LATEST ADDITIONS

Tigran Hamasyan: StandArt, Rebecca Martin/Larry Grenadier/Orquestra Jazz De Matosinhos: After Midnight and Walter Smith III & Matthew Stevens: In Common III.

Camp Cope: Running with the Hurricane, Oumou Sangaré: Timbuktu, Old Crow Medicine Show: Paint This Town and Spiritualized: Everything Was Beautiful.

A review of the Monitor Audio Studio 20 loudspeaker is a study in contrasts. Compared with most other loudspeakers in the $4500/pair range, this 6.5" two-way from England is a mere pup. Perhaps this observation was sparked by the fact that I'd just finished reviewing the similarly priced Snell Type B, a huge, six-driver, four-way system. The two loudspeakers couldn't be more different, both in physical characteristics and sound.

The Reed 3P tonearm, which I reviewed in my April 2016 column, was an impressive piece of imaginative engineering and manufacturing prowess. I asked Reed's importer, Axiss Audio, if I could hold on to the 3P—I was already planning to review Reed's Muse 3C turntable. I'm glad I did—the 3P ($5000) and 3C ($15,000) make an outstanding combination. (When the only complaint you have about a turntable is that the cable from its power jack to the power supply isn't long enough to reach the floor, you can be sure you're going to write a very positive review.)

The Kingdom of Audiophiledom rests on a paradox. Inanimate audio systems and rooms aim to deliver music that animates our senses and touches our souls. The inherently lifeless exists to bring music to life.

This holistic reality—that systems and rooms function as living organisms where every part is interconnected and interrelated—came home to me when, during one of the first AXPONAs in Chicago, I entered a long, cavernous basement room with several spongy "conference room" walls. "There is no way that any setup can deliver good sound in this room," self said to self. Yet, the system sounded unbelievably good.

2022 is turning out to be a good year for Lyle Lovett, not least because he is, to use a cowboy metaphor, back in the saddle.

"I've been out of work for two years," he says archly. Normally, Lovett performs more than 100 concerts a year, regardless of whether he's released new work. But the pandemic pinned him down at home in Houston, with his wife and their now–four-year-old twins, in the house his grandfather built in 1911. Domesticity suits Lovett. "There was plenty to do every minute of every day. Absolutely no boredom!" He sounds like he means it; unselfconscious mentions of paternal tenderness bubbled up in our conversation from time to time.

My tastes coalesced around rock music, particularly the harder and faster kind, by the time I was in middle school. Earlier, they were oriented toward pop: The Beatles are my first and forever musical love.