Bais Audio's A.J. Conti chose T.H.E. Show Newport 2013 to introduce his top of the line Work of Art turntable. Though it's bee available for a few years, he's not brought it to a show. It was spinning records via his new Superarm 9 tone arm
T.H.E. Show Newport Beach 2013 is underway and coverage will begin later today. I participated in the ribbon cutting ceremony with John Atkinson, Robert Harley and Dr. David Robinson wearing the GoPro camera so you could see the event from my perspective but the camera was accidentally set to 'still' and I didn't get the video.
Before touring the Record Industry pressing plant Analogplanet's Michael Fremer sat down with Ton Vermeulen to get the factory's history and a figurative finger on the pulse of a man who would buy a record pressing plant as the vinyl record lay on its supposed death bed.
David Bowie fans who lost the thread around his Tin Machine days or who meandered mystified or perhaps less than fully satisfied through his end of century output and beyond need to return for The Next Day his first album in a decade, following his 2004 heart attack and major surgery. Not that Heathens wasn’t a good outing
After visiting the U.K. after Munich's High End show, I flew to Amsterdam. Record Industry pressing plant owner Ton Vermuelen picked me up at the airport and drove me to the Haarlem-based pressing plant he owns.
I flew into Los Angeles a week early to be HI-FI '98's media mouth. I hung at the hotel as much as possible, but there were radio stations and record stores to visit. I'd decided not to schlep records with me from back east, instead relying on what I could find in the L.A. bins.
What luck! Rockaway was having another half-price sale on used vinyl. I got unplayed "steamboat''-label Reprise pressings of the Kinks' Kink Kontroversy and You Really Got Me, and a British Apple original of the Beatles' 196266, for 12 bucks apiece.
After the Munich High End Show I went to the U.K. on some other business and while there paid a visit to Electric Mastering, the parent company of reissue label The Electric Recording Co.
The Munich High End Show is probably the world's best attended audio event and the industry's most important. It is of greater significance than even the International Consumer Electronics Show held in Las Vegas every January.
In addition to showing his almost menacing looking mega-mass Stabi M turntable we highlighted in CES 2013 coverage, Franc Kuzma introduced a line of MC phono cartridges with motors manufactured to his specs in Japan and bodies he machines in Slovenia.
American WADAX distributor Rick Brown holding a test pressing of a new vinyl reissue of one of Todd Garfinkle's most highly regarded m-a recordings, Será Una Noche