LATEST ADDITIONS

Norway's Hegel Music Systems has made its way to the US market. I met Hegel and the company's charming founder, Bent Holter, at the <a href=" http://blog.stereophile.com/ces2007/010907set/">2007 Consumer Electronics Show</a> and then again in Las Vegas during <a href=" http://blog.stereophile.com/ces2008/011208top/">the following year</a>. On both occasions, I had a lot of fun listening to music and learning about Holter's designs. As I wrote last year, I was instantly attracted to the designer's combination of tech-talk and passion for music. The guy is at once serious and totally wacky.

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We're always asking the big questions: Are we really alive? Will we ever find true happiness? How can we be better human beings? What's love, but a secondhand emotion? Who needs a heart when a heart can be broken? How can the high end audio industry reach a wider audience?

On the train this morning, a pretty girl sitting directly in front of me, with a large purse in her lap, and connected to it, an iPod. Earbuds to her pretty, little ears letting loose the music, the most appalling of all songs ever to hit the Top 40: The Beach Boys' "Kokomo."

George Russell died today, at the age of 86, after a long bout with Alzheimer’s, and if you’ve never heard of him, all the deeper pity.

When John Atkinson reviewed Sonos's original <a href=" http://www.stereophile.com/budgetcomponents/1006sonos/index.html">ZP80 Bundle</a>, he fell in love with the company's CR100 controller which uses a full-color, 3.5" LCD screen to provide easy navigation of music files on up to 16 network devices and displays all the metadata associated with each track, including album art. JA wrote:

The Yardbirds' version of "Train Kept A-Rollin'" has been sharing space in my mind with Outkast's "Ms. Jackson." Makes no sense. It's like the train keeps rolling right <i>into</i> Ms. Jackson. Only my subconscious knows why.

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The Pharcyde's "Otha Fish," from their crazily good 1993 album, <i>Bizarre Ride II the Pharcyde</i>.

Back in 1992, J. Gordon Holt stated "we haven't accomplished what we set out to do. The playback still doesn't sound 'just like the real thing.'" Is Holt still right, has high-end audio lost its way?