LATEST ADDITIONS

Measuring 7.1" by 1.6" by 9.1" and with an attractive paper-over-board cover, [Talking Heads founder] David Byrne's boldly titled new book resembles the textbooks often found in public-school classrooms. If not for the author's brief lapses into street talk—he uses the word shit just a bit too freely for the youngest readers—one gets the impression that Byrne wouldn't mind having his book taught in elementary school. He quotes from Oliver Sacks's brilliant Musicophilia: "For the vast majority of students, music can be every bit as important educationally as reading or writing."

On February 1st, Stereophile posted the Audience aR2p Adept Response Power Conditioner Sweepstakes that yielded a total of 213 entries. There was only one lucky winner. Here Stereophile.com member rlabarre shares his thoughts on his fortuitous prize.

Visitors to Montreal's annual Salon Son et Image (SSI) high performance audio show will notice some changes when the three-day event opens to the public on Friday March 22 in its customary location, Hotel Hilton Bonaventure. For starters, instead of the approximately 100 exhibit rooms encountered in 2011, and the approximately 85 last year, visitors will discover 70, including two dedicated to home theater, as well as 370 brands.

Today’s payday. These are the albums I bought.

When Steve Davis told me that people were hungry for an audio show in Chicago, he wasn’t kidding. What Davis believes to be over 4000 attendees—2000 tickets had been sold before the Show opened—visited over the course of three days, March 8–10. They mobbed many of the rooms on Saturday and actually managing to keep things lively in most of the rooms I visited on the 8th floor on Sunday. And that was with people having to choose among 90 exhibit rooms, a bunch of table displays, an art show, multiple seminars, and lively marketplace that together extended over five floors of the Doubletree in Rosemont (Ground, mezzanine, and all of floors 7, 8, and 9) near O’Hare Airport. (My thanks to John Atkinson for standing outside in the pouring rain to get the photograph of the hotel.)

I don’t know what the sound was like at Chicago’s last consumer audio show, sponsored by Stereophile, which took place in the Palmer House Hilton in the Loop in 1999, but at the Doubletree, a large number of dealers and manufacturers managed to produce good to excellent sound within the confines of hotel rooms that they had never before exhibited in.

You can always count on Doug White, owner of The Voice That Is in Newtown, PA, to provide excellent sound and an attractive display. At AXPONA, he came through in spades, rendering John Atkinson's recording of male ensemble Cantus singing Eric Whitacre's Lux Aurumque with extreme beauty. The system did equally well on Rimsky-Korsakov's well-worn Dance of the Tumblers, producing superb sound and nice depth. Lacking only were the ultimate transparency and room-filling soundstage that I encountered in far too few rooms at AXPONA.

I had been looking forward to auditioning the 10th Anniversary Edition of Scaena's Silver Ghost speakers at the 2013 CES, but as I reported, there was a curious lack of recorded ambience. The Silver Ghosts, which cost $153,000/system with two active subwoofers, sounded much better at AXPONA, driven by Audio Research amplification. The front end was the new dCS Vivaldi rig and cabling was all Silversmith Audio Palladium. A duet between a woman singer and a double bass on the old Gloria Gaynor hit "I Will Survive" was absolutely convincing in its tonality and musicality—with plenty of recorded ambience!