LATEST ADDITIONS

Five decades later, even dedicated fans of former Procol Harum guitarist Robin Trower have had to admit that they appreciate his solo albums for more than just his guitar gluttony. To be sure, For Earth Below's title track and his other blues-rock jams, obviously influenced by both the tone and approach of Jimi Hendrix, are foundational for today's stoner-rock subgenre.

As much as I love my stereo system and listening to music through two speakers, some recordings just can't be bound by the limits of stereophony. For instance, Carl Orff's epic cantata Carmina Burana. Sure, I've heard successful stereo versions, but listen to the four-channel Quadraphonic mix of the classic 1974 recording by the Cleveland Orchestra, Chorus and Boys Choir, conducted by Michael Tilson Thomas, then decide whether stereo still does it for you.

In high-end audio, Italian designs play by different rules. They tend to favor beauty over austerity, boldness over caution, and emotion over restraint. Rather than just hearing the music, you're meant to be swept away by it. That spirit animates gear from Unison Research, a tube-focused company located just north of Venice.

"Art is the only political power," the artist Joseph Beuys once said. If only it were true. Often, when power is wielded against an entire people with enough brutality and efficiency, it reduces the culture to a sickening silence, leaving room only for state-sponsored propaganda. Think of the Soviet Union under Stalin, or Germany during the Third Reich. But in other, rarer cases, repression is met with an efflorescence of great art, like a charred field welling up into a riot of wildflowers.

As a music teacher, I can think of no better learning experience than what trumpeter Donald Byrd did in the early 1970s for a group of his music students. To quote the band's current website, "Byrd envisioned taking active students at Howard University in Washington, DC, on a real-world field trip which would expose them to ins and outs of the music business."

Hegel has introduced the H150, a streaming integrated amplifier that replaces the H120. The company says the H150 uses the same streaming platform and control app found in the H400 and H600, adds a Moving‑Magnet phono stage, and in a first for Hegel, plays music directly from a USB‑A drive. Hegel refers to the H150 by the nickname Prodigy.

"Panel speakers that do bass? Sign me up!" That was my reaction when I first heard a pair of Diptyque Reference loudspeakers, at AXPONA 2023. The Reference is a 6'-tall, French planar magnetic speaker whose designers, Gilles Douziech and Eric Poix, make no secret of their love for Magnepan, the Minnesota company famed for its dipole panels. The French duo has improved on Magnepan's pioneering technology by addressing the number-one shortcoming of such designs: a lack of low-frequency extension.