Michael Fremer

Acoustical Systems two years ago introduced the Axiom pick up arm—one of the world’s most sophisticated and expensive. This year AS showed the arm on a "tricked out" La Platine Verdier Granito that had mistakenly been identified by someone in the room as something new from Acoustical Systems. Acoustical Systems will soon introduce less costly pick up arm.

I heard this tubed Acousticplan Phonomaster SE in the Devore Audio room and it sounded sweet yet detailed.

Adele's 25 sold 22,000 vinyl copies in its first week. Yes, that's a fraction of the total sales of 3.8 million copies sold but it's still impressive in our niche world.

After calming down following the original Birth of the Cool review I took a deep breath and listened again. What's more i realized I had two more versions of the record: a Dutch Odeon pressing (lime green Capitol label) from 1972 (5C052 80 798) with a different cover that you can pick up on Discogs for a few bucks, and a mysterious one from I believe a German label called Good Buy (Good Buy 2 F 671045) released around the same time as Classic's, which remains the best sounding available and so costs well over $100 on Discogs.