LATEST ADDITIONS

Stereophile gets press releases every day. Some days, they are for products that strike us as really great ideas, sometimes they make us go huh? And sometimes we think both.

It has a fan, it won't work without a monitor, and it contains a 750GB hard drive&mdash;for some audiophiles, that's a trifecta of reasons <I>not</I> to buy the McIntosh MS750 music server ($6000).

Who knows? <A HREF="http://www.shinealightmovie.com/">This</A&gt; might be good.

I was listening to Radiohead’s new album, <I>In Rainbows</I>. It’s really as great as all the rock critics say. More than that (from this blog’s angle), it’s as harmonically and rhythmically sophisticated as just about any work of modern jazz. (I’m not saying it’s <I>like</I> jazz; rather, that on any musical level, the purest jazz purist has no grounds for looking down on it.) The album sent me to my music closet to take another listen to Brad Mehldau’s cover of Radiohead’s “Knives Out,” from his trio’s 2005 CD on the Nonesuch label, <I>Day Is Done</I>. I listened through all 10 tracks—which include, besides two Mehldau compositions, Lennon & McCartney’s “Martha My Dear” and “She’s Leaving Home,” Burt Bacharach’s “Alfie,” Paul Simon’s “50 Ways to Leave Your Lover,” and the title tune by Nick Drake.

Is it how much you spend or how you spend it? Is it how you organize your priorities when it comes to audio? Is it only a state of mind? Define the word "audiophile."

Blues movies, movies about the blues, continue to be a treacherous swamp for filmmakers; For some bizarre reason, they just can’t get it right.

In his July 2003 "The Fifth Element" column, John Marks enthusiastically wrote about the Benchmark Media Systems DAC1 D/A processor and headphone amplifier. Comparing its sound playing CDs with that of a three-times-more-expensive Marantz SA-14 SACD player, he concluded that the DAC 1's "Red Book" performance was at least as good as that of the Marantz, being "slightly more articulate in the musical line, and slightly more detailed in spatial nuances, particularly the localization of individual images in space, and in soundstage depth."