LATEST ADDITIONS

Terry Jones 'fesses up that <I>The Life of Brian</I> might have been even more controversial than it was&mdash;thanks to a couple of deleted "Otto" scenes. However, says one of the two "nice" Pythons, that wasn't why he cut the material.

Mark Waldrep, the man behind the "only all-HD digital label," Aix Records, has now established an all-HD download site, www.itrax.com. While Music Giants and Linn offer HD downloads, iTrax calls itself "the only website to offer <I>real</I> HD in multiple mixing perspectives," since it offers consumers two-channel stereo, 5.1-channel "audience," and 5.1-channel "stage" perspectives in MP3, Dolby Digital, DTS, WMA pro, WMA Lossless, and PCM 96kHz/24-bit resolutions.

John Atkinson and I recently spent a few hours talking to cable manufacturer <A HREF="http://www.tributariescable.com/">Tributaries</A>&#039; president and founder, Joe Perfito. Perfito had come to NYC to meet the press and introduce his company's newest cable families, the high-end Series 7 and the higher-end Series 9. "The Series 9 cables are the best cables we know how to make," Perfito told us. "The interconnects are hand-made of 20AWF solid OFHC signal conductor and a 1.25% silver-plated 46-strand 20AWG OFHC return conductor. We use an LDPE dielectric and an OFHC copper-braided shield <I>and</I> a double-sided copper foil secondary shield for 100% freedom from interference. The conductors are double-soldered to the solid brass connectors, then pressure welded&mdash;they will <I>not</I> let go of one another."

Readers often ask how I choose components for review. My method is simple: Ninety percent of what I review is gear that has impressed me at one of our Home Entertainment Shows, or new designs from manufacturers whose products I've liked in the past. The remainder are assigned by John Atkinson.

It was 45 years ago this month that the first issue of Stereophile, just 20 pages in length, went in the mail. It had been founded by one J. Gordon Holt. Gordon had been technical editor of High Fidelity magazine in the 1950s, and was tired of being asked to pander to the demands of advertisers. "I watched, first with incredulity and then with growing disgust, how the purchase of a year's advertising contract could virtually insure a manufacturer against publication of an unfavorable report," he said in a 1974 article looking back at those dark times. And if a company didn't buy advertising, they didn't get reviewed at all. The Stereophile, as it was then called, was Gordon's answer to audiophiles' need for an honest, reliable source of information. "Okay, if no one else will publish a magazine that calls the shots as it sees them, I'll do it myself," he later wrote.

It’s a mystery how Carla Bley’s new CD, <I>The Lost Chords Find Paolo Fresu</I> (ECM), achieves its greatness. Even the word seems too freighted for music so minimal. A scale segues into a simple melody, followed by a straight harmony, some swishes on snare and hi-hat, a bass line that follows an equally simple counterpoint. Yet some quirky gravity holds these strands in magical equipoise, like a Calder mobile.

Bagheera wonders when she developed four eyes. Correctly, she blames me, course.