At the listening party last night that featured this album I found that Thom Yorke is not my cup of tea. No surprise, I’m old and set in my ways.
The system being listened to was an SME 6 table and arm with a Hana ML on the end of it. Didn’t catch the phono pre but the store owner preferred it to the built in of the Luxman 509Z. Speakers were the Wilson Sasha V. I was sitting in the back of the room but to my ears the first side of the record had a dynamic range of about six dB. I was close enough to see the Luxman meters pretty much stayed in a very narrow range. The second half of side two got a little more dynamic but the Luxman seemed to be running out of gas by that time and it wasn’t very loud at all. Worst part for me, and the reason I posted this here was the noise between cuts was far too noticeable for my tastes. Plenty of folks were buying the record afterwards so what do I know? This was the first in-shop listening session I had been to in about 35 years and it was enjoyable.
