Pulse!

December 2023

Every November, around Thanksgiving Day, I move my holiday music collection into the living room. It takes some effort, because I have to shift a couple of CD storage shelves down to the basement and bring my seasonal CD collection upstairs. Then I bring the holiday LPs up from the basement, and they displace the records I’ve been playing recently. I don’t know how much of my holiday music ends up hitting my turntable or CD player from late November through early January, but it takes up a good bit of living-room real estate.

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November 2023

One of the best things about listening to and collecting music is that you get the chance to challenge old opinions and hear things with a fresh ear.

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October 2023

As vinyl grows in popularity, Heinz Lichtenegger of Pro-Ject Music Systems, Harry and Mat Weisfeld of VPI Industries, Roy Hall of Music Hall Audio, and Roy Gandy of Rega Research must be pleased that they kept their faith in LPs and continued to manufacture turntables. Companies that had scaled back or even dropped their turntable lines are back in the game. Audio-Technica and Technics are making turntables for the audiophile market after years of sticking with DJ or entry-level ’tables.

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September 2023

About a year ago, Bruce Springsteen began touring again. It was the first time he and the E Street Band had appeared onstage together since 2017. Like a lot of performers, Springsteen was eager to be performing again. Some musicians who had been prevented from touring by the COVID-19 pandemic were downright cranky. Performers need to perform. They’re addicted to the stage.

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August 2023

I have a friend, a guy I worked with for a long time, who drove a modest little Geo sedan for his long commute. Ugly car, really. And small. He looked after it, though; it ran well and was dependable. Every workday, he drove 90 minutes or more each way, and I don’t think he ever missed a day of work because of car trouble. When my friend retired, he stopped driving that car and got a new Camaro. He deserved that reward. I have no idea how many miles he had racked up on that Geo, but I’m willing to bet it was over 300,000.

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July 2023

On the day that my comments about the recent MoFi settlement were posted on this site, I received a copy of Tuttle v. Audiophile Music Direct in the mail.

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July 2023

When the news broke last year that Mobile Fidelity Sound Lab was using high-resolution digital files as the source for some of its vinyl releases, including its costly Ultradisc One-Step pressings, a predictable outcry from vinyl lovers ensued. The story even got national attention, with a writeup in the Washington Post. Several SoundStage! Network contributors addressed the issue, including Jason Thorpe. I weighed in as well, as did SoundStage! founder Doug Schneider, who also posted a video about it.

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June 2023

It’s hard to think of a currently active mastering engineer whose initials appear on more LP lead-out grooves than Kevin Gray’s. He cuts the lacquers for Blue Note’s Tone Poet and Classic Vinyl series, as well as for rock recordings released on vinyl by Intervention Records. He also remasters vinyl reissues for some of Concord’s Craft Recordings reissues, including the newly resurrected Original Jazz Classics series. And that’s just a sampling of his current work.

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May 2023

If you want a good example of vinyl’s healthy return as a format, take a look at Blue Note’s Tone Poet reissue series. Jazz lovers have embraced it, despite the slightly higher costs. The Tone Poet LPs are mastered to an audiophile standard and the packaging reflects the care everyone has taken in presenting the great Blue Note and Pacific Jazz titles in the series. The covers are made of heavy cardboard, with tipped-on, laminated artwork prepared by Stoughton Printing. Most of the covers are gatefolds, with photos from the original sessions. Record Technology Incorporated, one of the best vinyl plants in the world, presses the 180gm LPs.

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March 2023

I’m on the email list for the writer Ted Gioia, who maintains a Substack blog publication called The Honest Broker. Gioia’s list of accomplishments is long—he is a music historian whose many books, including The History of Jazz (in its third edition as of 2021) and Music: A Subversive History (2019), are well regarded. Gioia has also written many music reviews, and, for a time, owned a record label. His fiction reviews are also well worth reading, but they seem to have migrated to The Honest Broker, which is a pay site.

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