LATEST ADDITIONS

Jon Iverson is going to love this.

Last night, on Later with Jools Holland, Joanna Newsom performed “81,” the lead single from her ambitious and inspired triple-LP, <i><a href="http://blog.stereophile.com/stephenmejias/bewitching_rewarding/">Have One On Me</a></i>.

As another Consumer Electronics Show rolls around, we are seeing some interesting and not-entirely encouraging things taking place in the audio field. The people for whom high fidelity was originally intended&#151;so-called serious music listeners &#151;have abandoned audio almost completely, leaving the pursuit of perfect music reproduction to a group of hobbyists who have more interest in hardware than in music. This, plus the recession, has almost killed middle-fi, which is now flailing out in all directions looking for a new market. Here's how it all came to pass:

Here's a question for a Stereophile.com poll: What's the best hi-fi value of the last 15 years? I'd bet that, 16 years after its introduction, Grado Laboratories' SR60 headphones would get more than a few votes.

The major record labels were riding high, then hit a major speedbump due to the Internet, high pricing, and mediocre music. What's next? What do you think will happen to the major record labels?

Whenever I’m at Tunes in Hoboken, getting my fingers all dirty on the vinyl LPs, I stop and stare at this one album, John Prine’s <i>Sweet Revenge</i>, and I wonder what it’s all about. Prine looks pretty bad-ass there in his convertible, decked out in so much blue denim, dark aviators over his eyes, a cigarette at his lips, the wind in his hair, legs crossed and flung out over the passenger side window like he’s seriously satisfied, like he really doesn’t care.

<i>Photo: Sebastian Mlynarski</i>