LATEST ADDITIONS

With good news to share about new downloads, let's dispense with the downer first. As <A HREF="http://www.twice.com/article/CA6661607.html?nid=2402&">reported by Twice.com</A>, HDGiants, aka MusicGiants, filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in US Bankruptcy Court on May 18. Although the site, often praised by <I>Stereophile</I> as a leader in CD-quality and high-resolution music and video downloads, still appears to be operating, the layoff of its sales and marketing staff raises serious questions about its future.

Joe Lovano’s <I>Folk Art</I>, his 22nd album on the Blue Note label, is an odd, sometimes jarring record—it took a few hearings before I found my bearings—but once the fragments snap into place, it’s a rousing pleaser, bursting with indigo moods, heart-skipped romance, and free-flow funk riffs. Lovano plays all kinds of reeds—tenor sax, straight alto sax, clarinet, and, on one song, the aulochrome, a Hungarian-built horn that’s a double soprano sax (attached to one reed), each side tuned to a different key, so that you blow melody and harmony simultaneously. He plays with a somewhat hardened tone, reminiscent of Sonny Rollins, but with a more soulful sensibility, stemming from his Midwestern roots (his father was a tenor blues saxophonist in Cleveland), though over the past couple decades, he’s played with, and gleaned ideas from, a wide variety of masters, including Hank Jones, Gunther Schuller, and Mel Lewis, to name a few.

I've been reading Daniel Levitan's <I>The World in Six Songs: How the Musical Brain Created Human Nature</I>, which makes pretty strong claims for the importance of those tones in time. (Neil McCormick conducted an interesting <A HREF="http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/neil_mccormick/blog/2009/04/09/evolution_o…; with Levitan in <I>The Telegraph</I>.)

Audiophiles constantly seek ways to improve the experience of hearing reproduced music. Preamps are upgraded, digital processors are compared, turntables are tweaked, loudspeaker cables are auditioned, dealers are visited, and, yes, magazines are read&#151;all in the quest to get just a little closer to the music.

As founder of California-based Vacuum Tube Logic of America, David Manley is at the forefront of the current renaissance in vacuum-tube audio equipment. In addition to manufacturing some highly regarded audiophile components, VTL has introduced a line of tubed professional equipment that is finding its way into recording studios. David has a lifetime of experience in tube electronics, recording studio design, disc cutting, music recording, and most recently, analog/digital and digital/analog converter design.

In 1989, Cambridge Audio, then run by Stan Curtis—who is still active in hi-fi— introduced their DAC 1. At about the same time, within a few weeks of each other, Arcam introduced their Delta Black Box and Musical Fidelity their Digilog. I forget who was first among the three. Arcam, I think. But the DAC race was on, led by the British. (There was even a DAC called the Dacula.) US companies got into the DAC race, too—at higher prices, of course.

I’ve just found out about a new, and unlikely, place to go hear jazz in New York City: the Cacao Bar at the Chocolate Factory, a.k.a. MarieBelle. Most of the time, it’s a chi-chi caf—on the 2nd floor of 762 Madison Avenue, between E. 65th and 66th Streets—that serves hyper-rich chocolates, exotic drinks, and (so I’m told) killer short ribs. But on Wednesday nights, from 7:30 to 10, jazz musicians—a pianist and usually just one or two others (there’s no room for more)—come in and play.