LATEST ADDITIONS

Here’s my list of the 10 best jazz albums of 2008. An elaboration, with 30-second sound clips illustrating my points, will appear tomorrow in my column in <I>Slate</I>. (Some of you may notice that I’ve mentioned most of these CDs in this blog through this year.)

I didn't know what this was when I picked it up. The jacket offers no band name or album title. Kind of like the Park Tavern on West Side Avenue in Jersey City; there's no way of knowing it's the Park Tavern unless you walk in, and once you're in, you never really want to leave.

I was flipping through the current issue of <i>Rolling Stone</i> (RS 1068/1069, with a mustachioed Brad Pitt on the cover) and stopped at their "Rock & Roll Gift Guide."

Musical Fidelity's "Supercharger" concept is simple, which is perhaps why no one had thought of it before: If you love the sound of your low-powered amplifier but your speakers are insensitive, or you just need more loudness, you insert the high-power Supercharger amplifier between your low-powered amp and speakers. The Supercharger loads the small amplifier with an easy-to-drive 50 ohms, and, in theory, has so little sonic signature itself that it passes on the sonic signature of the small amp unchanged, but louder.

One might argue that Thiel Audio's 3-series loudspeakers are the audio equivalents of BMW's 3-series sports cars: relatively affordable, but 100% about performance. Thiel has made bigger, more expensive loudspeakers than the 3s, as well as smaller, less expensive models&#151;but the iconic Thiels are the 3s.

In the early morning hours of December 11, Joseph Cohen of the <A HREF="http://www.lotusgroupusa.com">Lotus Group</A>, the exclusive distributor of Oyaide products in North America, sent out a "Lotus Group News Flash!" The e-mail, dated December 10, declared:

One night last week, a bout of channel surfing brought me to the Grammy nomination concert. Not the Grammys mind you, that’s in February, but a televised special to announce the nominations. And only the nominations of the celebrity&#151;driven stuff like Best New Artist which is when LL Cool J, who was hosting, walked across the front of the auditorium and ask the Jonas Brothers how it felt to be nominated. As the bile rose in my throat I changed the channel. I found it to be very strange that this was proceeded by a showing of the venerable 1964 stop motion animation special, <I>Rudolph, The Red&#151;Nosed Reindeer</I> which is narrated by Burl Ives and contains a couple of indelible toon icons in the prospector Yukon Cornelius and a Yeti called a “bumble.”