LATEST ADDITIONS

Amoeba Music with record stores in Hollywood, Berkeley and San Francisco says that due to the Covid-19 virus it faces an "uncertain future" as all three stores since mid-March have been shut down. Savings are running out and while the company is paying staff salaries it cannot continue much longer without help from customers and friends.

WAM Engineering's new universal WallyTractor is now available from the newly formed company, a partnership between the late Wally Malewicz's son Andrzej, himself a mechanical engineer and Wally's former production assistant J.R. Boisclair. They've just launched the Wallyanalog website where you will find complete details of the new $395 universal WallyTractor and the available services the Santa Rosa, CA based company provides.

Staffers stealing beer crates every night. £5000 in cash misplaced and incinerated by New Years’ Eve pyrotechnics. A lighting engineer stealing equipment for his own rental business. Seemingly endless tax problems.

Starting with their solicitor’s £5000 company registration fee (compared to the £175 DIY cost), Factory Records’ Manchester, England nightclub, the Haçienda, quickly became a financial black hole and later a cultural icon. Established between Factory and New Order at manager Rob Gretton’s insistence, it opened in 1982 at the corner of Whitworth Street West and Albion Street, in a former yacht warehouse. Assigned the Factory catalogue number FAC 51, it established an amalgamation of the era’s Manchester and New York’s clubs, always being too far ahead of its time. In The Hacienda: How Not To Run A Club, former Joy Division/New Order bassist (and Haçienda co-owner) Peter Hook (aka Hooky) recounts the club’s inner workings, with Andrew Holmes providing additional context blurbs between Hook’s stories.

The hi-fi world has lost a giant, and we at Stereophile have lost a brother.

Art Dudley passed peacefully this morning around 4am after a short illness. The cause was metastatic cancer.