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I am a lucky person. Who gets to be an artist, an aspiring griot, and a Stereophile reporter? Who gets to stay at home in paint-smeared pajamas, draw pictures of teapots and barn owls . . . and then, on top of everything, gets paid to listen to music made by Henryk Szeryng, Eugene Hütz, and Winston Reedy? C'est moi!

I have groovy friends, too: other eccentric artists, scruffy musicians, recording and mastering engineers, beekeepers, authors and editors, art and junk collectors, tube wizards, turntable savants, DJs, Mensa-type amp designers, bat-shit-crazy poet-philosophers, and unrepentant hoarders.

To those who were into audio in the late 1980s and early '90s, the name Audio Alchemy is a familiar one. I've owned DACs and jitter-reducing devices made by Audio Alchemy and Perpetual Technologies (the first successor to the original AA) and found them to provide excellent performance at modest prices. Indeed, at the time, many in the industry felt that the Audio Alchemy products were underpriced, leaving too little room for profit, and that this led to the company's demise. The new Audio Alchemy—led by its original designer, Peter Madnick, and having on staff other employees from the old AA—is what Madnick describes as a "grown-up" version of the original company, maintaining "the brand's original ethos of superior technology and value." And the prices, while quite reasonable for the performance they seem to offer, appear high enough to allow the new AA to survive.

Art Blakey’s A Night At Birdland, Vol. 1 remains a landmark of both bebop and the earliest live recordings of jazz in a club setting.

Wednesday August 31, 6:30–8:30pm, Encore Home Entertainment Systems (2115 Siesta Drive, Sarasota, FL 34239) is hosting a special NAD/PSB/Bluesound event. Travis Huff, the Central Regional Sales Manager for Lenbrook America, parent company of NAD, PSB, and Bluesound products, will be discussing and demonstrating the introduction of the Master Quality Authenticated (MQA) audio codec into NAD and Bluesound components for 2016. Featured models include the NAD MDC module and all six Bluesound network-streaming player, speakers, and electronics products.

Sad news: Wes Phillips, who was Stereophile's deputy editor 1995–1999 and a valued contributor 2000 to 2011, passed away yesterday morning after several years of chronic ill health. Wes (right) is shown here at his leaving lunch, 1/1/99 with (L–R) music editor Robert Baird, then-publisher Larry Archibald, and editor John Atkinson. Wes is survived by his wife Joan. We will post more information as it becomes available.

Rudy Van Gelder, pioneer recording engineer, creator of "the Blue Note sound" (and the many sounds that imitated it through the years), died at the age of 91 this week. Every true jazz fan and true audiophile has grown to venerate Van Gelder—at least the work he did in the 1950s and '60s for the innovative labels of the day: not just Blue Note but also Prestige, Impulse!, Riverside, New Jazz, and scattered others.

Almost 20 years separate the First and Second Violin Concertos of Sergei Prokofiev (1891–1953), but they share a language of such ravishing beauty and unexpected transitions that they seem like first cousins. Among their many recordings, violinist Vadim Gluzman reading with the Estonian National Symphony Orchestra (ENSO) under Neeme Järvi's on a BIS hybrid SACD, entitled Prokofiev • Violin Concertos, Etc, easily holds its own against classic recordings by Heifetz, Milstein, and, more recently, Vengerov with Rostropovich.