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Mack Avenue Music Group & Octave Music Partner With Vinyl Me, Please For Erroll Garner's Magician
Michael Fremer  |  May 20, 2020  |  5 comments
Mack Avenue Music Group and Octave Music are proud to announce a partnership with Vinyl Me, Please on Erroll Garner’s Magician as their May Classics Record of the Month. The record is also featured as the 11th release of the critically acclaimed year-long 12-album Octave Remastered Series featuring newly restored and expanded editions of classical Garner albums from the 1960s and ‘70s. Vinyl Me, Please’s package includes 180g black audiophile vinyl and an exclusive listening notes booklet by Ted Gioia.

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Analog Corner
Analog Corner #122
Michael Fremer  |  May 20, 2020  |  First Published: Sep 01, 2005  |  9 comments
Record Haul Weighs Down Minivan

“Records? You want to talk about records? I have at least 7000 and you can have them! But you can’t come over and cherry-pick what you want. You have to take them all,” said the gent who’s sat next to me at Avery Fisher Hall for the past four years. Somehow, the subject of LPs hadn’t come up till then, maybe because he shows up at every New York Philharmonic concert with a bag full of CDs from Tower Records.

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News
dCS Expands "Legends" Award Program to Additional Grammy-Winning Engineers
Michael Fremer  |  May 20, 2020  |  0 comments
dCS (Data Conversion Systems, Ltd.) announced earlier this month an expansion of its "Legends" program that acknowledges recording, mixing and mastering greats who have brought all of us so much listening pleasure through great recorded sound. The initial recipient, Bob Ludwig (third from the left after engineering greats Elliot Scheiner and Chuck Ainlay) was the first recipient at an awards ceremony in New York last October.

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Features
The Great Cable "Unmasking"
Michael Fremer  |  May 19, 2020  |  56 comments
Well, here we go. More than 125 people have participated in the It’s Just Wire “blind test”, so thank you all. Certainly, we’ve dispelled the ridiculous notion that “wire is wire” and that all wire sounds the same. Which one might prefer is of course a personal preference. That we’d need blind A/B/X testing to “prove” that any sonic differences exist is absurd.

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News
Reprise Drops June 19th Neil Young's 1974/'75 "Lost Album" Homegrown
Michael Fremer  |  May 19, 2020  |  6 comments
Neil Young describes Homegrown as "The One That Got Away". Recorded in 1974 and '75, the album should have been released a few years after Harvest, but the sad side of a love affair was too much for Young to deal with after recording it, so he "...kept it to myself, hidden away in the vault, on the shelf, in the back of my mind….but I should have shared it. It’s actually beautiful. That’s why I made it in the first place. Sometimes life hurts. You know what I mean. This is the one that got away."

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News
"Experiential" Grateful Dead 14 LP All-Analog Box Set in "Acid Flashback" Colors From Vinyl Me, Please
Michael Fremer  |  May 18, 2020  |  17 comments
Denver CO—Vinyl Me, Please today announced The Story of the Grateful Dead, a limited-edition 8 album, 14-disc set deluxe box set featuring 4 studio albums and four "essential" live albums all cut by Chris Bellman at Bernie Grundman Mastering using the original analog master tapes, housed in "Tip-on" jackets and pressed at QRP on colored vinyl.("Acid Flashback" color characterization, AnalogPlanet's description, not VMP's).

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News
Music Direct's Josh Bizar Asked For a Quarantine Album Fave So We Delivered
Michael Fremer  |  May 14, 2020  |  39 comments
Music Direct's Josh Bizar asked if Malachi and I to contribute short reviews to his website feature "Notes From My Listening Room" so we did.
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News
Is Tonearm Manufacturer JELCO a Covid-19 Victim?
Michael Fremer  |  May 11, 2020  |  31 comments
This morning I received an email from Simon Brown designer and manufacturer of the innovative The Wand tonearm and new The Wand turntable telling me that Jelco tonearm's parent company Ichikawa Jewel Co. Ltd had announced it would be shutting down the business.

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Cable Reviews
It's Just Wire (REVISED FILES)
Michael Fremer  |  May 09, 2020  |  134 comments
Thanks to all who listened and participated (so far) including those who correctly criticized me for having channels reversed on two files. I posted in haste. Also I should not have "normalized" the files and should have instead posted them "as-is" so the only possible variable was the cable. Also the track lengths are now as close to identical as possible.

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Analog Corner
Analog Corner #121
Michael Fremer  |  May 08, 2020  |  First Published: Aug 01, 2005  |  6 comments
Heart Attack on a Plate
Sundazed Music’s Bob Irwin was angry—and not because the corned beef at the Carnegie Deli was fatty (a given). A bunch of grizzled industry veterans, among them John Atkinson, AudioQuest’s Joe Harley, and David Chesky, were gathered for the annual pre–Home Entertainment Show high-cholesterol blowout organized by Ken Kessler at the famous New York eatery, and Irwin was explaining what the nice folks at Universal Music Group (UMG) had just done to him.

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