LATEST ADDITIONS

Florence Foster Jenkins was many things. A teacher, a philanthropist, and a kind and generous friend, by many accounts. What she was not, was a gifted vocal artist, despite her unshakable belief to the contrary.

Paul West writes the first aphasic memoir. As a writer, I find the loss of language skills the most terrifying boogie man of them all.

Depending on where you live, the 25<SUP>th</SUP> anniversary of the Compact Disc is coming up in the next 9 months. Did you buy a player or any discs the first year CD was available in your country? If so, what did you get?

The Harvey acquisition of MyerEmco announced in <A HREF="http://www.stereophile.com/news/051407harvey/">May</A&gt; has been called off. The merger&mdash;which was supposed to have closed by June 7, later extended to the end of July, and then pushed back to August 10&mdash;called for Harvey to pay $10 million in cash and assume MyerEmco's debt.

<B>John Atkinson: Making It Live</B>
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The e-mail from <I>Stereophile</I> reviewer Bob Reina was straightforward: "I want to make a demo of my new jazz group. I plan to record the session in my living room by getting my old four-channel Teac 3440 out of mothballs and sticking one or two mikes on each instrument. I'd like your view on which mikes would be most appropriate for the four instruments . . . "

I'm not sure what motivated me to read the owner's manual for the Audio Valve Eclipse, but I'm glad I did: As it turns out, this line-level preamplifier has at least one distinctive feature that I would have missed otherwise.

For a hobby based on science and technology, audiophilia has more than its share of unscientific elements. That's not necessarily a bad thing; not all of those elements are obvious snake oil, and there's more than science to creating&mdash;or re-creating&mdash;a musical experience. Still, for the more technical-minded it's a little disconcerting that even the most basic distinctions, such as why two CD players sound different from each other, are hard to explain using technical measurements and simple scientific concepts.