Whenever I crossed paths with my colleague Jonathan Valin at RMAF 2018, he didn’t look happy. Though there were exceptions, he said, mostly the sound was not so great. My experience was different and the ...

On a Sunday afternoon in January of 1955, 23-year-old Glenn Gould played his U.S. debut recital at the Phillips Collection in Washington, DC. This highly idiosyncratic program included music by Gibbons (Lord Salisbury’s Pavan), Sweelinck ...

Photography by Dennis Weeks Real-world audiophiles understand that the pursuit of good sound, like most things in life, involves compromise. Those loudspeakers that you absolutely must have necessarily inform your choice of electronics; the dimensions ...

A week and a half before Christmas, I went down to my condo’s lobby to get the mail. As expected with the holidays coming up, a slew of packages were piled up on the floor, ...

Eighth Blackbird is a consistently cutting-edge chamber ensemble. But “cutting edge” doesn’t necessarily mean abstract, difficult music. The group’s projects are all over the map stylistically, and their latest, Olagón—”a conflicted wail of both mourning ...

An awful lot of reviewers have approximately the same photo of themselves with Dave Wilson, taken in that charmingly old-fashioned Provo living room, an XLF hulking nearby for scale and authenticity. I'm no exception. You ...

Real-world audiophiles understand that the pursuit of good sound, like most things in life, is ruled by compromise. The loudspeakers you can't live without inform your choice of amplifier; the size and shape of the ...

For those with a consuming (or even passing) interest in Wilson Audio Specialties, the next six days are going to feel like a bit of a striptease—the closest you'll ever get to that from the ...

Photography by Dennis Weeks Here’s an unanticipated finding: TAS’ Jonathan Valin, assigned the impossible task of covering all loudspeakers at the vast High End Munich show last year, observed that most were priced above $20,000 ...

By my count, these two piano concertos are David Chesky’s 18th and 19th compositions with the word “concerto” in the title—and there are actually several others characterized as “Urban Concertos” in his catalog. Chesky’s style ...

At 7 p.m. on Labor Day, I was sitting at a table in the empty lobby of the Hilton Garden Inn in Worcester, Massachusetts, waiting to speak with Reference Recordings engineer Keith O. Johnson. Across ...

In the primordial days of computer audio—that is, around a decade ago—it was obvious early on that the analog output from a laptop or desktop machine just wouldn’t do for anything resembling critical listening. Although ...

It’s a safe bet that, for most, the future of digital music playback will be disk-less. There will be streaming, probably downloads, and files derived from long-ago-relegated-to-the-attic compact-disc collections. LPs will still flourish because of ...

Does the release of Lyn Stanley’s latest album, her fifth since 2013, warrant a full page of coverage in this magazine? I think it does, as Stanley is one of us. She recognizes the importance ...

At audio shows, anytime I’ve run into Michael Vamos, the president of Audio Skies and importer of Larsen loudspeakers, he seems to be in an exceptionally good mood. Maybe he’s on medication. Maybe he’s just ...