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In a room that vied for recognition as the hottest enclosed space on the hottest floor on the hottest day of Munich High End, 45-year-old Burmester Audio introduced its new CEO, Industrial Engineer Frank Weise, and at least four new products.

The stylus that cuts the grooves in your favorite records is best described, in simple terms, as "chisel-shaped." The most accurate playback styli—the "extreme" ones that extract the maximum amount of information from the grooves—have a similar shape, with sharper and more severe contact edges than a standard elliptical stylus, itself an advance over spherical styli.

At a well-organized Munich press conference, Danish speaker company Raidho, now owned by Dantax, introduced the successor to the X1, the Raidho X1t Super Mini Monitor (€5800, presumably for the pair and equivalent to US$6210). The speaker is equipped with the company's planar-magnetic ribbon tweeter, which claims 50 times less mass than conventional dome tweeters; a 5.25" tantalum-coated ceramic-on-aluminum midbass driver, which claims to raise breakup modes to 15kHz; and a rear port. Frequency range is 70Hz–50kHz, impedance >6 ohms, sensitivity 85dB, and black piano and white piano finishes.

Great hi-fi can give you goosebumps. And it relates to another source of horripilation: live music, and its recordings. I've also always been a live music junkie—ever since I was a kid.

I was fortunate to have grown up attending the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra and Cincinnati Pops Orchestra's "LolliPops" children's concerts. I'd seen some tepid live acts as a kid (ie, Donny and Marie). But nothing prepared me for my first rock concert. It, um, rocked my world.

Unless you live under a rock, you've followed Russia's invasion of Ukraine. You know something about sanctions against Russia and Russia's responses to those sanctions. If, in addition to not living under a rock, you're a tube-audio aficionado or electric guitar nut, you may have thought about a likely consequence of that war that's far less momentous than the destruction and carnage we see on TV: Will I be able to get new tubes for my amplifier? Especially those lovely Russia-made tubes.

I wrote about the music industry's impressive recovery in the February 2022 AWSI. Robust LP sales were a headline item of that report, but they're a sideshow: Paid-subscription streaming is what is bringing the industry back.

When I wrote that, 2021 wasn't quite over, so year-end financials weren't available. They're available now.

Eric Nathan: Missing Words, Carolyn Sampson: Trennung: Songs of Separation, Brahms: Piano Trios Nos.2 & 3, Brahms: String Sextets, Mahler: Symphony No.4 and Hans Abrahamsen: Schnee.