LATEST ADDITIONS

Set-Up Tips
Zenith Angle: The Final Cartridge Set-up Frontier?
Michael Fremer  |  Mar 09, 2022  |  46 comments
First up: identifying the two John Lee Hooker files in The Tapestry reveal: "File 1" is the original pressing. "File 2" is the Analogue Productions 2010 double 45 reissue. Some preferred the reissue, clearly cut from a secondary source, lured by the added bass and top end intended to distract from the soft guitar transients, vocal cloud and lack of top end air and having locked into that, those listeners found the original pressing "bright" and "bass shy". It's a tricky business but while the original may have had the bottom cut slightly it is otherwise massively superior and over time far more listenable. Now on to a really interesting and important test!

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News
Finally! The Contemporary Records Acoustic Sounds Series Reaches the Presses
Michael Fremer  |  Mar 08, 2022  |  21 comments
The extensive, long planned and then delayed Contemporary Records-Acoustic Sounds series finally drops beginning May 13th with six key titles mastered AAA by Bernie Grundman, pressed at QRP on 180g vinyl and presented in Stoughton Old Style Tip On jackets. The series is a continuation of Craft Records' 70th Anniversary Contemporary Records Celebration.

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Album Reviews
Anders Koppel's Mulberry Street Symphony  Is Made For These Times
Michael Fremer  |  Mar 07, 2022  |  9 comments
Danish immigrant Jacob Riis’s photojournalism book “How the Other Half Lives” published in 1890 documents the squalid life in New York City’s teeming Lower East Side slums crowded with Irish, Jewish, Italian, Chinese and other newly arrived immigrants. The muckraking book made an immediate impression upon New York’s upper classes and led to many reforms.

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Album Reviews
On Ghost Song  Cécile McLorin Salvant Finds Reflective Pleasure In Pain
Michael Fremer  |  Mar 05, 2022  |  4 comments
Surfacing on Nonesuch with Ghost Song, a personal, highly introspective album that intersperses covers and seven originals in service of a cautionary look at love and love lost, the always unpredictable Cécile McLorin Salvant dispenses for the most part with standard jazz backing, replacing it with imaginative instrumentation and ear-catching production techniques more reminiscent of a rock album, to deliver a series of fanciful mind flights sure to delight longtime fans and win her new ones.

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Set-Up Tips
If You're Using an Oscilloscope to Set Azimuth Here's a Really Handy Program Courtesy WAM Engineering
Michael Fremer  |  Mar 03, 2022  |  31 comments
If you're using an oscilloscope to set azimuth you are well aware of the math hassles involved. First you have to convert the derived voltages into dBVolts then you have to subtract the smaller number from the larger to determine the crosstalk and you have to do it twice: L-R, R-L.

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Vote
The "Tapestry" Reveal!
Michael Fremer  |  Mar 02, 2022  |  46 comments
The music enthusiasts who ran the reissue label 4 Men With Beards appreciated the vinyl format, so they reissued 180 gram records in glossy gatefold jackets, thus producing physically desirable, attractive reissues. They were not at all concerned about “analog purity” or sound quality other than that the CD or file supplied by the licensing record label was the “official” source. 4 Men began reissuing these records at a time when little vinyl was being released by anyone.

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Album Reviews
Is The Kid A Mnesia Vinyl Set Worth Your Money?
Malachi Lui  |  Mar 01, 2022  |  12 comments
In November 2021, Radiohead combined their “twin albums” Kid A (October 2000) and Amnesiac (May 2001) with a previously unreleased outtakes collection, Kid Amnesiae, for the highly anticipated three-disc Kid A Mnesia. Several formats are available: US and EU standard weight 3LP pressings on black (standard) and red (limited) vinyl, a similar 3CD set, a Japanese 3CD featuring Amnesiac B-sides excluded from most other Kid A Mnesia releases, a Kid Amnesiette limited edition double cassette (also featuring those Amnesiac B-sides), and the sold-out “Scarry Book.” The latter, a super deluxe 3LP package, lacks the Amnesiac B-sides but features a 36-page large-format art book and the 3 LPs on 180g cream-colored vinyl.

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FeaturesShort Cuts
Review Explosion: The Weeknd, Burial, Hikaru Utada, The Beatles, & Beach House
Malachi Lui  |  Feb 28, 2022  |  10 comments
(Review Explosion, curated by contributing editor Malachi Lui, is AnalogPlanet’s guide to notable recent releases and reissues. It focuses on the previous few months’ new releases for which we don’t have time or energy to cover more extensively.)

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Interviews
Catching Up With Colin Hay
Bill Wright  |  Feb 28, 2022  |  3 comments
Everyone has that band or performer that represents in his or her life a particular time and place. Colin Hay for me is one of those artists.

It was the mid-80’s, and I was a college radio DJ at St. Mary’s College of California. These were the pre-Internet days, and in our lives music was the predominant force. CDs were slowly emerging, but vinyl was still king. We would spend long nights spinning records in the KSMC studio and discussing the artists on the air, while the rain beat quietly on the windows.

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Features
Billy Byers—Impressions of Duke Ellington —Mercury PPS 6028—The Records You Didn’t Know You Needed #10
Joseph W. Washek  |  Feb 28, 2022  |  6 comments
Billy Byers (1927-1996) was an excellent jazz trombonist that today is probably best known for his all over the horn, hard-swinging solo on the title track of Frank Zappa’s The Grand Wazoo album. Although he was awarded a long solo by Zappa, a famously exacting taskmaster, and played in the bands of the no less demanding Buddy Rich and Benny Goodman, recorded as a sideman on many jazz dates and made two albums as a featured soloist, Byers after the late 1950s, mainly worked as an arranger, not as a player. Probably the choice of the rigors and travails of the life of a touring jazz musician or the frequent tedium of studio work had little appeal and he made a long and successful career for himself, writing arrangements for hundreds of jazz recordings, movies and television shows. Discogs lists three hundred and forty-one “Writing & Arrangement” credits for Byers.

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