Sasha Matson

Music history, like all human history, is filled with nooks and crannies—digressions from the main course of events. Take Anton Bruckner for example. The global concert hall calendars are filled with performances of his symphonies and some of his choral works. New recordings of these pieces are frequently released. How many of you have ever heard a performance, or recording, of any piece for solo piano by Bruckner?

Youngstown, Ohio–based loudspeaker manufacturer SVS made foundations its specialty, starting at the company's very beginning in 1998, when it started by designing subwoofers and only subwoofers. The company didn't start offering regular loudspeakers, with midranges and high frequencies, until 2012. Over time, SVS's high-value speakers got more ambitious until earlier this year, at AXPONA, it introduced its most ambitious loudspeaker yet, the full-range, three-way Ultra Evolution Pinnacle ($4999.98/pair).

Sasha Matson: Good morning from Cooperstown, home of baseball. Do you follow baseball?

Charles Lloyd: I played first base. I'm left-handed.

Matson: Does this new album, The Sky Will Still Be There Tomorrow, feel special to you?

Lloyd: It does indeed.

The Sky Will Still Be There Tomorrow was released by Blue Note Records on March 15, 2024, which was Charles Lloyd's 86th birthday. It is Lloyd's 47th album as a leader—the first was Discovery!, on Columbia Records, in 1964—how about that! With a running time one minute over an hour and a half, pressed on two LPs, this album is a significant addition to Lloyd's era-traversing catalog. Of the album's 15 tracks, 13 are Charles Lloyd compositions, split between new pieces and new arrangements of older works.

The hefty, floorstanding Sasha V maintains a close family resemblance. The new Sasha's width and height are almost identical, logging 14½" and 45 1/16", respectively. The cabinets gain an inch in depth and now measure 23 15/16". The cabinets' subtle beveling is slightly different; probably only recent Sasha owners would notice. Extra thickness in the cabinets adds 9lb for a total of 245lb per speaker.

In my house, I have a little stack of CDs that I bring out once a year—for Christmas Eve and Christmas day. I then put them away on the shelf until the following year. This annual Festival of Christmas Albums is met with varying degrees of pleasure and resignation by the family members present; listening is non-negotiable, though we may not make it through all of them. Once in a while a new Christmas album will make the cut and be added to the stack, but not every year.