LATEST ADDITIONS

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 June 2010 issue of <i>Stereophile</i> is now on newsstands. It opens with John Atkinson’s “iPad Daze,” an exploration of a print magazine’s inherent value in this digital age, and a piece that JA’s been thinking of writing for at least two years. He figured it’d be controversial, perhaps setting the entire World Wide Web against us, but I don’t think he expected to be <a href="http://forum.stereophile.com/forum/showflat.php?Cat=0&Number=88273&an=0…; for his application of Sturgeon’s Law to today’s popular music:

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.

<i>Sommer</i> from German electronic duo Klangwart (Markus Detmer and Timo Reuber) includes rare compilation tracks, remixes for other artists, and previously unreleased studio recordings.

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.