LATEST ADDITIONS

I’m late in coming to the drummer-composer John Hollenbeck. (These things happen: so many records, so little time…) It wasn’t until a few months ago that I stumbled upon <I>Eternal Interlude</I> (on the Sunnyside label), the latest CD by his 20-piece Large Ensemble, which, had I heard it earlier, would have made it on <A HREF= http://blog.stereophile.com/fredkaplan/best_jazz_of_the_year_and_the_de… >my 2009 Best 10 list</A>. (Ditto, just to set the record straight, for <A HREF= http://blog.stereophile.com/fredkaplan/darcy_james_argues_secret_societ… ><I>Infernal Machines</I></A> by Darcy James Argue’s Secret Society, that other wondrous big band that escaped my attention.)

John Atkinson is psyched about the new iPad version of <i>Stereophile</i>. “I LOVE it!!!!!” he said, with five exclamation points.

As someone who wrestled endlessly with the nine-pin serial ports and the RS-232 protocol with which early PCs came fitted (footnote 1), I welcomed the Universal Serial Bus (USB) interface when I first encountered it a decade ago, on the original Apple iMac. Plug it in. Don't worry. Be happy. The computer peripherals work as they should, which was often not the case with RS-232. It was a given, therefore, that the then-new USB port would be seen as a natural means of exporting audio data from a PC (footnote 2), but the first generation of USB-connected audio devices offered disappointing performance.

Nineteen days after <A HREF="http://www.stereophile.com/news/j_gordon_holt">J. Gordon Holt died</A>, my daughter and I drove west on NY Route 20, passing lawn sale after lawn sale on our way to the supermarket in Richfield Springs. Each sale promised a pleasant waste of time on that hot afternoon, but only one caught my eye: There, among the Avon bottles and the 8-track tape cartridges, were two large bookshelf loudspeakers, dressed in walnut veneer and light-colored fabric grilles. AR 3s, I thought. Or maybe Large Advents. "They'll still be there when we come back this way," I said, stupidly.

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The word <a href="http://forum.stereophile.com/forum/showflat.php?Cat=0&Number=88273&an=0… our forum</a> is that 90 percent of today’s popular music is crap. Need a little proof that real talent still exists in the world of pop music? Check out Janelle Monae’s performance on last night’s Letterman show.

This sexy album cover, making glorious the embrace of sanctity and lust, belongs to Rene Hell’s <i>Porcelain Opera</i>. Rene Hell is the latest guise of noise artist Jeff Witscher, whose overwhelming mass of work, under names including Impregnable, Deep Jew, and Marble Sky, has been documented mostly to <a href="http://blog.stereophile.com/stephenmejias/why_cassettes/">cassette</a&gt;, while utilizing high-quality production. The curious might take a chance on his latest <a href="http://www.raccoo-oo-oon.org/np/">Night People</a> release.