Rick Schmidt

Telluride 2016

In the intro for the 2015 Telluride Film Festival I wrote about how Aretha Franklin was suing to stop the presentation of the performance-documentary “Amazing Grace”. I’m happy to cut and paste that information into this year’s intro. We were shocked to see that it was on the schedule...

Telluride Film Festival 2015

Telluride Film Festival 2015

There was a great lineup of films at this year’s Telluride. Among them were two music documentaries that were filmed in the 1970’s but have barely seen the light of day in the forty-some years since. One of them vanished back into the darkness on opening day however. At the press conference at 1:00 pm on the Friday...

Pono Portable Music Player Review

We've been waiting for the PonoPlayer for a long, long time. Neil Young was first pitching this thing on Letterman in 2012. The kickstarter campaign, which raised nearly 15x the initial goal of $800,000 ended on Tax Day 2014 with delivery promised by October.

Telluride Film Festival 2014

This was my 13th straight year at the Telluride Film Festival and I was more excited than ever. The story leading up to the festival was the "land grab" by the Toronto Film Festival. The Toronto fest immediately follows Telluride each year. And while Telluride can best be thought of as the Labor Day barbeque for Hollywood and film lovers...

Moving Magnet vs Moving Coil

I bought a new turntable but am still trying to decide on the cartridge. Should I get a moving magnet (MM) or moving coil (MC) cartridge? What price range should I consider assuming I have mid-priced components in my audio system?

- Tony M
Phoenix, AR