LATEST ADDITIONS

One of the many musical sawhorses that I often put the spurs to&#151;being a pain the bass just comes with the territory I’m afraid7#151;is the whole bit about why labels who are all hurtin’ right now don’t spend more time digging in their vaults and hauling out treasure in the form of unreleased studio material and especially live shows. Well, the emerging empire that is Concord Records (proud owners of the catalogs of Telarc, Fantasy and now, Rounder Records), a label whose judgment I have questioned in the recent past (<I>Stax Does the Beatles</I>, WTF?), released a killer record earlier this summer that’s been finding its way back to my Musical Fidelity CD player as of late, Otis Redding, <I>Live on Sunset Strip</I> collects performances that didn’t make it onto the two previous albums, <I>In Person at the Whisky a Go Go</I> and Good To Me: Live at the <I>Whiskey A Go Go Vol. 2</I>, that came from a three night stand at the Whiskey in L.A. over Easter weekend 1966. While the set list of the three full sets on these two CDs contains some repetitions, it’s great to hear

Yesterday morning, John Atkinson and I drove out to Mikey Fremer’s place to perform a set of test measurements on the <a href="http://www.magico.net/magicoq/index.php">Magico Q5</a> (review scheduled for our November issue). While JA set up his gear for the in-room measurements, I got to listen to music. Mikey was my personal DJ. He played some sultry Julie London, some angry Gil Scott-Heron, and some soothing Nat “King” Cole. All three, thanks to the outstanding recordings and thanks to the outstanding system, sounded very much <i>alive</i>.

I’ve been following Jenny Scheinman for a few years now: her frequent Tuesday night sets at Barbes, a small Brooklyn bar and sometimes-jazzclub not far from my house; her side gigs with the likes of Bill Frisell, Jason Moran, and Ben Allison at various clubs in Manhattan; her wry CDs, most notably <I>12 Songs</I>.

In <A HREF="http://www.stereophile.com/hirezplayers/marantz_sa-11s2_reference_sacdc… review</A> in the February 2009 issue of Marantz's SA-11S2 SACD/CD player ($3599.99), I said that "buying [an SACD] player in 2009 necessitates an act of faith similar to the one turntable buyers faced back in 1992." The negative reaction to this from the besieged SACD community was as intense as it was irrational. If they're angry with <I>me</I>, I can only imagine how they feel about Stanley Lipshitz and John Vanderkooy, who presented a white paper at a 2001 Audio Engineering Society convention that claimed to prove that SACD doesn't qualify as a high-fidelity format (footnote 1). How many figurative bags of flaming poop did they leave at <I>their</I> front doors?

Over the years that I've been reviewing hi-fi, I've had my share of loudspeakers that drew comments from everyone who visited during the audition period. Some of those comments were about the speakers' appearance&#151;most often about their size&#151;and some were about how good they sounded. Vivid's G1Giya loudspeaker ($65,000/pair), its narrow-baffled, swirling cochlear shape molded from fiber-reinforced composite, elicited more comments of both types than has any other speaker I've reviewed.

A funny thing happened at the symphony the other night. A concert by the great Berlin Philharmonic sounded like lousy hi-fi.

<B>Sinatra Jobim: <I>The Complete Reprise Recordings</I></B><BR>
Concord CRE-32026 (CD). 2010. Sonny Burke, orig. prod.; Lee Herschberg, orig eng.; Hal Gaba, reissue exec. prod.; Charles Pignone, reissue prod.; Larry Walsh, reissue eng.; Dan Hersch, 24-bit remastering. AAD. TT: 58:23<BR>
Performance ****<BR>
Sonics ****