LATEST ADDITIONS

New York’s outdoor concert season is in full swing and I happened to catch a couple pretty wonderful shows, one free and just the opposite the other night.

Hey everybody! As we like to say around here in the office, it's "Happy Friday!" For alliterative purposes, let's call it "Fiery Furnaces Friday." <a href="http://www.thefieryfurnaces.com/site/">The Fiery Furnaces</a> have something up their sleeve, and I don't know what it's all about, but I'm betting that's it's good. I bet there are a lot of words involved. But, perhaps, no sound. A lot of alliteration, too. The Fiery Furnaces are good at that.

Norway's Hegel Music Systems has made its way to the US market. I met Hegel and the company's charming founder, Bent Holter, at the <a href=" http://blog.stereophile.com/ces2007/010907set/">2007 Consumer Electronics Show</a> and then again in Las Vegas during <a href=" http://blog.stereophile.com/ces2008/011208top/">the following year</a>. On both occasions, I had a lot of fun listening to music and learning about Holter's designs. As I wrote last year, I was instantly attracted to the designer's combination of tech-talk and passion for music. The guy is at once serious and totally wacky.

We're always asking the big questions: Are we really alive? Will we ever find true happiness? How can we be better human beings? What's love, but a secondhand emotion? Who needs a heart when a heart can be broken? How can the high end audio industry reach a wider audience?

On the train this morning, a pretty girl sitting directly in front of me, with a large purse in her lap, and connected to it, an iPod. Earbuds to her pretty, little ears letting loose the music, the most appalling of all songs ever to hit the Top 40: The Beach Boys' "Kokomo."

When John Atkinson reviewed Sonos's original <a href=" http://www.stereophile.com/budgetcomponents/1006sonos/index.html">ZP80 Bundle</a>, he fell in love with the company's CR100 controller which uses a full-color, 3.5" LCD screen to provide easy navigation of music files on up to 16 network devices and displays all the metadata associated with each track, including album art. JA wrote:

The Yardbirds' version of "Train Kept A-Rollin'" has been sharing space in my mind with Outkast's "Ms. Jackson." Makes no sense. It's like the train keeps rolling right <i>into</i> Ms. Jackson. Only my subconscious knows why.