LATEST ADDITIONS

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.

Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery...or maybe not!

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

Putting multi-format bundles aside for the moment, if you had to pick one primary format for your music, what would it be?

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.

<B>Jim O'Rourke: <I>The Visitor</I></B><BR>
Drag City DC375CD (CD). 2009. Jim O'Rourke, prod., eng. AAD? TT: 38:03<BR>
Performance ****<BR>
Sonics ****

"Check it out." Music editor Robert Baird handed me a CD. "He's 70 years old, it's his 13th album, he got Don Was to produce it, and it's his best yet."