Pulse!

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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February 2023

Music is the reason for high-end audio. I still recall the first time I heard music on something that was better quality than the stereo console my parents owned. When I was in high school, I knew a keyboard player who worked part-time in an electronics supply shop. He convinced the owner, who might have been his dad—we’re going back quite a few years so the details are a bit fuzzy—to let him set up an audio shop in a section of the store.

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January 2023

Harrisonburg, Virginia, is a city of 52,000 in the Shenandoah Valley, about two hours from Washington, DC. Roughly an hour from Charlottesville, Virginia, where you can visit Thomas Jefferson’s home, Monticello, and another Jeffersonian attraction, the University of Virginia, Harrisonburg itself is home to two well-established colleges: James Madison University and Eastern Mennonite University. James Madison is a public university of over 21,000 students, while EMU is private and has about 1200 students.

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December 2022

It was the year live music was supposed to be back. And it was, in some senses—although pandemic-related restrictions continued to play havoc with musicians’ travel and festival schedules, and artists continued to reflect on the theme of “What the hell just happened?”

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September 2022

Woo-hoo! You made it through the recording process, but your work’s not done yet. Now you have to take all those separate tracks and turn them into something other people can listen to—and, ideally, something they want to hear. This process is called mixing or mixing down. The mixdown stage can seem daunting at first, especially when you have many tracks to mix. However, with practice, it’s not that big a deal on a modern digital audio workstation (DAW). It’s easier if you’re also the person who did the recording—you’re already familiar with the tracks, and you were probably working on the mix during the recording. But that’s not essential, and for this column I’ll be assuming that someone else recorded the tracks. The same principles apply to both situations.

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