This afternoon I got out my Philips LP of George Szell conducting the Concertgebouw Orchestra in the Sibelius 2nd Symphony. This is...

I would have been about 15 years old. The family lived in Applewood, a western suburb of Denver. We rented a small townhouse, nothing...

My collection of recordings is so large as to be daunting. It takes up about six terabytes of disc space, all either FLAC or Apple...

I've been fiddling with my main sound system for some time. Check here , and here , and here , and here . Not that there's been anything...

Blomstedt, Gothenburg, Stenhammar, and BIS: Heaven I'm definitely an audiophile but I sincerely hope that I never devolve into the crazy...

I've been rewatching the series of movies from the 1930s and early 1940s that Universal Pictures released regarding Baron Frankenstein...

I practice a double career. On Mondays, Wednesday, and Fridays from the end of August to mid-May I'm a college professor, the Chair of...

In a previous post I described how I was disappointed in one of my new acquisitions – the Kara F preamplifier from Schiit Audio, after...

In my most recent post I described how I have been fiddling with my main sound system. All has gone along well, but one component hasn't...

Audiophilia is a cyclic phenomenon that goes through long periods of stability, then erupts into fits of fiddling. I'm in the fit of...

I suppose I should slap the 'audiophile' label on myself. I'm reluctant to do it. Not because I'm embarrassed in any way by being devoted...

After I had my home's windows replaced with fine new vinyl jobbers, the family-owned window company sent over their dad (the company...

The other night I awoke abruptly after a particularly awful dream that had percolated up from who knows where in my subconscious. It was...

I make absolutely no secret of being a wildly enthusiastic record collector. Some might call it an addiction. But they just don't know a...

Recording venues aren't famous as a rule. Even Abbey Road Studios is familiar not so much for itself, but for the famed Beatles album. Most people have never heard of such places as the Sofiensaal (the site of many great Decca recordings with the Vienna Philharmonic) or Philadelphia's Broadwood Hotel (Columbia Masterworks and the Philadelphia Orchestra). Recordings have to be made somewhere , after all, but the actual locale is usually buried somewhere in the technical credit

When I took over the chairmanship of the music theory/musicianship department, I inherited a problematic young teacher who had been a...

You gotta admire the sheer cheek of conductors Riccardo Chailly, Daniel Barenboim, Christian Thielemann, and Osmo Vänskä. They’ve done...

The Vienna Philharmonic isn’t just an orchestra. It’s the music world’s ultimate insiders club. You can’t get in merely by playing an...

Fascinated by recordings at an early age, but saddled with a kid’s limited budget and even more limited accessibility from my perch in a...

Certain pieces make me happier like no others, and Mozart Symphony No. 39 ranks high on that list. I'm particularly potty about the slow...