LATEST ADDITIONS

When Audio Advisor's Wayne Schuurman contacted me about reviewing the <A HREF="http://www.stereophile.com/headphones/1108vincent">Vincent Audio KHV-1pre</A> headphone amplifier, I felt confident that I had everything I needed to handle the task, owning, as I do, both the <A HREF="http://www.stereophile.com/headphones/806akg">AKG K701</A> and <A HREF="http://www.stereophile.com/thefifthelement/605fifth/index1.html">Sennhe… HD-650</A> headphones, which have long been my references. <I>That oughta get 'er done</I>, I thought.

Reader "dr.d" asks: "Is it better to have a decent system that allows all recordings to sound good, or to have a system that might make some not-so-hot recordings no fun to listen to?" What's your preference, a system that always creates beauty or one that can reveal the ugly truth?

Continuing with the theme started with last week's question: Which single composer or performer would you recommend to introduce someone to jazz music? And why?

The walls of the <i>Stereophile</i> offices have been shaking to the sounds of Mogwai's latest, <i><a href="http://blog.stereophile.com/stephenmejias/the_hawk_is_howling/">The Hawk is Howling</a></i>. Yes, we know that hawks don't howl. (Or do they?) We also know the difference between a hawk and a bald eagle. (Sourpusses.)

Some reviews take longer to gestate than others. But in the case of Cary's CD 306 SACD Professional Version SACD/CD player, it has taken me literally years to get this review into print. I had visited Cary's impressive facility in North Carolina just before Christmas 2005, when I'd been playing the high-resolution master files of some of my recordings at an event being promoted by Raleigh high-end dealer Audio Advice. Cary's head honcho, <A HREF="http://www.stereophile.com/interviews/399">Dennis Had</A>, had been playing me music on a system featuring his Silver Oak loudspeakers, with the front-end one of the first samples of the original CD 306, playing discs through the two-chassis Cary SLP 05 preamplifier that Art Dudley <A HREF="http://www.stereophile.com/tubepreamps/906cary">ended up reviewing</A> in the September 2006 issue. "Now <I>that's</I> a product I'd like to review!" I enthused, looking inside the CD 306, and I drove back to Brooklyn with a review sample.

We played Scrabble and listened to Brian Eno's Another Green World. The synthesizers were raw, saw-toothed, and gripping, and Eno's volume swells had never been truly appreciated till that night.

Even though he's heard me play the record about a million times, Kyle kept asking, "Who is this playing?"

I think it caught him by surprise this time around.

It was a certain sunless Sunday afternoon and we were listening to some records at the Brooklyn Navy Yard's <a href="http://blog.stereophile.com/stephenmejias/112206custom/">DeVore Fidelity factory</a>. Something had just come to an end, and I decided to take a look through a box of LPs to find something new. I found an album that was still sealed in its plastic wrapper. It was the seventh installment of Sonic Youth's SYR series, the album that <a href="http://blog.stereophile.com/stephenmejias/040808immediately/">started it all for me</a>. I was shocked. <i>Shocked</i>. I was all exclamation points and italics.