Maria Schneider’s Jazz Orchestra plays at Birdland in midtown Manhattan this week, an unusual season and setting (usually they play at the Jazz Standard around Thanksgiving). The occasion is the premiere of a new, commissioned composition, and at Wednesday’s early set, it sounded as lovely as anything she’s written: joyful, melancholic, adventurous, pensive, with a samba swing.
Remember <a href="http://blog.stereophile.com/stephenmejias/the_world_is_crazy/">this rad video</a>?
Marantz has introduced four new, relatively affordable products: two integrated amplifiers and two disc players. All carry on the sleek, attractive design of the company’s reference components, featuring the classic Marantz star logo (cool), sculpted faceplates, and solid-looking build.
After a gap of far too many years, Northern California again has a high-end audio show. Sponsored by Constantine Soo's DaGoGo.com, the fledgling <A HREF="http://www.caaudioshow.com/">California Audio Show</A> will take place July 30 –August 1 at the Hilton Garden Inn in Emeryville. That location —next to Interstate 80, just across the bridge from San Francisco, midway between Oakland and Berkeley, and a free (albeit time-sensitive) <A HREF="http://emerygoround.com/schedule.php">shuttle ride</A> from the BART (Bay Area Rapid Transit) MacArthur line—is expected to draw a good cross-section of audiophiles from throughout the Bay Area.
Phiaton, maker of sexy headphones for sexy people, has <a href="http://www.phiaton.com/">a nice new website</a> filled with pictures of attractive young adults, set in clean, chic surroundings, looking very deeply engaged with what they’re doing, whether at work or at play or getting ready for a big date, while wearing Phiaton headphones. Check it out.
The August 2010 issue of <i>Stereophile</i> is now on newsstands. The cover, with its mellow tones, is one of my favorites. To a greater degree than any other cover we’ve released, this one got a buzz going around the office. People would walk by and say nice things. I hope the cover works the same magic for people browsing the newsstands.
You might say that brown boxes serve as a metaphor for our lives here at <i>Stereophile</i>. Some days are fuller than others. Right now, I’m buried.
Considering that the crates they're shipped in are each as large as a Manhattan studio apartment, once they'd been set up in my listening room, Focal's Maestro Utopia III speakers weren't as visually overpowering as I'd anticipated. The elegant dark-gloss front baffles, the gloss-gray side panels, and the fact that the speaker's three subenclosures are vertically arrayed so that the top, midrange section is angled down, significantly reduced their apparent size.
Klyne Audio Arts is such a low-profile outfit that I marvel at its continued existence. It is reliably absent from the <I>Audio</I> and <I>Stereo Review</I> annual equipment directories, and if Stan Klyne has ever run an advertisement for any of his products anywhere, I haven't seen it, Yet Klyne Audio Arts always manages to have an exhibit at CES, where they display some of the most beautiful preamps and head-amps we see there, only to go underground again for another six months.
At our best, audiophiles are the selfless and generous custodians of a thousand small libraries, keeping alive not only music's greatest recorded moments but the art of listening itself. At our worst, we are self-absorbed, superannuated rich kids, locked in an endless turd-hurl over who has the best toys.