LATEST ADDITIONS

Irving M. "Bud" Fried, an early contributor to Stereophile, hails from the city of brotherly love, and I must confess to finding it difficult avoiding a few brotherly jabs at Mr. Fried's name: something like "this Bud's for you" would surely not escape deletion by our conscientious Editor. And what if I should happen to complain of a dried-up or "Fried" quality in the upper mids—JA is bound to object to this breach of good taste. Well, having gotten that off my chest, you'd be interested to know that I consider it quite appropriate that someone from Phil-a-del-phia should be in love with transmission-line enclosures; the name is almost as convoluted as a trip down a folded line.

I’ve received two packages in the mail today. Both were from Portland, Oregon, a hotbed for outstanding independent music, and both contained <i><a href="http://blog.stereophile.com/stephenmejias/why_cassettes/">tapes</a></i&…;.

It could have been a stupendously bad purchase or, perhaps, a cat running across the turntable while your first-pressing Parlophone Beatles LP was playing. What stands out as your biggest audio disaster?

John Hammond has always been a strange case. Son of the legendary record producer and scout John Hammond Sr. who worked with Billie Holiday, Bruce Springsteen, Bob Dylan and Leonard Cohen, young John who sang and played guitar staked out a difficult piece of musical turf when he decided to make playing acoustic Delta&#150;styled blues on the National Steel guitar his signature move.

I was introduced to <a href="http://www.freewebs.com/scotchtapes/">Scotch Tapes</a>, “the worst hi-tech music label ever,” on December 9, by a <a href="http://twitter.com/stereophilemag">Twitter</a&gt; post from <a href="http://www.jagjaguwar.com/">Jagjaguwar</a&gt;. Oneida would be releasing a limited-edition <i>cassette</i> through Scotch Tapes. This was interesting news to me, first because <a href="http://blog.stereophile.com/stephenmejias/the_way_we_listened_then/">I’ve been fascinated</a> with the idea of a “cassette tape revival,” and second because Oneida is a well-established name in the world of underground rock bands. Why would Oneida release work on a format that had been all but forgotten by the music industry? Why cassettes?

The venerable British company ATC Loudspeaker Technology was founded in 1974 by Billy Woodman, and is famous within the professional community for developing the first soft-dome midrange driver, and for their well-regarded line of active (powered) studio monitors, the user list of which is a veritable <I>Who's Who</I> of mastering engineers. ATC loudspeakers are all still made in the UK, and were a favorite of the late <A HREF="http://www.stereophile.com/asweseeit/j_gordon_holt_19301502009">J. Gordon Holt</A>.

It's now 10 years since the launch of the two high-resolution audio disc formats, <A HREF="http://www.stereophile.com/asweseeit/164">SACD</A&gt; and <A HREF="http://www.stereophile.com/asweseeit/1099awsi">DVD-Audio</A&gt;. Yet, perhaps partly because both were <A HREF="http://www.stereophile.com/asweseeit/257">hobbled in various ways</A> to please the record industry, perhaps partly because too many supposed hi-rez releases sounded no better than CD, and perhaps partly because record retailers weren't sure how to display the formats to their best advantage, neither took off in any substantive way. DVD-A disappeared, and SACD survived only as a niche format for high-quality classical releases in both two- and multichannel forms. As we got deeper into the same decade, digital technology, despite various sparks and flashes, went into the doldrums. Mainstream digital technology was increasingly concerned with squashing the music into fewer and more portable bits, not with increased sound quality. Even the concept of "CD sound quality" began to seem an unattainable goal, as <A HREF="http://www.stereophile.com/features/308mp3cd">MP3 files</A> became the dominant music carrier.