LATEST ADDITIONS

The day I visited Stereophile Senior Contributing Editor Kalman Rubinson, I arrived back home with a headful of new understandings, but before I could ponder those things, I made a cup of tea and sat down to read a few New York Times obituaries.

While Kal and I sat chatting on his couch, he told me that reading obituaries was not only fascinating but had actually helped him find out what happened to a few people he had lost touch with. I told him I hadn't read Times obits in years but when I did, I did it to enjoy the quality of writing. We agreed that the Times's obituaries (as well as their Sports, Food, and Arts & Leisure pages) are good places to find inspired bits of pure journalism.

After some raving about our favorite journalists, we began telling when-we-were-kid stories about how we used to stare through the grille cloths on table radios, where inside by the speaker we would see the announcer's face, and sometimes whole orchestras—in miniature—on a dark stage where the speaker cone morphed into a concert shell.

It was October 1990 and Richard Lehnert, at that time Stereophile's music editor, buttonholed me in our office parking lot. He had an idea for a new feature in which, instead of recommending audio components, which we had been doing since the first edition of Recommended Components in 1963, we should do the same for music. "Rather than a selection of all-time (or year's) best recorded performances—which are common enough—or a list of audiophile reference recordings—common enough in the audiophile press, at any rate," he said, "this would be a list of stereo recordings that are both musically and sonically impeccable. In other words, the best, the tops, to die for."

It took me less than a New York minute to sign off on Richard's idea. We asked the magazine's audio and music writers each to name two of their favorite albums of all time—albums that were, to them, "to die for."

Elvis Costello: King of America & Other Realms
UMG 602488514378 (6 CDs). 2024. Costello and Henry "T Bone" Burnett, original album prod., Costello, Steve Berkowitz, reissue prods.; William Berry Jackson, David Dominguez, Larry Hirsch, Mark Linett, others, engs.
Performance ****½
Sonics ****

By the mid-1980s, Elvis Costello was in dire need of a change in musical direction. As he recounts in the extensive new liner notes, he was "playing in a band that suddenly sounded like four strangers." Seeking inspiration, he decided the path forward was to use his own name, Declan MacManus, in the credits and to indulge his love and respect for American music.

Donald Vega: All Is Merry and Bright; Kris Davis Trio: Run the Gauntlet; Sarah Hanahan: Among Giants.

Mozart: Piano Concertos Nos.19 & 23, Kristian Bezuidenhout, fortepiano; Freiburger Barockorchester; Dvořák: Legends; Slavonic Rhapsodies, Czech Philharmonic/TomᚠNetopil; Evening Songs: Songs by Dvořák, Smetana, Fibich, and Suk, Adam Plachetka, tenor; David Švec, piano.

From May 4 through August 18, 2024, the San Francisco Museum Of Modern Art (SFMOMA) staged the largest multisensory installation cum performance art exhibition in its history. Entitled Art Of Noise, the multi-room show, which occupied 14,000ft² on the museum's seventh floor, drew an estimated 140,000 visitors, boosting museum attendance by over 33% from the same period in 2023. Even accounting for postpandemic attendance declines, that's an impressive figure.

The exhibit, designed to celebrate "pioneering designs shaping our music experiences," was the creation of two visionaries: Museum Curator Joseph Becker, 40, and New York–based audio salon host/entrepreneur/system and fashion designer Devon Turnbull, aka Ojas, 45.

To watch as Rega very slowly expands its turntable offerings upmarket requires the patience of a Thomas Pynchon addict waiting for each new tome from the notoriously slow-working and reclusive author. Starting out 51 years ago with just one turntable model, Rega now offers turntables at seven different price levels, plus a few minor variations in between. During the "lost years" of waning turntable and vinyl sales in the 1990s and early 2000s, Rega boss Roy Gandy candidly admits that the company put little effort into advancing its turntable designs, as sales at the time didn't really justify the investment. Rega had shifted its focus to digital source components, amplifiers, and loudspeakers, and even introduced a tube CD player.

That momentum finally started to reverse about 15 years ago, as the vinyl revival started to kick in and turntable sales began to pick up again. By this point, Rega was a much larger company and was able to leverage its growing reputation to engage with cutting-edge high-tech manufacturing subcontractors. Through these new relationships, they created a test bed turntable called the Naiad that would extend their design philosophies as far as was feasibly possible...

The Naiad's high price was the result of some of the design choices that had already been made, when scaling up for production wasn't even under consideration. Rega knew it wouldn't be too difficult to create a more production-ready version, into which they could distill most of what they had learned from building the Naiad. The result is the Naia, where with just a few simple changes, they have managed to undercut the Naiad's price by more than 70%, down to $12,995.