Stephen Mejias

The December 2009 issue of <i>Stereophile</i> is now on newsstands. Our final issue of 2009 includes our annual “<a href="http://www.stereophile.com/features/1208poty/index9.html">Products of the Year</a>” feature. People love this feature. We’re already receiving fun complaints from manufacturers whose products are not <i>pictured</i> in the article, complaints from readers because we only vote on products we’ve actually <i>listened to</i>, complaints from angry moms because we didn’t pick their children to play one of the lead roles in “A Christmas Carol.”

Well, here’s <i>another</i> great video from Grizzly Bear. The band is like a bottomless cup of creativity. How do they do it? Don’t they have record reviews to write? Don’t they have issues to ship to press?

Casa Werner

During my Barcelona sojourn, I made a trip to the leading high end gear store in that beautiful city, <B>Casa Werner</B>, which is downtown, on the Ronda Sant Pere. Open since 1933, this former music store which began selling Victrolas along with 78’s, before moving entirely from content to gear, has been in the same family now for about a decade.

If just seeing a room can make you mouth water...well, this was it.

I saw this prominently displayed...

It was an audacious demonstration. For the launch of Aerial's 20T loudspeaker at the end of 2002, Aerial's head honcho and designer, <A HREF="http://www.stereophile.com/interviews/467">Michael Kelly</A>, had arranged to compare the speakers reproducing the recorded sound of virtuoso violinist Arturo Delmoni with the <A HREF="http://forum.stereophile.com/photopost/showphoto.php/photo/467">real thing</A>. The setting was the ornate dining room of one of Newport, Rhode Island's many mansions, and, given the inevitable differences&#151;due to the facts that a violin has a very different radiation pattern from a loudspeaker and thus excites the room differently, and that the recording inevitably gives the listener a double dose of the room's acoustic&#151;the demo was successful. There was much subsequent argy-bargying between <I>Stereophile</I>'s reviewers about who would review the Aerial 20T, but it was Michael Fremer who eventually <A HREF="http://www.stereophile.com/floorloudspeakers/404aerial">wrote about it</A> in April 2004.

Every now and then an affordable product comes along that's so good, even wealthy shoppers want it. Past examples in domestic audio include the <A HREF="http://www.stereophile.com/turntables/184rega">Rega RB300</A> tonearm, the original Quicksilver Mono amplifier, the Grace F9E phono cartridge&#151;even Sony's unwitting CD player, the original <A HREF="http://www.stereophile.com/cdplayers/708play">PlayStation</A&gt;. Based on word of mouth alone, one might add the HRT Music Streamer+ to that lauded list.