Following 5 years of R&D Franc Kuzma today introduced his latest creation, the SAFIR 9 tonearm. The conical arm tube is fabricated from sapphire— "the first implementation of the precious stone" for this application.

The recent Zenith angle error story gave readers a choice of two files, one that corrected the zenith angle error built into the cantilever because the stylus was inserted "off" by about 4 degrees and the other set up using the cantilever to set stylus groove tangency and so adding 4 degrees of error at the "null" point where tangency error should be 0.

The responses were interesting: at first participants chose "File 1" as the one with the zenith angle correction but later commenters chose "File #2". File #1 is the one that's corrected to compensate for the 4 degree error.

Following a snooze-inducing headlining performance (based on the recording) at the 2000 Glastonbury Festival, David Bowie and his band (guitarist Earl Slick, bassist Gail Ann Dorsey, pianist Mike Garson, drummer Sterling Campbell, and musician/producer Mark Plati) entered New York’s Sear Sound to re-record his early, mostly pre-Space Oddity catalog highlights. Bowie intended the quickly recorded result, Toy, as a surprise release, though in 2001 the financially struggling Virgin/EMI balked at the idea and eventually rejected the album altogether. For the following year’s Heathen, Bowie signed to Columbia and left uncertain Toy’s future. Leaked in 2011 and recently officially released by his estate and Parlophone, Toy now has its proper place in his studio discography. Yet, is it worthy of its legendary—and in some circles, almost mythical—status?

Mulberry Street Symphony awaits a re-press. Once it's in stock, Cowbell (see comment section) says it can ship to the United States.

Luxman today announced the introduction of the new LMC-5 moving coil the company's first new cartridge in 40 years.

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!

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.

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.

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.

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.