Added to the Archives This Week

In his review of the Meridian 508.24 CD player, Wes Phillips finds the machine "a beautiful design with impeccable technical credentials—a CD player that belongs, with only a few others, at the very sharpest portion of the leading edge, and that joins them in producing sound that is highly musical and hard to criticize."

Wes Phillips also delivers his take on the Audio Research CD2 CD player. Noting, as he did with the Meridian 508.24, that most modern CD players are converging on pretty decent sound, Phillips says, "We have reached the point, as the Audio Research CD2 illustrates, where the variation between the finest examples of design has become bafflingly small."

The Wadia 850 CD player's "idiosyncratic digital filter" flashes John Atkinson back to his cabaret days backing comedians on stage. JA seeks to determine if the Wadia's performance will remind him of the punchlines to one favorite comedian's jokes or startle him with revolutionary sound.

As J. Gordon Holt and Larry Archibald remember, big changes took place at Stereophile back in 1982 (and also in 1998, when the magazine was purchased again just as the three CD player reviews above and the RotM below were published). Two new eras in the magazine's history unfold in Changes of Everything.

Finally, the latest installment in our "Recording of the Month" series for the online archives, Recording of May 1998, Olu Dara: In the World, from Natchez to New York. Robert Baird notes that, while most multicultural music projects sound pretty good on paper, few live up to what Olu Dara has achieved with this sparkling disc.

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