LATEST ADDITIONS

In 2010, the funky-eclectic New Orleans band Galactic—known today as much for being the owners of the city's storied Tipitina's club as for their music—cut their song "Heart of Steel" with singer Irma Thomas for their album, Ya-Ka-May. The band noticed that Thomas soon included the same tune in the sets that she played with her band. In 2022, Galactic decided to revisit the Thomas connection and came up with the idea of collaborating with her on an entire album of new music.

On May 29, Adam Wexler's Resolution A/V, in Red Hook, Brooklyn, debuted new products from two heavy hitters in the audio world: Brooklyn's DeVore Fidelity and the renowned Swiss brand Nagra.

SVS is best known for subwoofers, but the company also makes speakers. Demo'd at T.H.E. Show in Costa Mesa were a couple of examples: the SVS Ultra Evolution Pinnacle flagship towers ($2500/each or $5000/pair), which were playing when I visited the room, and a pair of rear-ported Ultra Evolution standmounts ($1200/pair; stands not included), which were set up in a system with the SVS SB-5000 R|Evolution subwoofer ($2000), which debuted at AXPONA.

The reborn US brand KLH debuted its Model Seven loudspeaker ($5998/pair) at High End Munich, proclaiming it the first of its kind: an acoustic suspension speaker with a 13" woofer.

KLH and acoustic suspension designs go hand in hand. Co-founder Henry Kloss helped introduce the concept in the mid-50s and established KLH in 1957. The key principle is to use the spring effect of air in a sealed cabinet to control the woofer's movement.

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The first commandment for a Stereophile reporter is to remain neutral about any product under review. But when a company has a history of making things you like, that isn't always easy to do.

Reviewing the VPI Avenger Direct turntable with its 12" FatBoy tonearm, I concluded, "The Avenger Direct recasts records I thought I knew well, revealing secrets and expressing a purer sense of each one's interior life." Covering the VPI Scout 21 for Stereophile's sister website, AnalogPlanet in October 2024, I wrote, "this $3300 table seriously swung and played it all warm and toasty, displaying a big heart. I would even say it displayed an inherent love of music, reflected in its wide rhythmic gait and warmhearted embrace of the LPs I spun on it. The 21 'table is quite the fine fit in the VPI sound family."

Despite my scarcely contained enthusiasm for these previous VPI products, I promise an unvarnished take on the Forever Model One turntable ($5250), which builds on one of the company's long-ago bestsellers, the HW-19, which was first produced in the early 1980s.

High-end speaker and audio electronics maker MBL—best known for its groundbreaking Radialstrahler loudspeakers—has hit a financial rough patch. The Berlin-based company filed for insolvency on May 27, 2025, and is now actively seeking investors.