LATEST ADDITIONS

"Art is the only political power," the artist Joseph Beuys once said. If only it were true. Often, when power is wielded against an entire people with enough brutality and efficiency, it reduces the culture to a sickening silence, leaving room only for state-sponsored propaganda. Think of the Soviet Union under Stalin, or Germany during the Third Reich. But in other, rarer cases, repression is met with an efflorescence of great art, like a charred field welling up into a riot of wildflowers.

As a music teacher, I can think of no better learning experience than what trumpeter Donald Byrd did in the early 1970s for a group of his music students. To quote the band's current website, "Byrd envisioned taking active students at Howard University in Washington, DC, on a real-world field trip which would expose them to ins and outs of the music business."

Hana has introduced the Umami Black, a new top-of-line moving‑coil phono cartridge above the Umami Red and Blue. US list price is $11,500. First public US demos are scheduled for September 6 at Quintessence Audio (Morton Grove, IL), with customer shipments beginning September 22.

"Panel speakers that do bass? Sign me up!" That was my reaction when I first heard a pair of Diptyque Reference loudspeakers, at AXPONA 2023. The Reference is a 6'-tall, French planar magnetic speaker whose designers, Gilles Douziech and Eric Poix, make no secret of their love for Magnepan, the Minnesota company famed for its dipole panels. The French duo has improved on Magnepan's pioneering technology by addressing the number-one shortcoming of such designs: a lack of low-frequency extension.

Sonus faber has announced the Amati Supreme, a floorstanding loudspeaker derived from concepts developed for the Suprema. The company positions the model as a compact implementation of its “Voice of Sonus faber” engineering approach.

My Russian neighbor Alex forges ax heads and smokes pig chests 5' from my bedroom window. At 2:00am, shirtless, in February. One especially cold night, I woke up to the sounds of hammering and loud music. When I looked out, Alex was blacksmithing a glowing red meat cleaver blade, with Rachmaninoff plays Rachmaninoff blaring from a cassette in his boom box.