LATEST ADDITIONS

John Atkinson heads across America's great plains toward Kansas to engineer a brand-new recording that he and Les Berkley document in <A HREF="http://www.stereophile.com//features/575/">A Mosaic of Music: <I>Stereophile</I>'s Clarinet Quintet CD</A>. For the new CD, JA returns again to Chad Kassem's audio Mecca, noting that "105 takes of the Mozart and 102 takes of the Brahms later, we had gotten everything down on tape in two days of intense music-making."

<A HREF="http://www.homeentertainment-expo.com">Home Entertainment 2002</A> is set to open to the public as planned, May 31&ndash;June 2, 2002, at the Hilton New York & Towers Hotel in New York City. Show attendees will be treated to numerous free educational seminars and musical performances from a dozen popular jazz, classical, and contemporary recording artists.

"It <I>took</I> long enough," as I said to Larry Fish and Roger Stockholm.

This magazine's "Recording of the Month" feature has been running without a break since it first appeared in our January 1994 issue. The idea of its progenitor, then-music editor Richard Lehnert (who still copy-edits every word you see in Stereophile), was that every month we would recognize a recording that defied "Holt's First Law" by offering superb sound and wonderful music (footnote 1). I think we've succeeded at that goal. Despite the letter that Robert Baird mentions in his "Aural Robert" column this month (p.113), whose writer objected to the February issue's pick (Shelby Lynne's Love Shelby, Island ISLF 15426-2), if an audiophile's music collection consisted entirely of Stereophile Recordings of the Month, there wouldn't be a dog in the whole eclectic bunch.

<B>NEIL YOUNG: <I>Are You Passionate?</I></B><BR> Reprise 48111-2 (CD). 2002. Neil Young, Booker T. Jones, Duck Dunn, Poncho Sampedro, prods.; John Hanlon, eng.; Aaron Prellwitz, Alex Osborne, asst. engs.; Tim Mulligan, mix, mastering; John Hausmann, Denny Purcell, mastering; John Nowland, A/D transfer. AAD? TT: 65:29<BR> Performance <B>****?</B><BR> Sonics <B>****</B>

Reader John Pluta says it took him three years to finally read his preamp's manual, and he wishes he had gone through it sooner. Do you go through your manuals right away or not?

For <A HREF="http://www.vivendi.com">Vivendi Universal SA</A>, when it rains, it pours. Just two weeks after chief executive Jean-Marie Messier ousted Pierre Lescure, the president of France's <A HREF="http://www.canalplus.fr">Canal Plus</A> television company&mdash;an event that caused demonstrations in the streets of Paris and paroxysms of nationalistic fervor among France's 18 presidential candidates&mdash;a complicated stock deal got vastly more complicated, resulting in a $250 million payment due to A&M Records founders Herb Alpert and Jerry Moss.