In the last six decades I haven't broken a single phonograph cartridge, but in the last two weeks I've broken two, and the crazy thing about it is I don't even know how I did it in either case. The first cartridge fatality was the Audio MusiKraft Denon DL-103 phonograph cartridge Guy Pelletier sent me. I... Read More »

I really appreciate the emails I get from you. Take for example the recent email from Robert Atkinson, expanding upon using the Hagerman FryBaby2 compact burn-in generator for interconnects, speaker cables, capacitors, and resistors. Jim's manual for the FryBaby2 is very brief and doesn't really give the reader a comprehensive overview of the specifics of... Read More »

I've been looking at guitars again, or more exactly, vintage Gibson ES 150 guitars. YouTube example below. Listen to that incredible tone of "Fred Archtop's" 1938 Gibson ES 150 "Charlie Christian", it's out of this world! So what does that have to do with audio? Well, both guitars and audio intersect at music, that's what! You've heard... Read More »

I love jazz. I love guitars. I love to hear jazz cats playing jazz on their guitars! It makes me smile. 🙂 Blues Going Up is a nice jazz swing album featuring George Barnes (guitar), Duncan James (guitar), Benny Barth (drums), and Dean Reilly (bass), that was recorded live at Bimbo's "supper club" on April 17,... Read More »

To get my mind off the plunging stock market and my plunging retirement savings, I thought I'd do something edifying like give my Thorens TD124 a try on my vintage Altec A5 Voice of the Theatre loudspeakers. I've wanted to revisit the Leben CS-600 integrated amplifier and Leben RS-30EQ combination that works so well together... Read More »

I went a bit wild today and decided to rearrange all my bedroom furniture so I could set up the new-to-me vintage Altec Corona loudspeakers as my bedroom system. The speakers look small in the photo above because of the size of the room, but they're really 3.5 feet tall and 3 feet wide, so... Read More »

I'm a huge fan of integrated amplifiers. In fact some of the finest amplification I've ever had the pleasure to listen to music with has come from integrated amplifiers, like the Leben CS-600 and the Spec RSA-M3 EX. I get quite a few messages from integrated amplifier owners asking me what separate components would better the... Read More »

It turns out that with my purchase of a pair of vintage Altec 832A Corona loudspeakers, that there are now four of us local friends that have vintage Altec loudspeakers with 800Hz (811B) horns that were designed for domestic use (Valencia's, and now the Corona's). Altec built a lot of loudspeakers that were designed for... Read More »

The vintage Altec Lansing 832A Corona's arrived from LA Jazz Audio this morning via R+L Carriers, who were very helpful and polite, and brought the pallet with the Corona's right up to my front door for easy unpacking -great service! LA Jazz Audio did a nice packing job, and I was able to quickly remove... Read More »