LATEST ADDITIONS

My favorite audio product of 2008 isn't precisely an audio product—it's a home theater in a box. I'm referring to Polk's lovely SurroundBar 360, which sells for $1200 and gives you a low-profile 48" "sound bar" and a base station, which includes an optical disc player, DSP processing, and an AM/FM tuner. The base station, of course, contains all the amplification the sound bar requires. Also included is a special umbilical to connect the two pieces—and, in a savvy little detail that tells you a great deal about how much thought has gone into the SurroundBar 360, the connectors on that cable cannot be connected "wrong."

Remember <a href="http://blog.stereophile.com/stephenmejias/cold_weather_usb_phono_preamp… I wrote last week</a> about my dream listening room? Some nice furniture, DeVore Fidelity loudspeakers, Shindo amplifiers, walls lined in vinyl LPs, all that?

It's not all-audio all-the-time in the <i>Stereophile</i> forums. Every once in awhile, a fellow likes to turn down the stereo and reach for <i>The Wall Street Journal</i>, <i>Mother Jones</i>, <i>The Economist</i>, <i>Sports Illustrated</i>, <i>King</i>, whatever.

Following that record, I tuned in to Luciano by Luciano Pavarotti, also found in the trash. Pavarotti sang with impact and the timpani were a joy.

Maria Schneider and her 18-piece orchestra play their annual Thanksgiving week gig at the Jazz Standard starting Nov. 25 and continuing till the 30th (except for Thursday, when the club is closed), and if you’re in the tri-State area, you should reserve seats now, as her shows usually sell out. Regular readers of this blog may recall my previous ravings about Schneider. A former student of Gil Evans and Bob Bookmeyer, she is the most sumptuous jazz arranger on the jazz scene today, having absorbed her teachers’ penchant for lush stacked harmonies and added a flair for Latin rhythms, a propulsive sway, and a dry wit. Her pieces are lyrical, even rhapsodic, but also taut, even muscular. Much of the band has been playing with her for over a decade, to the point where they’re nearly Basie-tight. Her most recent CD, <I>Sky Blue</I>, topped my 2007 list of best jazz albums (except for Charles Mingus’ previously unreleased <I>Cornell 1964</I> concert-recording). I’m told she’ll be playing many songs from it and from her 1996 album, <I>Coming About</I>, which she’s just re-mastered and re-released. All of her albums are on the ArtistShare label, the artist-owned music collective, and are available only through her website, mariaschneider.com.

Reader William King notices that Saturday evening has its own musical demands: "I play my most 'up' party music Saturday night and wonder what other readers favor for this time of the week? I'd like to know what is your favorite Saturday night record?"

Recently, I caught myself smiling at a tiny ad for Nirvana cables that proclaimed them to be "the quiet cable." My smile wasn't because the claim was outlandish, which it wasn't, but because it was so typical of Nirvana Audio Products&#151;small, understated, and all too easy to miss. The ad could just have easily and just as accurately have read "Nirvana...the quiet company."

In my <A HREF="http://www.stereophile.com/hirezplayers/201">February 2000 review</A> of Meridian's multi-talented, multichannel, multi-kilobuck Digital Theatre system, I fumed about the lack of a medium for discrete multichannel music. Even more loudly, I railed against the irresponsible mastering of many Dolby Digital and DTS discs, which place the listener in the middle of an ensemble and swirl the voices around his or her head with little concern for musical or artistic coherence.

Welcome to the wonderful world of firmware and software updates. With almost every audio device now microprocessor-controlled, and the tasks to be performed increasingly complex, it's not surprising that "finished" products leave the factory only to be stymied by reasonable but unpredicted user practices. It's not that we're all becoming beta testers, but we are contributing to the intelligent evolution of product capabilities.

Frank Zappa was well known for a lot of things&#151;his sharp satiric wit, his virtuoso guitar improvisations, his excellence as a bandleader, his fearlessness in combating hostile political forces and crooked record-industry executives. But Zappa is all too rarely given credit for his status as one of the most creative musical imaginations of the 20th century, regardless of genre.