LATEST ADDITIONS

In high-end audio, Italian designs play by different rules. They tend to favor beauty over austerity, boldness over caution, and emotion over restraint. Rather than just hearing the music, you're meant to be swept away by it. That spirit animates gear from Unison Research, a tube-focused company located just north of Venice.

Outside of Vincent Van Gogh, Brian Wilson had the most infamous—and ultimately the most valuable—left ear in the world. Wilson—the chief architect of countless Beach Boys pop classics, who passed away at age 82 on June 11, 2025—lost the hearing in his right ear at an early age. One could reasonably argue that he only ever heard all the sonic masterpieces he constructed, for that quintessential California band he cofounded, in mono.

"I think art is the only political power," the artist Joseph Beuys once said. If only it were true. Often, when power is wielded against an entire people with enough brutality and efficiency, it reduces the culture to a sickening silence, leaving room only for state-sponsored propaganda. Think of the Soviet Union under Stalin, or Germany during the Third Reich. But in other, rarer cases, repression is met with an efflorescence of great art, like a charred field welling up into a riot of wildflowers.

Hana has introduced the Umami Black, a new top-of-line moving‑coil phono cartridge above the Umami Red and Blue. US list price is $11,500. First public US demos are scheduled for September 6 at Quintessence Audio (Morton Grove, IL), with customer shipments beginning September 22.

Hegel has introduced the H150, a streaming integrated amplifier that replaces the H120. The company says the H150 uses the same streaming platform and control app found in the H400 and H600, adds a Moving‑Magnet phono stage, and in a first for Hegel, plays music directly from a USB‑A drive. Hegel refers to the H150 by the nickname Prodigy.

My oldest aural memory is my mother singing nursery rhymes to send me off to sleep. After that, it's vinyl records. Being the third child, I benefited from a constant stream of audio-related hand-me-downs, starting with a 1960s kiddie phonograph and a pile of well-worn records from my older brothers.