LATEST ADDITIONS

Eugene Starostin and Gert van der Heijde have solved a 75-year-old conundrum by developing tools to predict the three dimensional form a Möbius strip will take.

'Fess up, you didn't know where they are either.

Jason Moran finished a week at the Jazz Standard in New York City last night and confirmed his standing, at age 32, as <I>the</I> jazz pianist of our times. A few years ago, I saw Moran playing in duet at Merkin Hall with Andrew Hill, one of his mentors, more than twice his age. Afterward, a friend of mine, a trumpeter just a little older than Moran, made a sharp observation about their respective generations: Hill, a leading avant-gardist from the ‘60s then undergoing a renaissance, played in one style, his style; Moran played in many styles, all styles. Though he didn’t put it in these terms, Hill (who recently died of cancer) was the jazz equivalent of an abstract expressionist painter (say, Franz Kline or Robert Motherwell), while Moran is the supreme post-modernist (say, Robert Rauschenberg) who appropriates everything around him, including ready-made objects, and somehow makes it all his own.

John Flahive answered the phone one evening. On the other end of the line was a stranger, George Martorano calling from prison. That call changed both their lives.

During the SACD and DVD-Audio heyday, multichannel audio was finding new converts. Did you convert? Has it stuck with you? Why or why not?

<I>Bookshelf loudspeaker</I>. The phrase may be common usage, but I really dislike describing small speakers as "bookshelf" models. Place a pair of high-performance minis on a bookshelf against the wall and you destroy much of the sound quality for which you've paid. Yet place the same speakers on good stands well away from room boundaries, and while it could be argued that their footprint is no smaller than a conventional tower speaker, with the best designs you'll get true high-end sound, particularly regarding the accuracy of midrange reproduction and the stability of stereo imaging.

A fellow member of the Bay Area Audiophile Society recently forwarded to me a link to Wikipedia's entry for audiophile. It's a horror. Even before the page defines the word, it begins with a large question mark, circled in green, and the warning, "This article or section may contain original research or unverified claims. Please help Wikipedia by adding references."