LATEST ADDITIONS

Outside of Vincent Van Gogh, Brian Wilson had the most infamous—and ultimately the most valuable—left ear in the world. Wilson—the chief architect of countless Beach Boys pop classics, who passed away at age 82 on June 11, 2025—lost the hearing in his right ear at an early age. One could reasonably argue that he only ever heard all the sonic masterpieces he constructed, for that quintessential California band he cofounded, in mono.

"Art is the only political power," the artist Joseph Beuys once said. If only it were true. Often, when power is wielded against an entire people with enough brutality and efficiency, it reduces the culture to a sickening silence, leaving room only for state-sponsored propaganda. Think of the Soviet Union under Stalin, or Germany during the Third Reich. But in other, rarer cases, repression is met with an efflorescence of great art, like a charred field welling up into a riot of wildflowers.

As a music teacher, I can think of no better learning experience than what trumpeter Donald Byrd did in the early 1970s for a group of his music students. To quote the band's current website, "Byrd envisioned taking active students at Howard University in Washington, DC, on a real-world field trip which would expose them to ins and outs of the music business."

Hegel has introduced the H150, a streaming integrated amplifier that replaces the H120. The company says the H150 uses the same streaming platform and control app found in the H400 and H600, adds a Moving‑Magnet phono stage, and in a first for Hegel, plays music directly from a USB‑A drive. Hegel refers to the H150 by the nickname Prodigy.

"Panel speakers that do bass? Sign me up!" That was my reaction when I first heard a pair of Diptyque Reference loudspeakers, at AXPONA 2023. The Reference is a 6'-tall, French planar magnetic speaker whose designers, Gilles Douziech and Eric Poix, make no secret of their love for Magnepan, the Minnesota company famed for its dipole panels. The French duo has improved on Magnepan's pioneering technology by addressing the number-one shortcoming of such designs: a lack of low-frequency extension.

My oldest aural memory is my mother singing nursery rhymes to send me off to sleep. After that, it's vinyl records. Being the third child, I benefited from a constant stream of audio-related hand-me-downs, starting with a 1960s kiddie phonograph and a pile of well-worn records from my older brothers.

Sonus faber has announced the Amati Supreme, a floorstanding loudspeaker derived from concepts developed for the Suprema. The company positions the model as a compact implementation of its “Voice of Sonus faber” engineering approach.