I remember the Tuesday night that music broke free of my hi-fi. The sound stirred my soul—everything was so right that I was tempted to call over my audiophile pals to earwitness its magnificence. But I didn't, fearing that sharing the sound might break the spell cast first by the Allman Brothers Band's At Fillmore East (2 LPs, Capricorn ST-CAP 712223 VSRP), then by Jimi Hendrix's Live at the Fillmore East (CD, MCA MCAD2 11931). By the time Hendrix got to "Machine Gun," I could almost smell the pot wafting up to the Fillmore's top balconies.

Gershwin: Rhapsody in Blue (1924 jazz-band version, orch. Grofé). ¹ Piano Concerto in F. ² "Summertime." ³ Gershwin-Wild: "Somebody Loves Me," "I Got Rhythm," "Embraceable You."⁴ Oscar Levant: "Blame It On My Youth." ⁵
Kirill Gerstein, piano; ^1–5 Storm Large, vocal; ³ Gary Burton, vibraphone; ⁵ David Robertson, St. Louis Symphony Orchestra^{1, 2}
Myrios Classics MYR022 (CD, 24/192 FLAC). 2018. Kirill Gerstein, prod.; Stephan Cahen, prod.,1-5 eng.; ^{1, 2, 4, 5} Paul Hennerich, ^{1, 2, 4} Doug Decker, ³ engs. DDD. TT: 73:45
Performance *****
Sonics *** (CD), **** (24/192 FLAC)

I grew up with Gershwin's Rhapsody in Blue. I was the youngest in a family not particularly interested in music, and whose record collection consisted of pop music and three oddly assorted classical recordings, all on 78rpm discs: Enrico Caruso singing "Vesti la giubba," Stravinsky's The Rite of Spring (on four 12" 78s), and the 1927 recording of Rhapsody in Blue with the Paul Whiteman Concert Orchestra and Gershwin at the keyboard.

Thursday July 19, 12–8pm, Manhattan specialty audio retailer NoHo Sound (62 Cooper Square, New York, NY 10003) will be having an open house. Special guests Jonathan Derda and Ben Newhall from MoFi Distribution will be on hand to demonstrate the TAD Micro-Evolution One loudspeaker (above), which received a rave review earlier this year, the TAD Compact-Evolution One loudspeaker, and TAD D1000 Mk.II DAC/SACD player, which was a "Greatest Bits" Award winner on our sister site AudioStream.com.

High Definition Compatible Digital^® (HDCD^®), the proprietary process for improving the sound of 16-bit digital audio, has finally arrived. More than a dozen digital processors using the technology are on the market, and the professional encoder used to master HDCD discs is following closely behind.

Tchaikovsky: Swan Lake & Sleeping Beauty Selections
New Philharmonia Orchestra, Stokowsky
London Phase-4 SPC 21008 (LP); Ampex LCL-75008 (open-reel tape). Tony D'Amato, Marty Wargo, prods.; Arthur Lilley, eng. TT: 46:50.

These are exciting, lilting, concert-style (as opposed to ballet-style) performances of the best-known excerpts from Tchaikovsky's second- and third-most-popular ballets. (First, of course, is the Nutcracker.) The recording is a surprise, after the excesses we've heard on earlier Phase-4 recordings.

Okay, we know that Humphrey Bogart didn't utter that immortal instruction in Casablanca, but we couldn't resist, given that this issue includes Jim Austin's adventures with Apple's HomePod, the first smart speaker with hi-fi pretensions, which is featured on our August issue's cover.