LATEST ADDITIONS

A Show like last week's <A HREF="http://blog.stereophile.com/rmaf2007">Rocky Mountain Audio Fest</A> presents me with conflicts. As a member of the press I should be spending my time covering the Show. However, I am also spending my time as a participant, in this case giving a <A HREF="http://www.stereophile.com/news/100807rmaf/">series of presentations</A> in which I allowed Showgoers the opportunity to listen to the hi-rez masters of many of my <I>Stereophile</I> recordings and compare them with CD and MP3 versions.

<A HREF="http://blog.stereophile.com/he2007">Home Entertainment 2007</A> was a blast for me, as it is every year. Not only did I get to perform with <I>two</I> jazz bands, <A HREF="http://www.stereophile.com/musicrecordings/907att">Attention Screen</A> and the John Atkinson Trio, but I enjoyed good to extraordinary sound in every room I visited. I've been attending hi-fi shows more than 20 years, so I'm rarely surprised, but HE2007 had two big surprises in store. First, the percentage of rooms sporting analog front-ends&mdash;vinyl <I>and</I> open-reel tape&mdash;was the highest I've seen at a show in over a decade. Second, there was a surprising number of <I>very</I> expensive loudspeakers. In fact, I counted more speakers costing over $50,000/pair than I did costing under $500/pair.

Visit www.stereophile.com and look at the <A HREF="http://cgi.stereophile.com/cgi-bin/showvote.cgi?522">Vote Results for June 17, 2007</A>: You'll see that when we asked our readers to name the one audio product that's spent the greatest amount of time in their systems, the most common answer by far was the <A HREF="http://www.stereophile.com/turntables/1103linn">Linn Sondek LP12</A> turntable (footnote 1). Little wonder that Scotland's most famous record player endures as an object of attention for various and sundry commercial <I>tweaks</I>.

Is it my imagination, or has the low-power tube movement of the last 15 years gone hand in hand with a renewed interest in moving-coil step-up transformers? Trannies remain misunderstood or ignored by most of the audio press&mdash;requests for review samples continue to be met with genial shock, rather like tourism in the Budapest of the 1990s&mdash;but enthusiasm for the practice seems only to grow. That leaves me to wonder: Did the unquestioning use of <I>active</I> pre-preamps for so many years grow out of the same bad attitude that gave us all those awful-sounding high-power amps and low-sensitivity loudspeakers? You know the mindset: Parts are cheap. Gain is free. Do it because you <I>can...</I>

I think my favorite is #311.

Now that it's fall, Bagheera barely leaves the toasty top of the Mac music server.

The casual interest soon transformed into an addiction and an obsession. Does <i>obsession</i> come before <i>addiction</i>, or after? I'm not sure. Either way, the salsa didn't seem to mind. It started in early August with two albums: <i>Siembra</i> by Ruben Blades and <i><a href="http://blog.stereophile.com/stephenmejias/la_gran_fuga/">La Gran Fuga</a></i> by Willie Colon. These two led me to several others which led me to more still. I read one pretty crappy Hector Lavoe biography, sent dozens of fiery e-mails to my family in Puerto Rico, devoured tons of liner notes, and watched a gazillion YouTube videos. I've now collected over 20 albums (all on CD), have lured one uncle into sending me rare and classic songs from his library of MP3s, coerced another into donating to my cause his entire LP collection (we'll see about that), and uncovered an entire world of really deep, incredibly hot tracks. The addiction is not fading.