Exactly five years ago as I write these words, I reviewed an elegant-looking and elegant-sounding tower loudspeaker from Canadian manufacturer PSB: the Imagine T3. Priced at $7498/pair before it was discontinued, the T3 combined three woofers, each housed in its own vented subenclosure, with a 5.25" midrange unit mounted above a 1" tweeter.

As I noted in previous Re-Tales columns, audio dealerships that stick to outmoded models after the world has changed may find themselves in danger of extinction. Such conflict between old and new has been with us since the beginning of time, or at least since the internet became ubiquitous. But the pandemic and its economic stresses and stimuli have accelerated the pace of change. So, how are dealers, um, dealing?

You never know when an idea might hit you, maybe when brushing your teeth, standing in the shower, or stirring the stew.

Have you ever flexed a playing card (or a few) back and forth close to your ear? They generate a little sound. According to MBL company lore, that action and sound sparked the design idea for the original Radialstrahler omnidirectional driver.

J.S. Bach: Six Suites for Unaccompanied Cello, Vols. 1 and 2
Zuill Bailey, cello
Octave Records OCT-0008 (Multiple formats; auditioned as DSD64). 2021. Five/Four Productions, Ltd.: Thomas C. Moore, prod.; Robert Friedrich, eng.
Performance ****½
Sonics *****

Why is Stereophile publishing its fourth review (at least) in three years of a recording of Bach's Six Cello Suites? Partly it's because the suites, which were composed ca 1720 but remained in obscurity until a young Pablo Casals rediscovered them in a secondhand sheet music store in Barcelona in 1890, contain some of the most joyous, moving, and profound music in the Western classical music canon. It's also because these two volumes, which present Grammy Award–winning cellist Zuill Bailey's second recorded exploration of the suites (the first was on Telarc more than two decades ago), abound in astoundingly beautiful musicianship illumined by fresh insights and superb engineering.

Let me break it down. On the one hand, handshakes were replaced with fist and elbow bumps, real smiles by eyes smiling over masks, whispers by conversations at regular volume. There were fewer attendees than at prepandemic shows, and fewer exhibitors. That situation will surely improve with time.