LATEST ADDITIONS

Drawn from a list of "100 Essential Country Songs" her dad penciled on a yellow legal pad after realizing that his young daughter didn't know any of what he considered to be part of his, and therefore her musical DNA, Roseanne Cash's The List is a full circle tribute to her father Johnny and her musical homecoming. It's an album the elder Cash would have been thrilled to hear.

Your head will spin dizzily with pleasure before you reach the end of the first chapter of "Canyon of Dreams," Harvey Kubernik’s lovingly told history of the unique Hollywood micro-climate known as Laurel Canyon. The supernovas and the dimly lit alike open up to L.A. native, record biz insider and scene maker Kubernik who transmits their stories with an immediacy that will make you feel more like an eavesdropper than a history buff.

As long as you're spinning an LP for your listening pleasure, and if digitizing it at a resolution of 24-bit/192kHz is transparent to the analog source, why not record and store the LP on your computer at that high sampling rate for future convenient playback via iTunes or for iPod use, or for burning to CD-R? And, while you're at it, why not record the LP unequalized and apply the RIAA curve in the digital domain, where you're not dependent on capacitors and resistors that are imprecise to begin with, and can drift over time? With no drift of phase or value, the virtual filter's results should be better than with any analog filter. And in the digital domain, you can program in any curve known, and select it at the click of a mouse. Aside from the sweat equity invested in programming it in the first place, it wouldn't add a penny to the program's cost.

The minuscule electrical output of an analog signal from a moving-coil cartridge needs to be boosted before it can be converted to digital and equalized in the digital domain. Of course, you could use your current phono preamplifier and record an equalized signal to hard disk, but then you wouldn't get to experience Pure Vinyl's digital RIAA correction—nor would you be able to avail yourself of all the equalization curves provide by Pure Vinyl, of which there are almost too many to count.