LATEST ADDITIONS

You might say that brown boxes serve as a metaphor for our lives here at <i>Stereophile</i>. Some days are fuller than others. Right now, I’m buried.

Considering that the crates they're shipped in are each as large as a Manhattan studio apartment, once they'd been set up in my listening room, Focal's Maestro Utopia III speakers weren't as visually overpowering as I'd anticipated. The elegant dark-gloss front baffles, the gloss-gray side panels, and the fact that the speaker's three subenclosures are vertically arrayed so that the top, midrange section is angled down, significantly reduced their apparent size.

Klyne Audio Arts is such a low-profile outfit that I marvel at its continued existence. It is reliably absent from the <I>Audio</I> and <I>Stereo Review</I> annual equipment directories, and if Stan Klyne has ever run an advertisement for any of his products anywhere, I haven't seen it, Yet Klyne Audio Arts always manages to have an exhibit at CES, where they display some of the most beautiful preamps and head-amps we see there, only to go underground again for another six months.

Before last year, I had no more than a professional interest in the products of Wilson Audio Specialties. But before last year I hadn't experienced <A HREF="http://www.stereophile.com/artdudleylistening/listening_86">Wilson's Sophia Series 2</A> loudspeaker ($16,700/pair)&#151;which, like the wines I tend to order when my wife and I go out to dinner, is the second-cheapest item on their menu. Within weeks of the Sophias' arrival, respect had turned to rapture, like to love, and an entirely new appreciation for Wilson Audio was mine (footnote 1).

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One of the many musical sawhorses that I often put the spurs to&#151;being a pain the bass just comes with the territory I’m afraid7#151;is the whole bit about why labels who are all hurtin’ right now don’t spend more time digging in their vaults and hauling out treasure in the form of unreleased studio material and especially live shows. Well, the emerging empire that is Concord Records (proud owners of the catalogs of Telarc, Fantasy and now, Rounder Records), a label whose judgment I have questioned in the recent past (<I>Stax Does the Beatles</I>, WTF?), released a killer record earlier this summer that’s been finding its way back to my Musical Fidelity CD player as of late, Otis Redding, <I>Live on Sunset Strip</I> collects performances that didn’t make it onto the two previous albums, <I>In Person at the Whisky a Go Go</I> and Good To Me: Live at the <I>Whiskey A Go Go Vol. 2</I>, that came from a three night stand at the Whiskey in L.A. over Easter weekend 1966. While the set list of the three full sets on these two CDs contains some repetitions, it’s great to hear

Yesterday morning, John Atkinson and I drove out to Mikey Fremer’s place to perform a set of test measurements on the <a href="http://www.magico.net/magicoq/index.php">Magico Q5</a> (review scheduled for our November issue). While JA set up his gear for the in-room measurements, I got to listen to music. Mikey was my personal DJ. He played some sultry Julie London, some angry Gil Scott-Heron, and some soothing Nat “King” Cole. All three, thanks to the outstanding recordings and thanks to the outstanding system, sounded very much <i>alive</i>.