LATEST ADDITIONS

Beethoven understood the pathos of the gap between idea and realization, and the sense of strain put on the listener's imagination is essential.—Charles Rosen

Bass, like sex, is something most young men desire in excess: To the novice, quantity trumps quality, and as long as he can hear from his playback system the deepest sounds of an orchestral bass drum or five-string electric bass (low string tuned to B-0 or C-1), he is completely satisfied.

I scuttled furiously from bedroom to living room. DVDs without cases, puzzles with missing pieces, and random pairs long Ragnell scissors (why do we even have these???) strewed across a cascade of coffee tinted MDF shelves. This hand-me-down Brobdingnagian entertainment center would be the new home for my hi-fi, chipped away but yearning for gear. Like any man on a mission, I needed my soundtrack, my “Eye of the Tiger”, my “Don’t Stop Believing”, my “Bootylicious”, but what would be my source?

What, another audio show? Yes, barely three weeks after the close of Salon Son et Image in Montreal, and five weeks after AXPONA Chicago, the UK-based Chester Group's New York Audio Show gets underway. Running April 12–14 in the New York Palace Hotel (455 Madison Avenue at 50th Street), the show promises perhaps the largest numbers of seminars and live music events of any current audio show in the US.

The challenge is biblical in character, if not in scope: A half year after railing, in these pages, against our industry's overabundance of products that cost more than $20,000, fate has given me such a thing to review.

The promise of happiness is elusive. Is it found in the 10-hour workday? Maybe it’s spotted sunbathing on the Portuguese shoreline. Or is it found in a wider soundstage? Sartre teaches, "In life, a man commits himself and draws his own portrait, outside of which there is nothing." So if your actions define who you are, and if you love what you do, then will you find content?

This business biography of hi-fi pioneer Gilbert Briggs and his company, Wharfedale, is an exhaustively researched labor of love on the part of his grand-nephew David Briggs. In a sense, the book is a prequel to Ken Kessler's KEF: 50 Years of Innovation in Sound (2011). That's because KEF's founder, Raymond Cooke, worked for Gilbert Briggs at Wharfedale from the early 1950s through mid-1961. But that is getting ahead of ourselves.

The day-of-release listening party, a lost tradition? The clever folks at Noisey, Vice’s music subdivision seem to think so. In response, they’re bringing it back on a global spectrum. Today, Wednesday, April 03, 2013 at 3pm EST, Noisey will be streaming the Yeah Yeah Yeah’s new record Mosquito in its entirety while party-goers interact with each other and watch video explanations about the songs from members of the Yeah Yeah Yeahs. This is just the first in a series of Noisey’s new Listening Party initiative. For an invite to the party, follow the tweets from @NoiseyMusic.