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It's one of audiophiledom's eternal questions: What can we do to draw more music lovers into the audiophile fold?

Of the proposals bandied about on audio forums, two seem predominant: a) sell stuff more people can afford, and b) sit your neighbor or the cable guy in front of your stereo, cross your fingers, and let 'er rip—the theory behind b) being that the experience will be so epic as to transform the reluctant participant into an audiophile butterfly. As if.

Avishai Cohen: Into the Silence
Avishai Cohen, trumpet; Bill McHenry, tenor saxophone; Yonathan Avishai, piano; Eric Revis, bass; Nasheet Waits, drums
ECM 2482 (CD). 2016. Manfred Eicher, prod.; Gérard de Haro, Nicolas Baillard, engs. DDD. TT: 53:08
Performance ****½
Sonics ****½

In the new millennium, no country other than Cuba has exported more important jazz musicians to the United States than has Israel. But even though the Israeli jazz phenomenon has been much discussed in the jazz press, critics have been late to recognize that Avishai Cohen is one of the best trumpet players alive. Cohen has two siblings who also play jazz, and his charismatic older sister, Anat, who has been winning major jazz polls on clarinet for several years, gets most of the attention in the family. And then there is Avishai's name problem: One of the best-known Israeli jazz musicians, a bassist of the same name, got to New York first.

Although I'm not one of those people who dismisses Tom Cruise—he's a very capable actor, he works hard at his craft, he has a track record of choosing good material, and his personal beliefs are his own damn business—there's no denying that the addition of Simon Pegg has transformed the Mission: Impossible franchise into mandatory viewing for fans of films that are fun. So it was at Montreal Salon Audio, in the room sponsored by the French company Devialet: the opening scene of MI: Rogue Nation on a surround-sound system using multiple Devialet Phantom powered loudspeakers (starting at $US1990 each) had this home-theater agnostic on the edge of his seat.

David Chesky fought the good fight for HDTracks and all of high resolution audio.

“Austin’s lost what made it cool.”

A distant relative to what folks in the rest of the United States sometimes call "pizza."

I walked into the larger of Joseph Audio's two demonstration rooms—the one shared with Nagra and Kronos—just in time to hear Neil Young's "There's a World" and "Bad Fog of Loneliness," from the Live at Massey Hall LP. The performances—and Young's very funny between-song patter—were thoroughly convincing, and even in this large space, there was a sense of the Joseph Audio Pearl 3 floorstanders ($US31,500/pair) pressurizing the room to realistic good effect. I loved the Pearl 3s—and so, apparently, did Nagra's Classic Amp ($US16,000), a 100Wpc stereo amp that runs in class-A for its first 10 watts.