Features

Leading up to the Newport Beach show this weekend, I took a day to travel around the L.A. area with Record Collector News publisher Jim Kaplan.

While many of us seem to hear wider dynamic range coming from vinyl, the numbers would seem to point in the opposite direction. Or do they?

Workingman's Dead and American Beauty have long been considered to be the two Grateful Dead albums for people who don't think they like the Grateful Dead.

Back in 1999 I reviewed in Stereophile the KR Audio VT 8000 monoblock vacuum tube amplifier. I wrote in the review: "Virtually every part in the amplifier is custom-made in-house or sourced from associated facilities, including the metal fabrication, the transformers, and the circuit boards. The internal wiring is Swiss in origin. And, of course, the vacuum transducers themselves are made in-house by hand, and that includes all of the tiny internal components, which are stamped out one at a time by hand on dies custom-machined in-house. Even the glass for the tubes is turned and formed by hand. If I hadn't seen all of this with my own eyes, I wouldn't have believed it."

Following Munich's High End 2014 show I flew to the U.K. where I met up with Chad Kassem and Chad Stelly of Acoustic Sounds, the new American SME distributor. On Monday, May 19th we took a train to Shoreham by Sea to visit turntable and tonearm manufacturer SME.

Permission granted to take a short walk through parts of Amoeba Music in Hollywood with the GoPro camera on my head.