LATEST ADDITIONS

Well before Aaron Neville's gorgeous warble turned to wobble and he began using it as vocal ground cover—so much so that Saturday Night Live easily satirized it—his was a gorgeous instrument capable of both technical excellence and exquisite emotional communication as this impeccably produced and recorded 1991 release demonstrates.

Are you old enough to remember when New York State, much of the rest of the Northeast, and parts of Canada were blacked out by a power failure on November 19th, 1965 at 5:18pm? I was in my Phi Sigma Delta frat-house library at Cornell, HO model-car racing—for money. At the flick of the wrong switch, all bets were off for the night. I'll never forget that.

Where were you when you heard your first compact disc? I'll never forget where I was: at an early-'80s AES Convention in Los Angeles. It was Roxy Music's Avalon played on a refrigerator-sized machine, and the sound was as awful as the technology was brilliant.

I may not have been listening as an industry insider on the playing field of the audio biz, but I wasn't exactly a spectator in the stands, either. I was kind of on the sidelines. You have to at least be on the sidelines to attend an AES demo of the new electronic future.

Numerogroup's Rob Sevier has responded to my charge that his Wire piece was the "Stupidest Article Ever Written About Vinyl". And as expected, his response was infantile, petulant and utterly predictable.

(This post was originally published on the Stereophile.com website where you can also find very thorough coverage of T.H.E. Show Newport 2013. With John Atkinson and Jason Serinius on the job, I was free to look for analog gear knowing their report would cover the systems and sound-Ed).