LATEST ADDITIONS

<A HREF="http://www.stereophile.com/musicrecordings/131/index8.html">Robert Silverman</A>, whose many recordings for <I>Stereophile</I> have made him a living legend among audiophiles, continues his <A HREF="http://www.audiohigh.org/upcoming-events">series of performances</A> of all of Beethoven's piano sonatas in San Jos&#233;, California, November 11 and 18. Held in San Jose's lovely and acoustically superior Le Petit Trianon Theatre, the concerts mark the halfway point in Silverman's eight-concert series. All proceeds go toward building, at Stanford Children's Hospital, an <A HREF="http://www.elfsystems.org">Elf Foundation Room of Magic</A>: a private entertainment theater in which uplifting music and films can be shared with patients.

Puerto Rico was wonderful, as always. We stayed at a place called <a href="http://www.homeaway.com/vacation-rental/p145641">Bello Horizonte</a>, a comfortable home away from home, hidden atop a palm-covered hill in the sandy town of Rincon, where every road leads to the ocean. (I highly recommend it. The house sleeps six in three bedrooms, has two bathrooms, a wide-open patio with two hammocks, a very fine grill, washer and dryer, and a pool that looks down the hill and onto the nearby beaches. Full disclosure: My aunt rents the house; so, yeah, I want you to go there and give my aunt your money.) Our days were spent by the pool or on the beach (or at the bar on the beach), relaxing and laughing. My favorite moment was walking into the glittering, blue-green sea, with a six-pack of Coronas in one hand and a coconut in the other.

Your amp blows up, with flames licking the underside of your wood equipment rack—or you see the flood waters approaching your LP collection. What is the scariest audio thing that's ever happened to you?

Ideally, LPs should be played with the pickup stylus remaining tangential (<I>ie</I>, at a 90&#176; angle) to the groove&#151;just as the lacquer from which the LP was ultimately stamped was cut in the first place. Over the years, many attempts have been made to accomplish this. Back in 1877, Thomas A. Edison's original machines tangentially tracked his cylinders, but Emil Berliner's invention of the flat disc put an end to cylinders altogether. In the 1950s, a number of companies marketed so-called "tangential" trackers that used dual arms, based on conventional pivoting arrangements, to change the angle at which the headshell was mounted as it moved across the LP side. In 1963, Marantz introduced the SLT-12, which used a plastic pantograph to move the stylus across the record surface. Garrard's Zero 100 pivoting arm controlled its independently pivoting headshell with a bar that extended from the main bearing of the tonearm.

<I>Never Stop</I> (on the E1 label) is the album from The Bad Plus that many of us have been waiting for—the first of their albums to consist entirely of original material.

I’ve never been crazy about Ahmad Jamal. His piano style has struck me as patio-cocktails jazz—nice harmonies and rhythm, but soft-spoken, too precious, de-sensualized.