LP Sales Skyrocket in 2008 Robert Harley SoundScan, the music-sales tracking company, just reported that sales of LPs increased by 89% in 2008 compared with the previous year. LPs sold at the rate of 1.88 ...

I may be a day late and dollar short in recommending a holiday album for the Christmas season but here goes. Five-time Grammy Award winning folk/pop singer-songwriter Mary Chapin-Carpenter who for twenty years has been ...

It has come to me that by some fortuitous alignment of the stars I’ve ended up with a system in my new second-floor listening room that is the most transparent to sources I’ve ever had ...

To recap: The Aston Martin DBS (aka, the James Bond car) that I enjoyed on two-day loan was delivered with a Bang & Olufsen sound system, customized for the DBS cabin. It’s a 13 speaker ...

I know this will seem like a considerable departure from my usual playing field, but an extremely affordable Litz-wire interconnect from ultra-high-end Japanese manufacturer Audio Tekne, handmade by the wife of Mr. Imai (the designer ...

Name That High-End Audio Company Robert Harley The following is my editorial that appears in the February issue of The Absolute Sound. I’m sure that some company names come to mind as you read through ...

I first heard about the solid-state Soulution 710 about a year ago. This hefty (176 lbs., uncrated), 240Wpc (into 4 ohms) Swiss-made stereo amp had already won a number of prestigious awards in Europe and ...

I've been a semi-serious photographer for many years and, in the heyday of film, owned virtually every kind of camera on the market--from Sinar, Deardorf, and Toyo 8x10s to Linhof, Sinar, and Toyo 4x5s to ...

Early this month I got to visit David Steven and his son David J., Chris, Martin, Andy, Rav, and all the other wonderful folks at dCS—designers and manufacturers of the two best digital products I’ve ...

I couple weeks ago I described my visit to Doug Sax’s the Mastering Lab in Ojai, California to listen the live-to-DVD-Rom demo recordings made by engineer Bill Schnee in concert with the ultra hi-rez JCF ...

Oppo has released some information on its much-anticipated BDP-83 Blu-ray Disc player. The DSD-over-HDMI feature is an interesting twist, as is the direct conversion of DSD to analog (rather than converting DSD to PCM for ...

Meridian Audio, the venerable British firm at the forefront of digital-audio technology, announced today that it has acquired music-server manufacturer Sooloos for an undisclosed sum. Sooloos’ music servers will continue to be sold under the ...

Man, I’ve been a jet-settin’ fool this year. First I went off to Germany in the spring, to make a quick stop at the high-end show in Munich and to take a factory tour of ...

I usually cover all digital products at shows, but this year I split the task with Alan Taffel. I took the disc players, transports, and DACs, and Alan tackled “Next-Gen Audio” (hard-disk-drive storage, Web-based content ...

A few weeks ago I spent an afternoon with engineers Bill Schnee and Doug Sax at The Mastering Lab, Sax's 5.1-channel facility in Ojai, California. I was there ostensibly to listen and to offer feedback ...