LATEST ADDITIONS

At last year's <a href=" http://blog.stereophile.com/ces2008/010908future/ ">Consumer Electronics Show</a> and <a href=" http://blog.stereophile.com/fsi2008/040408muon/ ">Festival Son & Image</a>, British loudspeaker manufacturer KEF caught a lot of eyes and ears with their shimmering, $140,000/pair Muon. Now the company has unveiled the Blade, an artful, sleek, stealthy looking thing, poised to draw similar attention.

Did you know that we recently remastered our <i>Rhapsody</i>? The album is a tribute to George Gershwin, conducted by pianist Hyperion Knight, and it's good, good fun on the hi-fi.

I love the styling of the latest Marantz gear&#151strong and masculine without being overblown or audacious. Though the late '80s through early '90s saw Marantz move away from their high end roots, the last decade has been a return to form. Under the ownership of D&M Holdings, the respected audio company seems to be embracing their cherished past. In May 2008, Michael Fremer was extremely impressed by their <a href="http://www.stereophile.com/solidpoweramps/508mar11s1/index.html">SM-11S1 Reference power amplifier</a>. He wrote:

For a long time, I wasn't sure if I would go to the show. Finally, on the day of the show, I decided I would go. I made the right decision. Marc Ribot, celebrating his 55th birthday at <a href="http://lepoissonrouge.com/">Le Poisson Rouge</a>, was something to remember. Little did I know he had played every night of the week, performing old and new material with several different bands at various venues throughout New York City.

And later in <a href="http://blog.stereophile.com/stephenmejias/things_are_so_bad/">the night</a>, I listened to Archie Shepp's <i>Three For A Quarter, One For A Dime</i>, which I understand is the darker, angrier, wilder side of a performance held at San Francisco's old Both/And Club on February 19, 1966.

Are audiophiles born or are they created? Are "Golden Ears" an innate talent (nature) or can you train yourself (nurture) to be a critical listener?

It’s one of those lineups that almost promises too much: McCoy Tyner, the pianist from Coltrane’s “classic” early-‘60s quartet, leading his own quartet with Ravi Coltrane, John’s son, sitting in on tenor sax. And yet, at tonight’s first set, they pulled it off, which is to say, they seemed natural, the music was simply very good--better than that--and not some cockeyed freak show like, say, Paul McCartney teaming up with Sean Lennon. The band was playing in Jazz at Lincoln Center’s Allen Room—a wonder of concert-hall architecture, at once spacious and intimate, with a grand view overlooking Central Park—and Tyner, now 70 and recently ailing, was in ultra-fine form. He banged out the set’s first notes, and there they were—those clanging block chords, forceful, percussive, the sustain-pedal meshing their overtones into a shimmering sonic bouquet. It sent shivers. Then entered Coltrane the younger, now 43 (he wasn’t quite two when John died of liver complications at the age of 40), sounding increasingly like his father—that plangent tone, the sinuous, fluent lines of sixteenth-notes, broken up by abrupt hesitations and jagged rhythms—but not as insistent, adopting more the tone of a balladeer. (Check out his new album, <I>Blending Times</I>, on Savoy Jazz, for a tasty sampling of what might be called intense lyricism.) Midway through the set, he and Tyner took a big risk—it literally took my breath—when they dashed into “Moment’s Notice,” John Coltrane’s uptempo anthem from his 1957 LP <I>Blue Train</I>, but Ravi navigated the brisk rapids with aplomb. (It may have helped that Tyner never played that song with Coltrane <I>pere</I>—the album was recorded a few years before he joined the group—so they were both, in a sense, interlopers. If they’d started wailing the first movement of <I>A Love Supreme</I>, well, that might have been too eerie.)