Johnny Sharp on the creation of the artwork for Isaac Hayes' 1971 album Black Moses
The resurgence in vinyl sales over recent years is not just about the sound emitted from those shiny black grooves. Many buyers, particularly younger ones, are just as attracted to album sleeves. And of those, a good proportion will tell you they like to have the full-fat LP package experience sat on their shelves unspoilt by actual plays, or even framed on their walls as artworks.
It's taken three years, but it was worth the wait: D'Agostino's Relentless Preamplifier has arrived, and it's as much of a revelation as the matching power amplifiers
You gotta love items with absolutely perfect names: 'Land Rover Defender', 'Rolex Explorer', 'Fender Jazzmaster'. When founder and chief engineer, Dan D'Agostino, dubbed his assault on the high-end 'Relentless', with cost-no-object flagship monoblock power amps [HFN Mar '20], he might have been referring to himself, as that is how he approached the task. With this matching three-chassis Relentless Preamplifier (£159,500), he's raised the bar once more.
This month we review and test releases from: Bonnie & Taylor Sims, The Gesualdo Six, Thomas Oliemans/Amsterdam Sinfonietta/Candida Thompson, Gábor Csordás, Sándor Tóth, Tamás Hidász & Vince Bartók and Octave Records.
AVID's 'sledgehammer-to-crack-a-nut' two-way features a massive all-alloy cabinet with tuned mass dampers to kill unwanted resonances – and this is the smallest in its range!
The friend who helped me unload these three AVID Hi-Fi boxes – one for each Reference Four speaker, at £20,000 a pair, plus one for the included (and very hefty) stands – thought he'd nailed it. 'What are these for, then?' he asked, 'heavy metal music?'. He wasn't far off the truth for while most speakers do very nicely indeed with variations on the wooden box theme, the Reference Fours use all-alloy cabinets, with panels up to 15mm-thick, sitting on six 'risers' attached to a thick alloy baseplate. Hence why each of these relatively compact speakers, at just under 37cm tall, weighs 25kg.
Inside a former church in London is a recording facility used by such stars as Bob Dylan, Tom Petty and Adele. Steve Sutherland invites you to pull up a pew as he tells its story
Some time in 1985, so the story goes, Dave Stewart of British pop duo Eurythmics had been working in Los Angeles with Bob Dylan and invited him to stop by his recording studio any time he found himself in London. The studio, which was called The Church, was in Crouch Hill, N8 and a few months later Dylan did just happen to be in the UK, so he decided to take up Dave on his offer.
It's taken three years, but it was worth the wait: D'Agostino's Relentless Preamplifier has arrived, and it's as much of a revelation as the matching power amplifiers
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