One is a well-established reissue label, known the world over for its completist black boxes filled with beautifully remastered jazz recordings from the 1930s through the 1960s.

The other is a new label that records only new jazz, released in elaborate packages that include a poem and original artwork, not to mention transparent 180gm pressings, tying into the newly fashionable idea of a vinyl lifestyle.

In both cases, hope truly springs eternal.

I like Brooklyn. I even got married under the shadow of the Brooklyn Bridge! (Almost the exact spot where Cher's grandfather let his dogs howl at the moon in Moonstruck. And if you're ever in the Park Slope area, check out McFeeley's for brunch.) I could be forgiven, therefore, for having a soft spot for any Brooklyn manufacturer, including Ohm Acoustics. Except that the only Ohm model I have heard was the omnidirectional Ohm Walsh 5 (favorably reviewed by Dick Olsher in Stereophile in 1987, Vol.10 No.4, and 1988, Vol.11 No.8), and the omni principle is something that I have never found to work, or at least to give me what I feel necessary in reproduced sound. The Ohm Model 16, however, is one of three more conventional Coherent Audio Monitor (CAM) speakers intended to offer good sound at an affordable price: $300/pair

Thursday March 9, 5–9:00pm, Seattle retailer Definitive Audio (6206 Roosevelt Way NE, Seattle, WA 98115) is presenting their 12th annual Music Matters event. Making their public debut Thursday will be Classé's Delta Pre and Delta Stereo and Bowers & Wilkins DB series subwoofers; making their debuts at Definitive will the Audio Research Foundation Series, the dCS Vivaldi reference digital audio playback system: DAC, Upsampler, Master Clock and Transport, the European Audio Team B-Sharp Turntable, Focal's Sopra 3 loudspeaker, which is featured on the cover of Stereophile's April issue, Naim's Uniti Series streaming music players—Atom, Nova and Core—and Transparent's Gen 5 power products.

Labor of Love is one of the most pleasurable albums you're likely to hear all year—and it sounds amazing, too...what we have here is magic: classic blues tunes—"Stagger Lee," "My Creole Bell," Mistreated Blues," "Zanzibar," "John Henry," and more—treated with such love and wit and heartache and (to use a tired term that's appropriate here) authenticity.

You may never before have heard of Flemish composer Giaches de Wert (b. 1535 somewhere in the region of Antwerp or Ghent), nor listened to his sacred motets, which I auditioned as a native DSD64 download from NativeDSD. Regardless, his music's supreme beauty, captured in convincingly natural spaciousness on Harmonia Mundi's latest DSD-native hybrid SACD from the 13-member, English vocal ensemble, Stile Antico, will likely sweep you away.