LATEST ADDITIONS

Like <a href="http://stereophile.com/thefifthelement/208fifth/">John Marks</a> and my uncle <a href="http://blog.stereophile.com/stephenmejias/021308sing/">Omar</a&gt;, I am prone to enthusiasms. It's not unusual for me to hear some new piece of music and wind up feeling that I need it&#151<i>neeeeeeed</i> it. So what? Music is great. It <i>is</i> unusual for me, though, to hear some new piece of music and be so moved by it that I leave work early, race up Madison Avenue, charge down into Grand Central, take the 4 to Union Square, and face the many temptations of the vast Virgin Megastore to buy that new piece of music.

Even the most savvy <I>Stereophile</I> reader might wonder what a "network music player" is. Linn rightly considers a <I>music server</I> to be a combination of 1) stored digital files, 2) music-management software, and 3) a device that uses #2 to transfer #1 to your hi-fi. What Linn's Klimax DS <I>is</I> is a high-quality digital-to-analog converter (DAC) that receives digital data through an Ethernet connection rather than optical or electrical S/PDIF or AES/EBU inputs.

I'm writing these words on the flight home from the 2008 Consumer Electronics Show, held January 7–10 in Las Vegas. I wasn't sure what to expect at this year's CES. Though the official stats show that the US economy has grown for the fourth straight year, audio retailers I spoke with before the Show feel that that economic growth has not resulted in any increase in consumers' disposable incomes. In fact, with the drying up of credit, retailers are concerned that 2008 may well be a step back from 2007 in overall sales, and that high-end audio—a niche category within a niche category—will be adversely affected by the relative impoverishment of the middle class.

Bad news. Last June 15, in my <A HREF= http://blog.stereophile.com/fredkaplan/061507jazz/ >
first entry</A> of the “Jazz Messengers” blog, I broke the news that three months hence, Sonny Rollins, the world’s greatest living tenor saxophone player, would be playing a rare trio concert at Carnegie Hall—with Roy Haynes (one of the two greatest living drummers) and Christian McBride (an outstanding young bassist)—and that his own record label, Doxy, would release the results on CD along with a similar, recently unearthed, never-before-heard trio session that Rollins played at Carnegie 50 years earlier.

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In the April issue of <I>Stereophile</I>, John Marks talks about using Sony's original Playstation as a CD player. What's the most unusual source you've ever used in your system, analog or digital?

As Wes Phillips recently reported on this website, CD sales are down and legal downloads of audio files are up. Stereophile has been criticized more than once for not paying enough attention to the subjects of MP3 and other compressed file formats, such as AAC, and for offering no guidance at all to readers about how to get the best sound quality from compressed downloads.