LATEST ADDITIONS

Italian manufacturer Chario Loudspeakers has never had a strong presence in the US. No wonder, then, when confronted by these exquisitely finished beauties of solid hardwood, many American audiophiles think, "Sonus Faber rip-off." Without knowing the musical history of the 1960s, had you heard Badfinger first, you might have thought the same thing when you then heard the Beatles. Similarly, Chario, by far Italy's largest maker of high-performance speakers, was founded in 1975, eight years <I>before</I> Sonus Faber. While SF has its drive-units built to its own specifications by other firms, Chario designs and builds its own.

The Gini Systems "LS3/5a" is an unlicensed and inexact replica of the celebrated LS3/5a outside (remote location) broadcast monitoring loudspeaker originally developed by the BBC in the early 1970s. (For a pr&#233;cis of the LS3/5a's history, click <A HREF="http://www.stereophile.com/thefifthelement/690">here</A&gt;.)

Dear colleagues:<br>
The year is almost over. The air has grown cold. Our rivers are stuck in deep, deep thought. Outside my 6th-floor window, countless, swirling bits of snow are decorating this gray city like little answers blowing in the wind, like so many true loves: A sure sign that the annual <a href="http://www.cesweb.org/">Consumer Electronics Show</a> in glittery Las Vegas is right around the bend. It opens on Thursday, January 8th and runs right on through Sunday, the 11th.

In "Pony," Frida sings:

Here’s my list of the 10 best jazz albums of 2008. An elaboration, with 30-second sound clips illustrating my points, will appear tomorrow in my column in <I>Slate</I>. (Some of you may notice that I’ve mentioned most of these CDs in this blog through this year.)

I was flipping through the current issue of <i>Rolling Stone</i> (RS 1068/1069, with a mustachioed Brad Pitt on the cover) and stopped at their "Rock & Roll Gift Guide."

Though it seemed to have been fairly well-scavenged by the time we arrived on Saturday afternoon, the ARChive of Contemporary Music's <a href="http://blog.stereophile.com/stephenmejias/926_new_stock/">Winter Record and CD Sale</a> held many great treasures.