LATEST ADDITIONS

Photo: Laurie Srebnick

As we announced last month, this past weekend saw the grand opening of EarsNova's new store at 3 East 28th Street, in Manhattan. Founded in 1979 by Joshua Cohn (right in photo), the store's new location is on the second floor of a solidly constructed 1920s building, with high ceilings and the space to present high-end audio products and systems under ideal circumstances. The listening rooms, for example, have floors and walls that are isolated from the building's structure. Not only does this prevent sound from the audio systems being demmed leaking into the other floors, it makes the rooms extremely quiet. When I was auditioning the new Magico Q1s during last Friday's evening rush hour, there was no clue that just half a block away there was the usual torrent of 5th Avenue traffic.

Photo: John Abbott

A year ago, almost to the day, I raved in this space about Sonny Rollins' 80th birthday concert, which I'd seen the night before at the Beacon Theater in New York City. I wrote: "A few thousand jazz fans are feeling lightheaded this morning," still "marveling" at having finally seen "a concert that made them tremble and that people will be talking about years from now."

This week, Rollins released a new CD, Road Shows, Vol. 2, which consists mainly of highlights from this concert, and I opened the package with some trepidation. Would the music, as a purely audio phenomenon, hold up to my memory of it? Or did my dizziness at the time stem, at least in part, from the thrill of being there, as part of the audience, at an event of such high expectations?

Natalie and I spent this afternoon searching for treasures at Iris Records, on Brunswick Street in downtown Jersey City. It had been weeks since my last visit, and I was happy to see that things had been busy. The small store was overflowing with new arrivals, crates and boxes covering almost every square inch of the floor and arranged neatly on several tables, all titles meticulously organized by genre and price. To offer all of this new stock in the best possible condition, store owner Steve Gritzan has even purchased a VPI HW-16.5 record-cleaning machine—an indispensable tool that every record store should have on hand. Even better: In addition to all their great used titles, Iris now carries a small selection of new LPs. Gritzan says he can order just about anything I might want—if I bring him a list, he'll get started on it. This is dangerously convenient; Iris is only a few steps from my apartment.

Today is my birthday; it's the blog's birthday, too.

Another year older, stronger, healthier, happier. Thanks for sharing it with me.

This story originally appeared at InnerFidelity.com

Today, I start a journey into the wisdom of pop-culture ... oy vey. In the last few years of economic upheaval and outright disaster, the headphone market has flourished ... blossomed even ... it's the fastest growing product type in consumer audio. Why?

Damned rappers!

I began my July column by talking about how quickly things are changing these days in multichannel audio. What I didn't pay enough attention to is that some things can change quickly enough to create inefficiency. Given that most multichannel digital products are based on digital signal processing (DSP), and many are network-enabled, they can be updated with relative ease. Almost every preamplifier-processor or A/V receiver I've reviewed has needed a firmware update during the reviewing process, and such updates are de rigueur for Blu-ray players, as more and more features (!) are added to new releases. And in addition to providing new performance features, firmware updates often also include corrections for operational glitches that have slipped by the designers and their alpha and beta testers, no matter how assiduously they've done their work.

Big bands died out back in the 1950s, right? They went away when the jitterbug faded and folks began dancing to music other than swing? And then real jazz fans departed when the bebop soloists came along and made big-band players look clumsy and quaint?