LATEST ADDITIONS

Musical Fidelity's founder, <A HREF="http://www.stereophile.com/features/575/index3.html">Antony Michaelson</A>, arrived at my house to help me set up the two chassis of his sleek, limited-edition, $30,000 Titan power amplifier. (The task requires at <I>least</I> two people.) A week later, a representative of Musical Fidelity's US importer, KEF America, dropped by to listen and to deliver three of Musical Fidelity's new V-series products: a phono preamp, a DAC, and a headphone amp. All three fit comfortably into a small paper bag; the price of the three was $700.

While my enthusiasm for the long-discontinued <A HREF="http://www.stereophile.com/cdplayers/708play">Sony PlayStation 1</A> remains high (see the July 2008 <I>Stereophile</I>), I freely acknowledge that not every high-end audio enthusiast wants a CD player with an injection-molded chassis, a Robot Commando handset, and a remarkable lack of long-term reliability: Yes, the Sony sounds wonderful, but sound isn't everything.

What’s the point of having a blog if I can’t occasionally indulge in self-promotion? So if you’ll forgive my blatancy for a moment, today marks the official pub date of my new book, <I>1959: The Year Everything Changed</I>. Unlike my last book, which was entirely about foreign policy, this one actually might be of some interest to the readers of this space, because it covers not just politics but also culture, society, science, sex—as the title suggests, <I>everything</I>. More to the point, there are three chapters (out of 25) that deal explicitly with jazz. (Key jazz albums of 1959 included Miles Davis’ <I>Kind of Blue</I>, Ornette Coleman’s <I>The Shape of Jazz to Come</I>, and Dave Brubeck’s <I>Time Out</I>.) There’s also a chapter about the creation of Motown (another 1959 phenomenon), and a jazz-blues vibe infuses the whole book.

Released in July, <I>Live at Otto's Shrunken Head</I> (STPH020-2) is the latest Stereophile CD from reviewer Bob Reina's jazz quartet, Attention Screen. Unlike the group's first CD, <A HREF="http://www.stereophile.com/musicrecordings/907att"><I>Live at Merkin Hall</I></A> (STPH018-2, released in 2007), which was recorded with multiple microphones, I captured the eight improvisations on <I>Live at Otto's</I> using a single pair of mikes.

On June 2, <I>Stereophile</I> reported that HDGiants.com, formerly known as MusicGiants.com, had <A HREF="http://www.stereophile.com/news/bust_and_booms_on_the_download_front/">… for Chapter 11 bankruptcy</A>. The future of the high-quality music and video download site that had most recently begun offering "Super HD" 24-bit surround-sound downloads was unclear.

A new integrated amplifier called the Lars Type 1, which made its debut at the <A HREF="http://blog.stereophile.com/ces2009/lars_by_lars">2009 Consumer Electronics Show</A>, has given my notion of a dichotomy between mainstream audio and alternative audio a severe beating. In that sense, the Lars Type 1 has been a life-changing product, although the change took longer than expected for me to digest.

Trumpeter Dave Douglas’ new album, <I>Spirit Moves</I>, featuring his Brass Ecstasy quintet, is a rouser: hot, cool, raucous, pensive, sometimes all at once, and always a lot of fun. The band’s name is a play on the late Lester Bowie’s Brass Fantasy, and they share a similar hard-blowing vibe—as well as two of the players (Luis Bonilla on trombone and Vincent Chancey on French horn)—but where Bowie used the band to riff on the pop tunes of the day (long before The Bad Plus), Douglas’ sources are mainly original tunes with a zesty swing and a dash of his trademark Mediterranean melancholy.