Lake’s death, followed by the fact that I had three new 140 gram ELP LP reissues...

Eighteen years after 21-year old Matthew Shepard was robbed and beaten by two men who lured him to their truck, tied him to a fence in a field outside Laramie, WY, and left him to die, Harmonia Mundi has released a two-hybrid SACD set of Craig Hella Johnson's touching requiem, Considering Matthew Shepard. Johnson's sweet tribute, an apt reminder of the consequences of homophobia, is lovingly performed by Johnson's excellent, Grammy-winning Austin-based choir, Conspirare, and an occasionally augmented group of eight acoustic instrumentalists.

Perhaps there’s a little nostalgia talking here...

Register to win a Wireworld Starlight Cat8 Ethernet Cable ($210.00 Retail Value) we are giving away at AudioStream.com.

According to the company:

"Wireworld Starlight Cat8 Ethernet cable provides breathtaking improvements in sound quality with a radical flat design that exceeds the new Category 8 performance standards."

All you have to do to enter is leave a comment at AudioStream.com. Click here for details on how to enter.

One of the few '70s funk/soul holy grails that’s actually worth digging for.

In "Music and Fractals" in the November 1990 issue, I discuss how digital audio's quantization of amplitude information in what was originally a continuous waveform represents a fundamental difference between analog and digital representations of music. In a letter published in the English magazine Hi-Fi Review in January 1990, John Lambshead conjectured that naturally originating sounds were pseudo-fractal in character; that is, their waveforms have a wealth of fine detail, and that detail itself has an even finer-structured wealth of fine detail, and so on, until the crinkliness of the waveform is finally enveloped in the analog noise that accompanies every sound we hear.

We're celebrating the imminent arrival of our January 2017 issue, chock full of great stuff. MartinLogan's superb Renaissance ESL15A electrostatic is featured on the cover but we also have a rave review of B&O's groundbreaking BeoLab90 speaker, measurements of Auditorium 23's retro Cinema Hommage speaker, reviews of headphone amplifiers from Audeze and Woo Audio, and an interview with a veteran of both the audio and music industries, Joe Harley of AudioQuest and Music Matters.