Stephen Mejias

It’s a beautiful day in NYC: sunny, 80 degrees, with a slight breeze and low humidity&#151a perfect day for an outdoor concert. Later this afternoon, I’ll head out to Prospect Park in Brooklyn, meet up with Natalie and Nicole&#151Kristin will be there, too&#151and enjoy a “Celebrate Brooklyn” event featuring Foster the People, Midnight Magic, and Cut Copy.

The September 2011 issue of Stereophile is now on newsstands. On the cover, we feature Oppo’s latest universal disc player, the BDP-95: It slices, it dices, it plays everything and sounds great. In his review, Kal Rubinson installs the BDP-95 in his Manhattan apartment where he compares its two-channel output against that of the Sony SCD-XA5400ES, then he takes the Oppo to his Connecticut home and compares its analog multichannel output against that of Oppo’s earlier BDP-83SE. He comes up with some interesting conclusions.

Also in this issue:

Mirror Mirror, the third album from Glasgow band Sons & Daughters, opens with a single note from a vintage synth. Barely audible at first, it grows and grows and rises vertically in the soundstage&#151for 15 seconds it grows: a sharp white light in an otherwise dark room&#151building tension, warning of some sort of danger, as it goes. This high-pitched note is met first by stomping feet, then by clapping hands&#151single file and far, far off, but growing in size and intensity&#151before finally being joined by the voices of Adele Bethel and Scott Paterson, singing, strangely singing, barely singing at all, more chanting, intoning, repeating, casting:

For awhile, we were at our wit’s end, feeling buried alive, but everything is okay now: We just finished shipping our massive October issue to pre-press. At 212 pages, it’s our largest issue since October 2008.

We’ll see the proofs on Monday. Until then, we can relax.

To help us do that, we have Cass McCombs’ “Buried Alive,” from the achingly beautiful Wit’s End.

This is one of Jaime's favorites, and Jaime is one of mine.

Cass McCombs' Wit's End is out now on Domino Records. The album is available on CD, LP, and cassette. (Yes, cassette!)

This is absolutely outstanding. Please watch and listen as sound expert Julian Treasure offers strategies for re-tuning our ears.

Via TED. (Thanks for the link, SP.)

The subject of the e-mail was “boobsheadphones.” Inside, a simple question (“Can you tell me if these are real?”) was followed by a link to an interesting YouTube video.

I’ve listened to no album this year more than I’ve listened to Wild Beasts’ Smother. For that matter, I’ve enjoyed no album more this year than Wild Beasts’ Smother. It courses slowly and deliberately through colors and moods of pain, longing, love, and desire&#151all that good stuff&#151and it does so with such a gentle touch, a delicious smoothness, a constant, lulling pulse.

It pours from your loudspeakers and into the room.