LATEST ADDITIONS

Roon, one of the major brands of audiophile-quality high-resolution music playback software, has just released its v.1.6 upgrade. Roon 1.6 finally includes a portal for hi-rez streaming Qobuz, whose US launch is rumored for sometime next month. In addition to pairing Roon's rich metadata with the entire Qobuz and Tidal catalogs, the upgrade also offers major new features.

Saturday, January 26, 5–9pm, The Audio Guy (1590 E. Business 121, Building 2, Suite 500, Lewisville, TX 75056) is having an open house with VPI Industries president Mat Weisfeld, who be giving a sneak peek at the new limited-edition HW40 turntable. Michael Vamos will be on hand to demo the GamuT RS5i speakers and other vendor reps will also demonstrate some of their latest offerings. And singer/songwriter Robynn Shayne will be performing some of her latest music!

I had a moment of revelation in 2000, when I first set up a pair of Revel's original Ultima Studio loudspeakers in my living room. It wasn't just my awareness that Revel's next-to-top-of-the-line loudspeaker was outstandingly good—it seemed to perfectly match my space and my ears. From the first day, I knew these would be keepers and I purchased the review samples.

Revel's Ultima Studio2 arrived in 2008, and though it performed even better than the original, the impression it made on me wasn't quite revelatory, and my praise was somewhat restrained—something for which Fred Kaplan justly chided me in his enthusiastic Follow-Up review in December 2009. To this day, the Ultima Studio2 and Revel's top model, the Salon2, remain Revel's standard bearers. Meanwhile, I wonder when there will be a Studio3.

I am obliged to begin this review of First Watt's new stereo power amplifier, the SIT-3, with an explanation of how I believe a power amplifier should be reviewed. Why? Because the 18Wpc SIT-3 is a unique and historically important design that can't be wired up to just any loudspeaker and then critiqued on the basis of its bass power, treble brightness, or midrange acuity.

To celebrate Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Day and the recent Women's March, we turn the spotlight on Symphonies Nos.1 & 4 of Florence Beatrice Price (1887–1953), the first African American woman to have her music performed by a major American orchestra. In doing so, I extend a big thank you to Naxos, whose invaluable American Classics series continues to record works by American composers both famous and relatively unknown.

When we premiered this feature in 1991, we felt that, rather than a selection of all-time (or year's) best recorded performances or a list of audiophile reference albums, we should choose recordings that were, in then music editor Richard Lehnert's words, "both musically and sonically impeccable—in other words, the best, the tops, to die for." As RL went on, "such a list also makes for some strange procrustean bedfellows—obscure recordings that would never make the proverbial 'desert island' list snuggling up next to towering classics of the concert hall and control room."

It's a high-end audio truism: Successful companies are founded by a creative engineer or entrepreneur with a vision. So what happens when the founder is no longer around? While Mark Levinson is an example of a brand that not only survived the exit of its leader but thrived, speaker manufacturer Thiel dwindled after co-founder Jim Thiel died in 2009, and eventually closed up shop. Colorado company Ayre Acoustics was faced with this problem when founder Charley Hansen passed away in November 2017.