LATEST ADDITIONS

It has been a strange winter. Now approaching what is formally known as spring, I’m not sure if we ever even made it out of autumn! Forty-five degrees Fahrenheit in the middle of February in New York City? What in the hell is going on?

Similar to how the seasons from 2011 to 2012 have melded together into the longest autumn, the shipping out of each issue of Stereophile becomes a blur as well. As I discussed in my last on newsstands March article, we are never really sure what month we are living in here at the Stereophile office, much less the month of the issue we are working on, except for when we are compiling April Issue. We always know when we’re working on the April.

Why’s that?

The ecumenical collaboration between Sheffield Lab, the Moscow Philharmonic Orchestra, conductors Lawrence Leighton Smith and Dmitri Kitayenko, an imposing gaggle of businessmen and bureaucrats, and partial sponsorship by The Absolute Sound's Fund for Recorded Music, if somewhat short of epoch-making, is, nonetheless, a positive example of free enterprise and socialism bedding down together, liberally (pardon the expression) lubricated with glasnost. Art, we are told, is universal. It transcends philosophical, racial, political, and religious differences of opinion. Yet, despite the implied altruism of this international cooperative effort, the actual genesis of the project was essentially pragmatic, fundamentally bottom line.

This year’s Ambassador, Iggy Pop, has this to say:

"Yes, son?"

"How are loudspeakers made?"

"Hmm...Maybe it's time we had a little talk. Follow me into the listening room..."