LATEST ADDITIONS

Dweezil Zappa knows how to push the boundaries of surround sound. He was already testing the limits of 5.1 when I asked him to be on a surround-centric panel I hosted at CES two decades ago. More recently, Dweezil has been laser-focused on mixing in Atmos, and his highest profile Atmos mix to date is the truly immersive 24-bit/96kHz mix he did for the 50th anniversary 3CD/1LP/1BD super deluxe edition box set celebrating Deep Purple’s seminal March 1972 album Machine Head. During Part 1 of a recent Zoom interview, music editor Mike Mettler and Zappa discussed his “bookend” approach to “Highway Star,” how he put an additional spotlight on keyboardist Jon Lord on “Lazy,” and what his specific directive was for the Atmos version of “Smoke on the Water”—and how he honored the song’s references to his late father, Frank Zappa. . .

By 1985, DC Comics was juggling a vast stable of characters with too many variations across an unwieldy menagerie of alternate planes of existence. How to simplify matters and also make an honest buck? The answer arrived in the form of Crisis on Infinite Earths, a popular and influential crossover comic book maxi-series by Marv Wolfman and George Pérez that effectively reset the lineup for a new generation of fans.

Because of his close association with Yes’ signature sound, guitarist Steve Howe is assumed to have been a member of the British progressive giants from the outset — but he only came aboard with the five-man band’s third studio release, February 1971’s The Yes Album. Though his fretboard predecessor, Peter Banks (who later co-founded the prog-adjacent ’70s outfit Flash), foreshadowed the aural adventurism to come on July 1969’s Yes and July 1970’s Time and a Word, it was The Yes Album that cemented the wide-ranging, time-signature challenging sonic template for one of the most forward-thinking progressive acts of the past six decades.