LATEST ADDITIONS

<I>Stereophile</I>'s annual "Records 2 Die 4" will be coming out shortly, but here's your chance to get a jump on the reviewers: What recording from the last 365 days ended up at the top of your musical heap?

It’s fair to ask how many audiophile pressings of John Coltrane’s <I>Blue Train</I> do we need? Yet Mike Hobson of Classic Records makes a compelling case for this answer: one more. Classic is putting out a whole new type of LP, and though its technical tweak seems preposterous—a parody of vinylphilic obsession—it really does yield a substantial improvement; it makes the head spin.

Paul Gowan's letter in the October 1989 Stereophile hinted that, whether or not audiophiles enjoy music, it should be true that the emotional experience we derive from music is what really matters. There, barefaced, lies the problem: who are "we"? A well-known Latin epigram affirms that in matters of taste there is no point in discussion. And a Greek epigram (coined in fact by Max Beerbohm in his Oxford novel Zuleika Dobson) suggests that "for people who like that kind of thing, that is the kind of thing they like."

The January 2009 issue of <i>Stereophile</i> is now on newsstands. Volume 32 Number 1 is pretty much bursting at the seams with radicalness. I received a voicemail from a long-time subscriber telling me so. It went:

We started the day with a bit of Bell's and a couple cups of coffee. Then, we started walking.

I often wanted to turn back, in fact, but Pete was so damn far ahead of me that I couldn't even get his attention. I kept following.

When we finally reached the top, we found a strange surprise: The rest of our classmates were there.