LATEST ADDITIONS

For exhibitors, showing off their products at audio shows is a crap shoot. The vagaries of arbitrarily assigned hotel rooms with unpredictable acoustics can play havoc with the sound of even the best-sounding systems. But over the years I've been attending shows, Joseph Audio's dems have always impressed me with how Jeff Joseph manages to set up his speakers so that they work with instead of against a hotel room's acoustics. Yes, Joseph's setup skills, going back to his days in audio retail, play an important role here. But his speakers, too, need to be of sufficiently high quality to benefit from those skills. And if they can be made to sing in a hotel room, they will also stand a better-than-usual chance of doing so in audiophiles' homes.

Phase Technology, a speaker-making division of MSE Audio based in Jacksonville, Florida, celebrated their 30th anniversary last September, at the 2013 CEDIA Expo, by reissuing of one of their first products, the PC-60 bookshelf loudspeaker, now updated with new drivers and crossovers. Dick Olsher reviewed the PC-60 for Stereophile in 1984 (footnote 1), and three decades later, John Atkinson thought it time to revisit this classic design, especially as the company's founder, the late Bill Hecht, was the inventor, in 1967, of the soft-dome tweeter. The PC60 CA (the CA stands for Classic Audiophile) intrigued me as well—despite having reviewed audio gear for 30 years and attended audio shows for even longer, I'd never heard a Phase Technology speaker. And with the PC60 CA costing $1400/pair—currently the hottest price point for high-performance bookshelf models—I couldn't wait to hear it.

Record-business profits peaked 20 years ago, just before Napster and other file-sharing sites turned their world upside down. There have been occasional surges, but the future of the Compact Disc looks bleak, and while income from downloaded files is still climbing, the shift of profitability from à la carte music sales to unlimited streaming on demand seems inevitable. The realignment is already underway—the vast majority of today's music listeners, young and old, haven't bought a CD, file, or LP in years. It pains me to admit it, but after hearing, at the 2014 Midem music exhibition, a presentation by Marc Geiger, of William Morris Endeavors, I was convinced that music-streaming companies are poised to reboot the industry. If Geiger's predictions are accurate, the music business will be more profitable than ever, and swell to $100 billion in 20 years or less (see www.youtube.com/watch?v=bcNsAR_FM5M&feature=share).

Extreme, perhaps, in size—6'10" when fully extended—and certainly in price ($260,000/pair US price), the Estelon Extreme loudspeaker has arrived at its exclusive US dealer, Audio High in Mountain View and Los Angeles, CA. The brainchild of Estonian designer Alfred Vassilkov, 56, who describes it as the culmination of 30 years of research, each loudspeaker, pictured above with Audio High's Michael Silver, weighs 551.16 lbs (250kg).

Yet there are country stars today that know and respect the history and yes…actually have taste.

Almost exactly four years ago, I posted a Blog that began like this: "Let's put the main point up front. The new duet album by Keith Jarrett and Charlie Haden, Jasmine (on ECM), is a gorgeous piece of work: all standards, mainly ballads, nothing fancy (not overtly anyway), but such poignancy and quiet passion; it's a glimpse into the intimacy of the act of making art." A follow-up CD is out now, Last Dance...