LATEST ADDITIONS

There it was again. Goosebumps. Even a grainy old out&ndash;of&ndash;synch <I>YouTube</I> video of a 1986 sound check at Maxwell's in Hoboken still evoked a shiver. At the risk of living in the rock 'n' roll past, The Replacements were one of the best bands, bar or otherwise, that I've ever had the pleasure of witnessing. Over the years I saw Westerberg, Mars and the Stinson Bros many, many times. I saw them when they were riotously drunk, careening from one tune to the next, never finishing any of them. I saw them once at an unbilled gig do not a note of their own music, preferring instead to rip through TV themes: <I>Batman</I> followed by <I>Bewitched</I> followed by <I> The Flintstones</I>... I saw them jacked up on God knows what, painting their shoes and whipping bologna from a deli tray all over their dressing room. Through it all, with the possible exception of when Bob Stinson was kicked out for getting a little too addictive, they had a ball. When it got serious near the end, around the time of <I>Don’t Tell a Soul</I>, it was for all intensive purposes, over. They were the best thing to come out of the once vaunted Minnesota scene&mdash;okay, after Prince&mdash;and whether they liked it or not, one of the originators of the whole "alt" rock thang.

The audio industry may have lost a legend and a prolific innovator in <A HREF="http://www.stereophile.com/news/11260">Henry Kloss</A> a few years back, but it still has another affable, creative eccentric in <A HREF="http://blog.stereophile.com/ces2008/011008smith/">Peter Ledermann</A>. In the mid-1970s, Ledermann was director of engineering at <A HREF="http://www.stereophile.com/historical/1005bozak">Bozak</A&gt;, where, with Rudy Bozak, he helped develop a miniature bookshelf speaker and a miniature powered subwoofer. Before that, Ledermann was a design engineer at RAM Audio Systems, working with Richard Majestic on the designs of everything from high-power, minimal-feedback power amplifiers and preamplifiers to phono cartridge systems. He was also an award-winning senior research engineer at IBM, and the primary inventor of 11 IBM patents.

Buddha said:

The first reference I saw to the Count of Saint Germain was in <I>Foucault's Pendulum</I>, Umberto Eco's dense novel about a man whose paranoid delusions become so overpoweringly real that, by the end of the book, the reader is left wondering whether the protagonist's enemies actually exist. That their number should include Saint Germain was a nice touch: Part cabalist, part confidence man, the real-life Count was thought by some to be immortal (in <I>Pendulum</I> he's pushing 300), and while Casanova wrote vividly of meeting Saint Germain at a dinner party in 1757, so did the English writer and pederast C.W. Leadbetter&mdash;in 1926. Like Aleister Crowley, the Count of Saint Germain can be seen peering over the shoulders of countless parlor (but not <I>parleur</I>, or even <I>haut-parleur</I>) occultists: He keeps popping up all over the place.

Dear Readers,<br>
I admit it. When Jerry commented to <a href="http://blog.stereophile.com/stephenmejias/041408really/">last week's entry</a>, saying that vinyl wears out with every single trip around the platter, it kind of shook me up. My heart raced and blood rushed to my head. I began to sweat. What had I done? What was I getting into? How would I afford this? Had I stepped into AlexO's bottomless pit?

Besides the reading I do here at <i>Stereophile</i>, I read a lot on the morning train. When Murakami is pissing me off with his cats and dead friends, I turn to the free dailies handed out by the dudes in the bright orange jackets standing outside the station. I pick one up and I say to myself, "I think I'll get a little stupid this morning." I go for <i>Metro</i>&#151"the world's largest global newspaper." Dressed in a cheery green and with a friendly font, it is clearly designed for those in jeans and sneakers, whereas <i>AM New York</i> is meant for the more serious suits.

I always look forward to <I>Stereophile</I>'s Home Entertainment Shows, where I scout out interesting new models of affordable loudspeakers. At <A HREF="http://blog.stereophile.com/he2007">HE2007 in New York City</A>, I was struck by the Silverline Audio room&mdash;not only by the sound I heard there, but by the way Showgoers reacted to that sound.