LATEST ADDITIONS

A week ago, I went to see Chris Potter lead a top-notch quintet at the Jazz Standard. It was a great set. Potter’s big tenor-sax sound keeps getting more swinging, more virtuosic, yet at the same time tonally subtler. Joining him were Steve Nelson on vibes, Paul Motian on drums, Craig Taborn on piano, and Scott Colley on bass. Potter was smiling a lot during their solos, as if he couldn’t quite believe that he’d assembled such a crew.

One of the weirder NYC boozing trends as of late is the faux speakeasy. Yes, that would be a room, usually subterranean, that for some unknown reason—perhaps every other cheeseball concept has been exhausted—tries to recapture some of those long lost flavors of the salad days of that joyous time in American history called Prohibition. You remember that grand social experiment perpetrated by the far right of American society that like all right wing idiocies, ignored reality and plowed ahead regardless of the damage it might have caused. Instead of stopping alcoholism, it spread the making and distribution of booze into the hands of criminals who got fabulously rich and turned horribly violent. Give those regressive social engineering types credit though; they sure know a good idea when they see one.

Good thing I bought all those records.

Call me shallow, but what first attracted me to Audience's Au24 cables when I <A HREF="http://www.stereophile.com/cables/802audience">reviewed them</A> in August 2002 was their looks. In contrast to superstiff cables as thick as garden hoses, the Au24s were slender and elegant. They were wonderfully flexible, too, and even their custom-made RCA plugs were slim and easy to handle. Instead of having to fiddle with a system of locking collet and barrel, merely slipping them on resulted in a tight, solid connection. Compared to the Au24s, a sizable number of audiophile cables seemed excessive, even a little foolish.

For the past few years, PSB Speakers International has been replacing its older lines with new models designed in Canada, and assembled in China from Chinese-made components. Judging from the reception here of PSB's <A HREF="http://www.stereophile.com/floorloudspeakers/408psb">Synchrony One</A> and <A HREF="http://www.stereophile.com/floorloudspeakers/psb_imagine_t_loudspeaker"… T</A>, it's clear that the new models combine advanced performance with true economy. Now, with the new Image line, we see the result of trickling all this down to less expensive products.

Leben Hi-Fi Stereo Company is a very small company in Amagasaki City, Japan, that hand-builds an exquisite line of vacuum-tube audio electronics. I find it intriguing that Taku Hyodo, founder and main man of Leben, once worked for the comparatively huge Luxman firm. Years back, Luxman went through various corporate owners and spent some time wandering in the desert, before returning to its high-end audio heritage. Whether, as I suspect, Leben was founded during Luxman's years of ownership by car-stereo maker Alpine, or if Hyodo simply wanted to be the captain of his own destiny, I don't know.

In <a href="http://www.electronichouse.com/article/sharing_in_the_vinyl_groove/">th… nice piece</a>, Arlen Schweiger, managing editor of <i>Electronic House</i>, describes the great amount of fun he’s enjoyed while getting back into vinyl. Even on a modest analog rig ($50 Technics turntable and $100 Cambridge Audio phono preamp), Arlen has had no trouble noting vinyl’s virtues, which in his experience include wider soundstages, better focused images, and tighter bass. Most of all, it seems, Arlen is enjoying hunting for outstanding bargains on used LPs and sharing his discoveries with friends and family. Be sure to check out the slideshow.