There’s no need to hold hot coals to my bare feet and force me to confess the album that I have played more than anything in my entire life. I freely admit that, by a wide margin, it’s the American edition of Elvis Costello’s This Year’s Model, with “Costello” on the label instead of “Columbia.”
I was working long hours at a radio station with a soft Adult Contemporary format. The U.S. Costello album concludes with the superb “Radio, Radio,” that isn’t on the UK edition. This is the stateside album cover.
Here’s another musical crossover involving the Jefferson Airplane. It was written by David Crosby, who is considered by some who have known him, to be a consummate jerk.
Turn volume down before playing. Unpleasant test tone.
This is the text I posted on YouTube to accompany the video:
Audiorpheus (https://www.youtube.com/c/Audiorpheus…) posted a lot of interesting and fun videos related to affordable record playing. He used the Hi-Fi News Test LP to perform some tracking tests, with the Nagaoka MP-110 coming out on top.
For this short video I used my copy of the Hi-Fi News test disc to compare a Grado Green cartridge with an Audio-Technica AT92E. I bought the Grado for $100 a couple of years ago, and the Audio-Technica was purchased new in 2013 for only $20 (the price was increased later to $30). The cartridges are mounted and aligned in identical head shells, and installed on a vintage Pioneer PL-112D turntable.
The Grado Green buzzes just as badly as the Grado Black did for Audiorpheus. The AT92E, however, performs just as well on the difficult inner-groove tracking test as the Nagaoka did for Audiorpheus.
The replacement for the AT92E is the AT85EP, for $40. If the AT85EP performs as well as the older model, it’s today’s #1 tracking bargain, costing a fraction the price of a Nagaoka MP-110.
