LATEST ADDITIONS

Though the recordings sell in <A HREF="http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/01/29/AR20100… numbers</A>, the real thing continues to thrive. Do you attend classical music concerts?

The relationship between the internet and music continues to evolve in new and bizarre ways. The latest is Guvera, a site that offers free music downloads, that the principals say uses the sponsorship model in new and they hope successful ways and keeps everyone&#151;from artist to label to consume&#151;happy. When you register for the site, they ask you a battery of questions about your likes and dislikes and then you’re free to search for a song or an artist. The site will then direct you to a channel or channels, sponsored by an advertiser, which has what you’re looking for. Using the information from those initial customers’ surveys and then your subsequent download history, the site’s algorhythms find the target audience for certain advertisers and grab their eyeballs in a better way than pop up or strip ads. They also tell the advertisers what music the customers they want to reach listen to. The advertiser pays the royalties on the music to whoever holds the copyright. In other words, either the record label or the artist gets paid. It ain’t stealing.

The March 2010 issue of <i>Stereophile</i> is now on newsstands. Open it up and you’ll see that Steve Guttenberg has rediscovered his faith in vinyl. Hooray! What did it for him? A new turntable: the VPI Classic. “Coming back to vinyl,” Steve writes, “I now see that digital’s primary fault is that it encourages passive listening.”

It’s been nearly a week since PBS’ broadcast of the White House concert of music from the civil-rights era, and its sounds and images keep popping up in my brain.

Among the maladies to which music lovers are especially susceptible, hearing damage caused by prolonged exposure to loud sounds is perhaps the most pernicious. When you're young, you normally don't think about the consequences of cranking up the volume, but if you do that routinely, you are sure to suffer some form of hearing deficit in your later&#151;or, in some cases, not so later&#151;years.

If you’re a fan of John Fahey&#151a fan of his music, his writing, his thoughts on life, whatever&#151and especially if you’re sort of sad, like I am, about having never met him, then you’ll enjoy this disc. The Three Day Band is Fahey and musician <a href="http://www.myspace.com/ayalsr">Ayal Senior</a> who, in addition to capturing Fahey on four-track here, also edited much of Fahey’s second collection of stories, <i><a href="http://www.dragcity.com/products/vampire-vultures">Vampire Vultures</a></i>. (Senior’s also got a bunch of good-looking cassettes available.)

Almost every assumption you might make about Vienna Acoustics' Klimt The Kiss loudspeaker by looking at it would be wrong. It is <I>not</I> a stand-mounted two-way loudspeaker. It's a three-way, with a coincident tweeter-midrange. And that ain't no stand&#151;it's an integral part of the speaker. It does <I>not</I> have a conventional cabinet&#151;there are two separate enclosures, complete with micrometer control of both vertical and horizontal axes. And those sure aren't plain-vanilla drive-units&#151;they're about as unique as they come.