Album Reviews

Note: the review below was written and posted before we received a technical note that was supposed to have been included in the review LP. The note from Reference Vice President Marcia Martin says there were both analog and digital masters of this production. When the analog tape is still in good condition it will be used as the source for these new Reference Mastercut LPs. In this case and for From the Age of Swing the analog tapes were transferred to 176.4kHz/24 bit digital and the file was used to cut the lacquer. This is safer, Ms. Martin says, when dealing with older tapes.

  Randy Wells' recent review of this Sundazed reissue may have seemed thorough and matter-of-fact to most of you and judging by the emails, well appreciated, but the folks at Sundazed were anything but pleased, which kind of surprised me, though Wells did prefer the Audio Fidelity release so perhaps I should not have been surprised.

The very first London "Blueback" probably engineered by the great K.E. Wilkinson in London's superb sounding Kingsway Hall combines stunning sonics with an accessible, lyrical musical program. Mendelsohn wrote the Overture opus. 21 in 1826 when he was but 17 years old. The remainder was written almost two decades later, commissioned by Prussian King Frederick William IV as accompaniment to an 1843 performance of the play.

Johnny Cash's third album and his major label debut  recorded in 1958 and issued in early 1959 doesn't mess much with the Sun era shuffle-and-twang musical formula. Luther Perkins does the twanging as he did as a member of The Tennessee Three, Cash's backing group but the overall sound is somewhat watered down.

With a nod to the Hank Williams tune of the same name (which also was the name of a book Earle authored), this Steve Earle album released last spring is a collection of songs dealing mostly with mortality, keying off of his father’s passing.

At first you might think "Can these tracks really have come from the same session that produced A Night in Tunisia?" That’s the claim, so you'd be  expecting the same level of raw intensity, the same Van Gelder generated echoey backdrop and the same sense that this was a “cutting session” for the ages.

The winner is physicist Richard Horton, in Huntsville, Alabama. Yes, a scientist who prefers vinyl! And here are the winning answers: