Saturday February 25, 12–5pm, Audible Images (161 Pineapple Avenue, Melbourne, FL 32935) is presenting Wilson Audio’s Alexx speaker. Guests will include Bill Peugh from Wilson Audio, Bill McKiegan from Dan D'Agostino Master Audio Systems, and Bob McConnell from Transparent Audio.

Thursday, February 23, 4:30–8:30pm, F1 Audio (311 E Dundee Road, Palatine IL 60074) will be hosting an event featuring the new Dynaudio Contour 60 loudspeakers (above), Nordost cables, Octave tube electronics, and music from MoFi. Factory representatives will be on hand performing demonstrations and answering questions.

Long-lived loudspeaker models are rare. So it's surprising that the two-way, stand-mounted Model 5, the smallest speaker made by Massachusetts-based Aerial Acoustics, was revised just once between 2015 and April 1997, when Robert Harley favorably reviewed it and it cost $1800/pair. The revised 5B was equally favorably reviewed by John Marks in July 2009. This kept the original's 1" titanium-dome tweeter and sealed-box woofer loading but replaced the 7" polypropylene-cone woofer with a 7.1" laminated-fiber–cone woofer. Despite more than a decade's worth of inflation, the price rose only slightly, to $2400/pair.

In contrast with such line-level source components as DACs and CD players, record players generate a lower-voltage signal that requires extra gain from either a standalone phono preamplifier or the phono stage of another, more comprehensive component in one's system—typically, a full-function preamplifier or an integrated amp.

But when the phono cartridge of choice is a moving-coil (MC) type, which generates even less voltage than its moving-magnet (MM) and moving-iron (MI) friends, even more gain is required. This presents the user with an additional choice: he or she can select from among the many standalone phono preamps that offer sufficient gain, or augment an existing phono or full-function preamp or integrated amplifier with a phono step-up transformer, which boosts gain passively, without using tubes or transistors.

For the first time in a decade, Grammy Award-winning audiophile label Reference Recordings (RR) has updated its website. Filled with new features, including new blog posts and an "Audiophile Corner," the website offers physical media and hi-rez downloads of a host of Reference Recordings made by legendary, Grammy-feted recording engineer/digital pioneer Keith O. Johnson, along with Sean Royce Martin, and other recordings on the RR Fresh! label recorded by the SoundMirror team.

On Moon Saloon, Rhode Island's Arc Iris, led by singer Jocie Adams, has discarded any traces of the Americana that was present on the band’s self-titled debut. The sheer amount of textures present on Moon Saloon is wonderful, an attribute abetted by an atmospheric digital recording and a decent LP pressing.