I'm sitting here listening to the latest release by the immortal Sonny Rollins - Without A Song - The 9/11 Concert

and while it may or may not end up being one his best live recordings, it is still head and shoulders above, and I do mean way, way above, anything put out by almost any young loin de jour.

Forget about giving this recording ratings for sound quality or anything of the sort - this the one of true giants captured in top form and therefore demands to be heard. You will not be disappointed.

Dear All,

I have a question regarding the ideal of an amplifier behaving like a perfect voltage source. Reading some amplifier reviews, and some of JA's very informative measurements, it would seem that some of the more expensive ones do indeed behave like the perfect voltage source, ie doubling their power from 8 into 4 into 2 ohms speaker loads. I also notice that some good and/or expensive amps don't (or can't) -- Chord Electronics is a case that comes to mind. Most of their amplifiers seem to be real powerhouses, but I don't think any of them (apart perhaps from one

rants-ML-2733-ML-

I'd like the editor to know how much I enjoy your monthly newsletter. Although my knowledge of audio is much (but increasing) less than most on these forums your December newsletter made me feel much less a leper in todays MP3 world.

I was very taken with Glenn Gould's concept of "the participant listener." In a fascinating 1966 essay (collected in "Audio Culture: Readings in Modern Music") anticipating developments in consumer audio technology he says if "...you enjoy Bruno Walter's performance of the exposition and recapitulation from the first movement of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony but incline towards Klemperer's handling of the development section...there is nothing to prevent a dedicated connoisseuer from acting as his own tape editor and with these devices, exercising such interpretative predilictions as will per