LATEST ADDITIONS

There’s nothing like being pulverized by a Norwegian power trio in the morning. Thank you, Bushman’s Revenge. Your latest assault, <i>Jitterbug</i>, completely kills.

While John Atkinson, Art Dudley, Bob Deutsch, and I were having a great time roaming the halls of the 2010 Salon Son et Image at the Hilton Bonaventure in beautiful Montreal, Francois Caron of <a href="http://thecanadianpublic.com/">The Canadian Public</a> was lugging a Canon Vixia HF200 camcorder and Rode Stereo Videomic from exhibitor room to exhibitor room, capturing the action.

The long-awaited US launch of <A HREF="http://www.passionato.com">Passionato.com</A&gt;, intended as the World Wide Web's "premier destination for classical music connoisseurs," has finally happened. Passionato, which has no membership fee, offers the largest collection of classical-music downloads in CD-quality, DRM-free FLAC and 320kbps MP3 formats yet assembled online.

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Thursday, May 20, 6 to 9pm: <a href="http://www.meridian-audio.com/">Meridian Audio</a> and <a href="http://stereoexchange.com/">Stereo Exchange</a> will host an evening celebration to introduce the new Meridian Sooloos 2.1 music server system and Meridian 808.3 Signature Reference CD player. Wine and music will be served.

Do you feel you have developed skills for placing speakers in a room, or do you plunk them down, shuffle them around, and hope for the best?

Besides my 20th wedding anniversary and the 15th anniversary of <I>Listener</I> magazine's first issue, this year marks the 25th anniversary of Roksan Audio Ltd., easily one of the most innovative design and manufacturing firms in British audio. Before Roksan came upon the scene in 1985, none of us had ever seen a loudspeaker whose tweeter was isolated from its surroundings by a sprung suspension. Or a commercial phono preamplifier designed to fit <I>inside</I> a turntable, just a centimeter away from the tonearm base. And who among us could have guessed that the <A HREF="http://www.stereophile.com/turntables/1103linn">Linn LP12</A>'s hegemony&#151;among flat-earthers, I mean&#151;would be broken by a turntable from outside of Scotland? Yet the Roksan Darius loudspeaker, Artaxerxes phono stage, and, above all, Xerxes turntable accomplished those things and more, to the genuine surprise of nearly everyone&#151;and to the benefit of our industry at large, as other firms took those ideas and ran with them.