KEF Debuts New Finishes for Blade One Meta and Blade Two Meta
Sennheiser Drops HDB 630 Wireless Headphones
Sponsored: Pulsar 121
Vivid Audio Introduces Giya Cu Loudspeakers
PSB BP7 Subwoofer Unveiled
Sponsored: Symphonia
Apple AirPods Pro 3: First Impressions
Sponsored: Symphonia Colors
Sonus faber Announces Amati Supreme Speaker

LATEST ADDITIONS

The Meze 99 Classics Headphones Sweepstakes

Register to win a pair of Meze 99 Classics Headphones ($309.00 Retail Value) we are giving away.

According to the company:

"What is it that discards the superfluous, the gimmicky, the flashy, the questionable, the overly fragile, the misplaced? The obvious answer would be time. And this is also the riddle of good design: very few objects achieve such a rarefied consistency of qualities. This is our aim with the Meze 99 Classics, the anti-fragility of a classic, with a sound on par with the design. Pure, natural sound in a timeless body."

[This Sweepstakes is now closed.]

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What If They Gave a CES and Nobody Came?

Last January, in Las Vegas, a record 170,000 people attended the 2016 Consumer Electronics Show. Most of them neither saw nor heard a trace of high-end audio gear. Not only was all mention of what CES calls "high performance audio" absent from the show's official Attendee Guide, but the hallways of the Venetian Tower, which in past CESes were filled with high-end manufacturers, dealers, and distributors, were anything but crowded.
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Recording of July 2016: American Tunes

Allen Toussaint: American Tunes
Nonesuch 554644 (CD). 2016. Joe Henry, prod.; Ryan Freeman,, eng.; Wesley Seidman, Monique Eveleyin, asst engs. ADD? TT: 49:31
Performance ****½
Sonics ****½

David Bowie, Glenn Frey, Phife Dawg, Merle Haggard, Dan Hicks, Ernestine Anderson, Lonnie Mack, Maurice White, Blowfly, Otis Clay, Steve Young, George Martin, Keith Emerson, Henry McCullough, Prince. Was there a genre or subgenre of music that did not grieve in the closing months of 2015 through spring 2016—a period that must rank among the most devastating ever for the loss of important and influential songwriters and musicians?

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My own. My love. My precious.

Photo: Kelsey Ohira

May 12, 2014. The day it all began. Three major events happened in my life on May the 12th:

1. My violent hatred towards the USPS was born.
2. I spent the most I ever have, till this very day, on a yellow cab.
3. A divine pair of Technics SL1200 Mk.II turntables entered my life.

Well, they didn't exactly enter my life, per se. They were left on my (then) doorstep in West Harlem, which may give you some insight on #1. More on that later. I need to calm myself. (Sips Earl Grey vehemently in straightjacket.)

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Out Now: the First Issue of the Summer

Our July issue hits newsstands and mailboxes this weekend. Jason Victor Serinus kicks things off by asking whether CES will remain a major show for high-end audio, but occupying pride of place on the cover is Zu Audio's Soul Supreme speaker. A big paper-cone driver (with a whizzer cone) operated full-range—we all know that can't work, right. But Herb Reichert and John Atkinson found their preconceptions blown away by the sound.
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Colin Stetson: Sorrow & Górecki

Eine kleine Nachtmusik it ain't. And yet, in 1992, lightning struck, tectonic plates shifted, and the third symphony of Polish composer Henryk Mikolaj Górecki (1933–2010) became a bona-fide hit. Defying both skeptics and logic, a recording of this decidedly sepia-toned work, subtitled The Symphony of Sorrowful Songs, by the London Sinfonietta conducted by American maestro David Zinman, and featuring soprano soloist Dawn Upshaw, eventually sold over a million copies, making it the largest-selling recording of modern classical music ever.
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