LATEST ADDITIONS

Saturday, December 5, 11am&#150;5pm: <a href="http://www.talkofthetownvideo.com/welcome.html">Talk of the Town</a> will host an “Audio, Video, & Home Theater Demo Day.” Show highlights will include demonstrations of SIM2’s C3X Lumis Host projector; Marantz’s 9004 Reference Blu-ray player; Totem Acoustics’s <a href="http://blog.stereophile.com/ssi2009/totem_wind_design/">Wind Design</a> loudspeakers; Classe’s SSP-800 preamplifier-processor with Dolby TrueHD and DTS-MA surround decoding; McIntosh’s MA7000 integrated amplifier; and Meridian’s DSP 5200 digital active speakers and Sooloos <a href="http://www.stereophile.com/mediaservers/908sooloos/">Music Server System</a>.

I dreamed that I was back <a href="http://blog.stereophile.com/stephenmejias/what_happened_in_puerto_rico/… Puerto Rico</a> with the Vivian Girls. They asked me to work on a new song with them. We decided to set up a rehearsal space at my aunt’s beach house. It was taking us awhile to get the instruments properly set up, and Katy was becoming anxious, but I soothed her nerves with a stunning spread of snacks and candies: finger sandwiches, kiwis, grapes, pomegranates, baskets of popcorn, bowls of pretzels and chips, towers of Twizzlers, tall pyramids of Almond Joy…

It began when my oldest brother, 13 years my senior, returned from military service and told me about "hi-fi." Until then, all I'd known was our ancient tabletop radio-phonograph with its insatiable appetite for osmium styli. Back then, in the early 1950s, audio componentry was scrappy, still evolving from World War II military electronics and public-address systems. I began reading the electronics magazines and learned that, to get started, I needed a record player connected to an amplifier and a speaker. I toured the shops and stalls on old Cortlandt Street, before the building of the World Trade Center, and made my selections based on appearance, reputation, and specifications rather than on sound. Still, compared to what we were used to, the results sounded hair-raisingly good.

I was sitting in the main listening room of In Living Stereo, a small Manhattan hi-fi shop nestled between Greenwich Village and the East Village, when my conversation with store owner Steve Mishoe turned to the economy's current dismal state. In the face of slow sales, Mishoe had noted an encouraging trend: Because we have less money to spend, we want to make sure that what money we do spend goes for products that not only deliver the thrill of something new, but also promise enduring quality. If this is true, then we have reason to celebrate. By shifting our focus from the so-called "latest and greatest" to that which will provide lasting enjoyment, we set ourselves up for some real happiness and fun. Editor John Atkinson had this in mind 17 years ago, when he began our "Products of the Year" ritual. He felt it important to distinguish the truly good products from all the flashy pretenders that too often win the affections of our capricious hearts.

The media likes to focus on the big-screen TV discounts people found this week, but did you find any audio bargains during the holiday shopping frenzy?

The world's largest classical label, Naxos of America, has released its first Blu-ray music package. <I>The Virtual Haydn: Complete Works for Solo Keyboard</I> contains three Blu-ray audio discs plus one three-hour Blu-ray videodisc that together hold 15 hours of music. All performances are by Tom Beghin, a baroque specialist and musicologist based at McGill University. Sound engineer Martha De Francisco, an Associate Professor at McGill, recorded the performances in high-resolution (24-bit/96kHz) PCM sound.

About 2200 years ago, a Greek writer named Antipater of Sidon compiled a list of the seven wonders of the world, which included a 100'-high statue of the Sun god Helios, erected next to the harbor of Rhodes on the Aegean sea. A of S called it the Colossus of Rhodes, for an obvious reason. Now there's a new Colossus, the derivation of whose name is a little less obvious, but which could justifiably be included in any contemporary listing of the seven wonders of the audio world.