LATEST ADDITIONS

When I first learned that Meridian had co-badged, with Ferrari, a $3000 table radio, I was tempted to cynically dismiss it as a marketing gimmick&mdash;an attempt by the audio manufacturer to leverage the brand loyalty of the Italian automaker to its own highly developed industrial designs. The problem was, that required that I dismiss everything I knew about Meridian and its singular head designer, <A HREF="http://www.stereophile.com/interviews/906bob">Bob Stuart</A>.

D&M Holdings, Inc., the Japanese consortium that owns Denon, Snell, Boston Acoustics, McIntosh, Escient, and Marantz, is apparently on the marketing block. Rumors to that effect have been circulating since mid-March, although the company's <A HREF=" http://www.dm-holdings.com/960_ENG_ASP.asp">website</A&gt;, in a press release dated 04/15/08, coyly says only: "D&M Holdings, Inc. notes that recent press reports concerning the potential sale of D&M shares is not based on any information provided by the company."

Truth is: I know diddly-squat about Frank Zappa. I've heard this and that, of course, and all I've heard has always been intriguing, but, for no good reason, I've just never taken the time to dive into Zappa's world. Perhaps it's because his world seems so enormous and wild and foreign. His world is full of barking pumpkins and utility muffins and Sprechstimme and other things I can neither imagine nor pronounce. I mean, even his name is strange. Like an exclamation, like a shot of electricity. Zappa! Say it three times, and something bad might happen. <i>Zappa! Zappa!</i> (No, don't!)

Ralph died last week (September 11, 1991), his great and faithful heart stopped in the aftermath of an affliction not too uncommon for older, larger dogs&mdash;a gastric torsion. He was approximately 12 years old.

Tomorrow is <a href="http://www.recordstoreday.com">Record Store Day</a>. Celebrate responsibly. Celebrate appropriately. It will make you feel good.

Amongst all the hand&ndash;ringing and head&ndash;scratching and kvetching about the music business and what we're going to do with our CDs and LPs and how iPods sound like shit but are the future whether we like it or not (in my case, the jury's still out), it's a good idea, at least in my overamped case, to step back, close&ndash;a&ndash;dee mouth and occasionally remember that at the bottom of all this claptrap, there's still music. Which I (we) presumably still love.

<I>"Modern recordings, for all their glory . . . have conditioned audiences to expect an inhuman degree of performance accuracy, comparable to what a recording studio's editing team can produce by patching together the best moments from multiple takes."&mdash;James F. Penrose, </I>Wall Street Journal<I>, January 25, 2008</I>