One of the first rooms I went into was that featuring products from The Signal Collection, the distribution company run by the affable Chris Sommovigo (right). Also in the room was Todd Garfinkel of M•A Recordings (left), who was using Chris's system to play the masters of some of his excellent-sounding recordings. (I mentioned below that M•A had made a sampler CD to be given ever attendee.) The speaker featured in the photo is the M3 Mk3 ($6499/pair) from Swedish manufacturer Transmission Audio, a floorstanding sibling of the standmounted M1i Ribbon Mini I had auditioned at the Atlanta Axpona last April. The M3 used two of the metal-cne woofers developed by Bo Bengtsson and Ted Jordan. Each woofer is loaded differently to give a two-a-half-way design. The crossover to the ribbon tweeter is set at 3kHz.

With the speakers driven by Klimo Tine class-A tube monoblocks ($8999/pair), a Klimo Merlino preamp ($6699), hooked up with Stereolab interconnects and speakers cables, I listened to some of Todd's DSD masters played back on his Korg MR2000 recorder, as well as a Red Book WAV file of a track from M•A's well-regarded Calamus: The Splendor of Al Andalus. Despite competing noise from a live band playing in an adjacent ballroom, the sound was open, and clear., with a wide soundstage.

The second Capital AudioFest, sponsored by Carnegie Acoustics, takes place this weekend at the Rockville, Maryland Crowne Plaza, pictured here in Friday evening's rainstorm. On show are 61 brands in 28 rooms and I will be reporting live—well, as live as possible considering that when I am in a room listening to a system, I am not blogging and vice versa—from the show.

Hours are 11am–7pm, Saturday July 9, and 11am–6pm, Sunday July 10. A raffle is being held at 6pm on both days, and every attendee receives a free sampler CD from M•A Recordings. There will also be a swapmeet on Sunday morning starting at 8am. Details can be found at http://www.capitalaudiofest.com/p1.html.

"Sometimes I can evoke the breathless rush of feeling that I experienced the first time that I ever really heard Robert Johnson's music. Sometimes a note will suggest just a hint of the realms of emotion that opened up to me in that moment, the sense of utter wonder, the shattering revelation."—Peter Guralnick, from Searching for Robert Johnson (New York: Dutton Obelisk, 1989)

It's an experience that all true blues fans need to savor. Fly into Memphis, drive south on US 61, into Coahoma County, Mississippi, down to the Delta, down to Robert Johnson country. There, on one of those steamy nights when the moon is full and fog, or maybe restless spirits, rise from the cotton fields, you can drive down to his two graves, in two churchyards nearly within sight of each other. You can sit in the dark and listen to the trains that were his constant mode of transportation. And on the way back to Clarksdale, the Delta burgh where Bessie Smith passed, you can go down to the crossroads and judge for yourself. Romantics say you can feel, smell, and even hear Robert Johnson's music, if not his desperate deal, still hanging in the humid Mississippi air.

It was just a matter of time, I suppose. Almost exactly a year after Rega replaced their popular P1 record player with the upgraded RP1, the British company has introduced the new RP3.

Lately, when I’ve been hungry for some good, uncomplicated, headshaking, soul-lifting songwriting, the kind that drops from the summer sky like a sudden shower and leaves a rainbow in its wake, I’ve turned to Slave Ambient, the sophomore release from The War On Drugs.

Recorded over the last four years in front man Adam Granduciel’s home studio in Philadelphia, Jeff Ziegler’s Uniform Recording, and Echo Mountain in Asheville, NC, the album is a drive to the ocean, windows down, head back, shades on. Acoustic and electric guitars, synthesizers, drums, and Granduciel’s voice, rambling and drifting and howling, together recalling heat waves, long days, Bruce Springsteen, Bryan Adams, Bob Dylan, Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers.

At pretty much the same time (just around noon on Wednesday), five lovely women sent me pretty much the same e-mail:

“Have you seen these?” they asked. “I want them,” they said.

I had not seen them, but they are beautiful. We can learn from this. There must be a lesson hidden here. But what? Girls like concrete? Girls like it raw and rough?

Let’s read from the press materials. Perhaps we’ll find some clues. The designer, 29-year old Shmuel Linski, says:

Paul Simon: So Beautiful or So What
Hear Music HRM-32814 (CD; the LP comes with a voucher for hi-rez downloads). 2011. Paul Simon, Phil Ramone, prods.; Andy Smith, eng. AAD? TT: 38:15
Performance ****½
Sonics ***½

"Love & Blessings"? "Questions for the Angels"? It seems that Paul Simon, who will turn 70 in October, has begun to ask life's Big Questions in preparation for his own exit. Yet in this case, seeming is not reality, and at 69, Simon has returned to his polyglot musical influences (that he may or may not have heisted...but that's an argument for another day) to fashion a startlingly powerful collection of songs that successfully mix the jaunty near-danceability of his world-music adventures with serious lyrics about impending death, the vagaries of love, and, especially, the many unknowables contained in the word God.