LATEST ADDITIONS

<B>PAQUITO D'RIVERA: <I>Portraits of Cuba</I></B><BR> Paquito D'Rivera, alto & soprano sax, clarinet; Lew Soloff, Bob Millikan, Diego Urcola, Gustavo Bergalli, trumpet, flugelhorn; Lawrence Feldman, alto sax, flute; Thomas Christensen, tenor sax, flute; Andres Boiarsky, tenor sax, clarinet, flute; Roger Rosenberg, baritone sax, bass clarinet, bassoon; John Clark, French horn; James Pugh, trombone; David Taylor, bass trombone; Allison Franzetti, Dario Eskenazi, Carlos Franzetti, piano; David Finck, bass; Mark Walker, drums; Pernell Saturnino, percussion; Carlos Franzetti, arr., conductor<BR> Chesky JD145 (CD only). David Chesky, prod.; Bob Katz, eng. DDD. TT: 60:36

<B>PATTI SMITH: <I>Gone Again</I></B><BR> Arista 07822-18747-2 (CD only). Malcolm Burn, prod., eng.; Lenny Kaye, prod.; Brian Sperber, eng.; Greg Calbi, mastering. TT: 55:58</B>

Back in 1968, <I>nothing</I> sounded better to me than "Penny Lane"&mdash;one of my all-time favorite songs&mdash;blasting out over my Dad's home-built Eico gear (when no one else was around, of course). For some reason, the various sounds packed into that song grabbed my attention as much as that old integrated amp whose steel case got as hot as the tubes inside&mdash;ouch! When the Beatles broke up, I played <I>Magical Mystery Tour</I> over and over for days before I felt I'd paid them sufficient homage. Like everyone else, I heard a lot of the Beatles through the '70s and '80s. (And now, of course, it may as well be the '60s again: if you can stomach another "Magic Carpet Ride" every hour (or so it seems), just tune in your local "classic rock" station and you'll hear lots of "Penny Lane," too.)

One of the characteristic traits, I have found, that defines the loudspeaker designer is that they are loners&mdash;they seem to avoid one another's company as if on purpose. But if ever you sit down with a designer, all you need to do to open him up is to ask him what he feels to be important in loudspeaker performance.

"Why no review of the Ayre V-3?" queried Stephen Slaughter in July's "Letters" column, echoing several urgent posts to my e-mail address. Word of mouth on this remarkable 100Wpc amplifier was reaching fever pitch. Show reports over the last several years had sounded a consistent note—rooms that demoed with V-3s kept getting mentioned in "Best of Show" overviews. Naturally, this also meant that the pendulum had started its backward swing. "It's not really as good as people are saying," one WCES attendee confided in me. "That's why they won't give it to critics."

The Vandersteen 3A is a higher-end variation on the theme established by the company's first loudspeaker, the 2C. The latter is still available, though much updated into the current, highly popular 2Ce. A four-way design, the 3A has separate sub-enclosures for each drive unit; the whole affair is covered with a knit grille-cloth "sock" with wood trim end pieces. A rear-mounted metal brace allows the user to vary the tiltback&mdash;an important consideration for best performance with this loudspeaker.

Let's say you play a CD on a poor-quality CD transport and store the digital audio data in a massive computer memory. You then repeat the process, but this time play the CD into the memory from the finest CD transport extant (say, the Mark Levinson No.31). A week later you feed the two sets of data from the massive memory into a digital processor and listen to the music. Would the CD transports' sonic signatures be removed from the signal? Could you hear a difference between the transports a week later?