You might have a small kitchen, but that doesn’t mean you can’t make cafe-quality coffee at home. I test over a dozen coffee makers every year in my own small space, and I’ve found that when it comes to preparing delicious espresso, size really isn’t everything.

If you want a machine that will prepare 40 different beverages at the press of a button then, yes, you’ll need to dedicate a significant amount of space on your kitchen counter to a hefty fully automatic machine. However, if you just want to make delicious espresso, there are far smaller options that will do a superb job.

Miles Davis has been reissued often enough to qualify for his own pressing plant, so another version of Cookin’ With the Miles Davis Quintet needs a reason to exist. Craft Recordings has one with this new $39 Original Jazz Classics edition, mastered AAA from the original tapes at Cohearent Audio, pressed on 180-gram vinyl at RTI and housed in a Stoughton tip-on jacket.

More importantly, it sounds excellent and offers a far easier alternative to hunting down a clean Prestige original that has survived nearly 70 years of worn styli, cigarette smoke, bodily fluids, basement storage and optimistic Discogs grading. This Miles Davis Cookin’ review asks the more useful question: does Craft Recordings’ new $39 Original Jazz Classics pressing give you enough of the magic without paying collector prices for somebody else’s history?

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Four Albums From Two Historic Sessions

By 1956, Miles Davis had outgrown Prestige, Columbia wanted him, and Miles found a way to make the divorce work for everybody. Still under contract to Prestige, he signed with Columbia with Bob Weinstock’s blessing, agreeing to give Prestige enough material to stockpile future albums while Columbia waited to release its first Miles recordings. The solution was two marathon sessions at Rudy Van Gelder’s Hackensack studio on May 11 and October 26 with John Coltrane, Red Garland, Paul Chambers and Philly Joe Jones. Prestige eventually turned those dates into Cookin’, Relaxin’, Workin’ and Steamin’ — four albums that sound considerably less like contractual housekeeping than one of the great jazz bands kicking the door off its hinges.

The reason is fairly simple: this was a working band, not five famous names assembled for a session photo. Months of touring and club dates had tightened the First Great Quintet to the point that Van Gelder’s studio could be treated almost like another gig; aside from a second attempt at “The Theme,” the material from the two marathon dates was captured in first takes. Cookin’, released in July 1957 and drawn from the October 26 session, feels spontaneous because the musicians had already done the hard work onstage.

“My Funny Valentine” strips the group down by having Coltrane sit out, leaving Miles enough oxygen to demonstrate why silence and space could be every bit as important as the notes coming out of his horn. “Blues by Five” lets Garland, Chambers and Philly Joe Jones dig in, while Sonny Rollins’ “Airegin” gives Coltrane room to bring more friction and urgency against Miles’ cooler phrasing. By the closing “Tune Up/When Lights Are Low,” there is no sense of five musicians taking turns; they are listening, reacting and pushing one another in real time. That is why Cookin’ still works nearly 70 years later. It sounds less like an album being made than a very good night that somebody had the sense to record.

How Does the New OJC Sound?

The review copy is exceptionally clean and well centered, with virtually no distracting surface noise. Although Cookin’ was recorded in mono, the instrumental definition is excellent, with Miles, Coltrane, Garland, Chambers and Jones remaining easy to distinguish throughout the recording. There is a convincing sense of space around the musicians, which allows the performances to breathe without sacrificing the density and energy of the quintet.

The horns are especially well handled. Miles has plenty of bite and presence but never becomes hot or piercing, while Coltrane retains his harder edge without sounding exaggerated. Chambers and Jones provide enough weight and propulsion to keep everything grounded, and nothing about the mastering tries to make a 1956 Rudy Van Gelder recording sound artificially modern.

Is It Worth $39?

If you already own a genuinely clean VG+ original or another excellent audiophile pressing, there is no compelling reason to replace it. For everyone else, this is a very strong value, combining AAA mastering from the original tapes, an excellent RTI pressing and quality packaging without the increasingly common $60, $75 or $100 audiophile vinyl tax.

Miles Davis was a once-in-a-lifetime musician: difficult, opinionated and equipped with an ego substantial enough to require its own rhythm section, perhaps, but none of that mattered once the horn reached his lips. Nearly 70 years later, very few musicians have sounded so unmistakably themselves within the first few notes.

Considering the session took place in Hackensack, sending Miles and the band to Hiram’s afterward probably requires surrendering my North Jersey credentials. White Manna was already serving its famous little burgers nearby, and Hackensack residents are currently cookin’ over plans to move the actual 80-year-old diner about a mile up the road and expand it. The building is coming along for the ride, but judging by some of the reaction, you would think they were relocating the George Washington Bridge.

Miles probably would have ignored the entire argument. He could have cooked those burgers with his horn, and nearly 70 years later, Cookin’ still does exactly what the title promises.

Our Ratings:

★★★★★★★★★★ Music

★★★★★★★★★★ Sound Quality

★★★★★★★★★★ Pressing Quality

Where to Buy:

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Anna and Elsa appear to be heading through a portal into a world of icy crystal butterflies next year, according to the first trailer for the third installment in the juggernaut Frozen franchise. 

Unveiled during Disney’s biennial fan convention D23 in Anaheim on Friday night, the Frozen 3 trailer was presented by Idina Menzel and Kristen Bell.

Frozen 3 is set “far from Arendelle in a frozen land more wild and dangerous,” Menzel said.

The trailer opens with a shot of the northern lights, where a snowflake falls and turns into a butterfly that flies to Arendelle Castle. It collides with Elsa during Anna and Kristoff’s wedding, and a portal opens. They step through it, finding an icy world filled with butterflies and an as-yet faceless new villain with dark hair who has been looking for Elsa.

Josh Gad also appeared on stage at D23 to sing a love song about a new snow woman named Samantha, with Menzel and Bell hinting that every character will have a love interest.

Disney also used D23 to show off the new Anna and Elsa costumes that kids across the globe will be demanding soon, with the ice queen now styled in a purple-blue ombre long-sleeved dress with a blue hooded cape, and the queen of Arendelle in a pleated pink dress and cape with a turquoise undershirt. In the trailer, Queen Anna wears a white wedding dress with flowers embroidered on it while Elsa is in a mauve dress.

The Frozen 3 trailer was revealed just over a year from its release date of Nov 24, 2027. To prepare for the return to Arendelle, you can stream both Frozen movies and multiple Frozen shorts on Disney Plus.

Corinne Reichert

Senior Editor

Corinne Reichert (she/her) grew up in Sydney, Australia and moved to California in 2019. She holds degrees in law and communications, and currently writes news, analysis and features for CNET across the topics of electric vehicles, broadband networks, mobile devices, big tech, artificial intelligence, home technology and entertainment. In her spare time, she watches soccer games and F1 races, and goes to Disneyland as often as possible.

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Doing anything on a frozen lake can carries some amount of risk. Nevertheless, every year events ranging from car racing to ice skating are held on them. As such, proper safety precautions are needed, the most important of which is ensuring the ice is thick enough to withstand the weight of whatever may be on it. This is done by cutting holes into the ice and measuring its depth in several locations. But this is a dangerous and imperfect process only giving a rough picture of actual thickness. So to solves these problems, a team of students at ETH Zurich made an ice measuring submersible drone. 

The concept of ice measurement employed is, on paper, reasonably simple. When a sonar pulse is sent out, some of the energy will return off the bottom of the ice sheet, but some of it will pass through creating a second return. By measuring the difference in these two returns, the thickness can be calculate with a high degree of precision. Attach the sonar to a submersible and give it a positioning system and you can simply get a thickness map, right? Well, employing theory in practice is a far more complicated prospect as the students soon found out.

The submersible itself is slightly positively buoyant. It features two concrete ballasts to adjust the center of gravity and six propulsion motors for six degrees of freedom. It’s powered by a NVIDIA Jetson to allow for autonomous operations and a whole host of sensors. Navigation is handled by a variety of sensors, mostly GPS and SBL. The GPS antenna sits in a radome at the top of the submersible, allowing for a strong enough signal for a positional fix when touching the bottom of the ice. SBL works similarly to sonar, where a transmitter on the submarine sends out an audio ping, received by a trio of hydrophones used to calculate the drone’s position.

But does all this complexity really work? Well, mostly. A number of real-world factors greatly compound the submarine’s effectiveness. The signal noise from in the sonar makes accurate measurements nigh impossible with that methodology. As such, the team used a depth based approach, by touching the submarine to the bottom of the ice, and measuring the water pressure and therefore depth, the ice’s thickness can be easily calculated. However, this method too is not without flaws. When snow falls on alpine lakes, it pushes the ice sheet downward, and a new ice sheet can form on top. This top sheet’s layer is what’s most important, but the depth measurement can only take into account the overall sheet’s thickness. Regardless, this was a really impressive first test of the submersible, and we look forward to seeing where it goes from here!

Make sure to check out this autonomous submarine next!