Lovely Recordings

I've been an audio fool for close to twenty years now, and I gravitate to SET's and high efficiency speaker systems. Currently I am using a rebuilt Lenco table, a Schiit Gungnir DAC, Shindo Masseto preamp, and Shindo Cortese amp. I am between speakers, but looking for the perfect pair.

I've wanted to share a "Lovely Recordings" post for months, but it wasn't until a recent trip to Sri Lanka that I finally pulled it together. The trip provided the space to revisit my favorite albums from 2017, including older albums that I learned about from blogs like this one and recommendations from friends. Music not only provides a context to our experiences—like, when traveling, zipping from hill country, to jungle, to plateau, to beach, to city—but it enables us to tweak and optimize the moment by selecting the perfect album or track. Like switching out a source, power cable or interconnect, music allows you to fine tune the color and adjust tone. I hope the choices offered up here provide you with ample options, whether for trips to exotic locales or for lazy evenings alone with your audio rig. Bon voyage!

Yes, I freely admit to loving Christmas music. Come Thanksgiving it's pretty much all I play until after New Year's Day. To sustain myself that long, I've had to collect a wide variety beyond the usual fare that gets played on the radio. For this list I've omitted the chestnuts everyone knows; no Vince Guaraldi "A Charlie Brown Christmas", no Nat King Cole or Bing Crosby, although I love all that stuff too. I have about 2500 Christmas tracks, mostly ripped from CDs, and I could easily include many of them here. But these are the some of the ones I turn to first when the season comes.

This is a list of albums in my collection that I like to listen in their entirety. I call it 'Whole Albums Worth Listening To”. There's not a clinker in the bunch of songs of each. When I first discovered each of these I played them over and over for months, and after years and years I still go back and listen. So sit back, queue 'em up and enjoy over 8 hours of good tunes.

The first user-submitted Lovely Recordings post arrived on October 26, 2015. Since then, there have been 101 Lovely Recordings, or more simply put, music shared among kindred spirits. Isn't that. . . lovely?

For Lovely Recording I selected music that speaks to me on many levels—and yes they all sound great!!!