LATEST ADDITIONS

Wednesday December 14, starting at 4pm, Utah Audio (77 East 10600 South, Sandy, UT) will be demonstrating a complete Dan D'Agostino system. And Saturday December 17, from 1pm–4pm, at Esoteric Audio (111 West Monroe Street, Suite 100, Phoenix, AZ), Dan D'Agostino and Bill McKiegan will be on hand for listening and discussion of the company's latest products.

At the end of November, I spent a couple days in Eindhoven, The Netherlands, getting a first look at Marantz's New Reference series audio components. During my brief visit to D+M's European HQ, I was fortunate enough to spend 40 minutes of one-on-one chat time with Ken Ishiwata, Marantz's famed Brand Ambassador, and a key component to Marantz's success for nearly 40 years. I was originally only scheduled to have 10 minutes with him, but thankfully, due to a last-minute adjustment, we were able to talk for longer.

Eighteen years after 21-year old Matthew Shepard was robbed and beaten by two men who lured him to their truck, tied him to a fence in a field outside Laramie, WY, and left him to die, Harmonia Mundi has released a two-hybrid SACD set of Craig Hella Johnson's touching requiem, Considering Matthew Shepard. Johnson's sweet tribute, an apt reminder of the consequences of homophobia, is lovingly performed by Johnson's excellent, Grammy-winning Austin-based choir, Conspirare, and an occasionally augmented group of eight acoustic instrumentalists.

Perhaps there’s a little nostalgia talking here...

One of the few '70s funk/soul holy grails that’s actually worth digging for.

In "Music and Fractals" in the November 1990 issue, I discuss how digital audio's quantization of amplitude information in what was originally a continuous waveform represents a fundamental difference between analog and digital representations of music. In a letter published in the English magazine Hi-Fi Review in January 1990, John Lambshead conjectured that naturally originating sounds were pseudo-fractal in character; that is, their waveforms have a wealth of fine detail, and that detail itself has an even finer-structured wealth of fine detail, and so on, until the crinkliness of the waveform is finally enveloped in the analog noise that accompanies every sound we hear.