LATEST ADDITIONS

I hope you’ve had an opportunity to listen to our October 2010 “Recording of the Month,” the evil and often hilarious Grinderman 2. On Sunday, I got to see the band play at the Best Buy Theater in Times Square. (The strangeness of seeing Grinderman perform at a place called “Best Buy Theater” is surpassed, albeit slightly, by the fact that the show took place on a Sunday, the Day of Our Lord.)

The Peachtree Audio MusicBox

In “Old-School Hi-Fi in Search of the New New Thing,” Hal Espen visits the Rocky Mountain Audio Fest and ponders the inherent dilemma of hi-fi.

How can a decidedly old-fashioned hobby move forward in an increasingly newfangled world?

Outside the listening rooms, the story of this year's Rocky Mountain Audio Fest traced the mood-swings and anxieties that buoy and beset the retro-futuristic world of high-end audio.

<i>Don Garber's Fi 46 monoblocks, in "test mule" form.</i>

Henry Threadgill should be better known than he is. A topnotch musician on alto sax and flute, one of the more innovative composers in jazz, a veteran of the Chicago avant-garde and a revivalist of ragtime improvisational styles (the two are not so contradictory, as he was the first to demonstrate), Threadgill started out on small labels, briefly landed contracts at RCA Novus and Columbia during their brief flirtations with experimentalists (in the late ‘80s and mid ‘90s, respectively), then went back to the indies—all the while retaining, even advancing, his spirit of adventure and his restless but disciplined innovation.

<B>Beethoven: <I>Piano Concertos 1&#150;5</I></B><BR>
Paul Lewis, piano; Jir&#237; Belohl&#225;vek, BBC Symphony Orchestra<BR>
Harmonia Mundi 902053.55 (3 CDs). 2010. Martin Sauer, prod.; Philip Knop, eng. DDD. TT: 2:55:42<BR>
Performance *****<BR>
Sonics *****

Show a time traveler from the 1920s an iPad and most likely he'd neither know what he was looking at nor what it might do. Show him a loudspeaker, even one as advanced as Magico's new Q5 ($59,950/pair), and he'd probably know exactly what it was and what it did, even if what it's made of might seem to have come from another planet.

Speaking of old formats, one major appeal that is lost with downloads is packaging. Or are those packages just waste? How important is the packaging (liner notes, album art, etc.) that comes with physical formats?