From spinning shiny discs to black vinyl was a small step. Amongst many other LP, we played Jimmy Smith with Bashin' as recently rediscovered in our stash of black gold. The B3 virtuoso here is joined by big band. Lots of brasses roar loudly on their own, then softer when his Hammond organ kicks in. Joe Cocker's classic Sheffield Steel is an icon of the early 80s and sports Sly & Robbie as the rhythm tandem and appearances by Jimmy Cliff and Robert Palmer with the characteristic voice of Joe Cocker against a relaxed soul-funk background; no wonder with an album recorded in Nassau on the Bahamas. After the CD version of Unifony, we now played the vinyl edition. With all the vinyl spun, we had the notion that the on-board phonostage did a good job but no more. Admittedly the Brooklyn Bridge is not meant to be a superior phonostage of its own. The phonostage is an addition and as such good enough. In a setup with a fine budget turntable and cartridge like a Dutch Takuma deck with Ortofon cartridge, it will do just fine.

Thus far we had used the analog volume control of the Brooklyn Bridge. There's also a digital option but in our opinion that should only be used for minor volume trimming to preserve resolution. Strong digital attenuation strips bits and beyond a certain point gets lossy. Here analog attenuation is still the better choice. On to streaming. As mentioned, we used mConnect Control for Tidal, Qobuz and locally hosted files. First up was Roberto Fonseca with Yo streaming from Qobuz in the 24bit/44.1kHz version.

In the opening track, strong rhythmic percussion keeps on going for half of its 4.14 minutes. Fonseca adds his piano with staccato chords until the halfway break whence the catchy melody and percussion return. Try to sit still with this going on! Also from Qobuz we played Ibrahim Maalouf 14.12.16 Live in Paris. The French streaming company offer this at 24bits/96kHz. Like with all Maalouf concerts, there is audience participation and here at the Accorhotels Arena, the audience was big. In the second track "Ya Ha La", they really get going. This track almost rocked down our casbah since we had the strong urge to keep turning the volume up. With Mytek's Apple remote, that was child's play. After the mayhem of the second track, the lovely "Lily Will Soon Be a Woman" had the audience sing very subtly at the end. With this French trumpeter, it's always a party. Here's a nice interview with him and at around 31:00 the music starts

We remained in France with the Hadouk Trio's Live a FIP. This album we had on our hard disk in the CD version. mConnect displayed all folders as an alphabetic list at least in our case so we had to scroll through all the folders or use the easy search option. We worked our way to the album and selected the mesmerizing "Barca Solaris" whose eight minutes took us on an internal journey. On a foundation laid by a very low gum bass, the trio spin an aural web that captures anyone who hears it. The somewhat fretful complaints of the duduk's nasal timbre taks the lead and sheets of keyboard-induced sounds come and go as if the wind played with them. It all culminates in an enchanting melody that makes you feel weightless all without any psychonautical assistance. We loved what we heard. Too bad this album is not available on Qobuz or Tidal.