LATEST ADDITIONS

Reader Carl Lundberg, noticing Wes Phillips' preference for cats, wants to know if all audiophiles exhibit this tendency. Are you a cat, dog, or other kind of pet person?

Has the <A HREF="http://www.stereophile.com/turntables/1103linn/">Linn Sondek LP12 turntable</A> really been around for 35 years? Yes, <A HREF="http://www.stereophile.com/interviews/1101ivor/">Ivor Tiefenbrun MBE</A>, founder and Chairman of Linn Products, asserts. Moreover, Tiefenbrun asserts, the revolutionary aspect of that 'table was not simply that it worked "simply better," but that it was designed to be "modular, upgradeable, and expandable in accordance with our continuous improvement philosophy. That is what 'simply better' means. It is not an assertive statement of superiority but an aspirational motto defining our objective as simplifying and improving everything that we do."

Friday night, I went to the 55 Bar—one of several small, inviting, low-to-no-cover jazz clubs in New York City’s West Village—to hear Kendra Shank sing in celebration of her (improbably) 50th birthday. Audiophiles will recall Shank’s mid’90s album, <I>Afterglow</I> (on the Mapleshade label), one of the best-sounding jazz-vocal records in recent times as well as a balladeer’s strong debut. In the years since, her voice has grown suppler, deeper, more versatile, dynamic, controlled, and adventurous. Her first mentor was the late Shirley Horn, and her biggest strength remains the ballad (she opened Friday’s set with a heartfelt and swinging “Like Someone in Love”). But she has also come under the sway of Abbey Lincoln (her most recent CD, <I>A Spirit Free</I>, is a Lincoln tribute, and a wonder), and so she staggers rhythms, syncopates lines unexpectedly, stretches a phrase, then snaps it back, with a fine feel for the building and release of tension—and she does it all with a purity of pitch and tone that eluded both her teachers (or that they both evaded in any case). Her rhythm section included the wondrous pianist Frank Kimbrough (whose new solo CD, <I>Air</I>, is, as I’ve written here already, one of the year’s best), Dean Johnson on bass, and Tony Mereno on drums. The band is mind-melding tight. Shank sings at the 55 Bar the last Friday of every month.

The audio industry may have lost a legend and a prolific innovator in <A HREF="http://www.stereophile.com/news/11260">Henry Kloss</A> a few years back, but it still has another affable, creative eccentric in <A HREF="http://blog.stereophile.com/ces2008/011008smith/">Peter Ledermann</A>. In the mid-1970s, Ledermann was director of engineering at <A HREF="http://www.stereophile.com/historical/1005bozak">Bozak</A&gt;, where, with Rudy Bozak, he helped develop a miniature bookshelf speaker and a miniature powered subwoofer. Before that, Ledermann was a design engineer at RAM Audio Systems, working with Richard Majestic on the designs of everything from high-power, minimal-feedback power amplifiers and preamplifiers to phono cartridge systems. He was also an award-winning senior research engineer at IBM, and the primary inventor of 11 IBM patents.

Buddha said:

The first reference I saw to the Count of Saint Germain was in <I>Foucault's Pendulum</I>, Umberto Eco's dense novel about a man whose paranoid delusions become so overpoweringly real that, by the end of the book, the reader is left wondering whether the protagonist's enemies actually exist. That their number should include Saint Germain was a nice touch: Part cabalist, part confidence man, the real-life Count was thought by some to be immortal (in <I>Pendulum</I> he's pushing 300), and while Casanova wrote vividly of meeting Saint Germain at a dinner party in 1757, so did the English writer and pederast C.W. Leadbetter&mdash;in 1926. Like Aleister Crowley, the Count of Saint Germain can be seen peering over the shoulders of countless parlor (but not <I>parleur</I>, or even <I>haut-parleur</I>) occultists: He keeps popping up all over the place.

Dear Readers,<br>
I admit it. When Jerry commented to <a href="http://blog.stereophile.com/stephenmejias/041408really/">last week's entry</a>, saying that vinyl wears out with every single trip around the platter, it kind of shook me up. My heart raced and blood rushed to my head. I began to sweat. What had I done? What was I getting into? How would I afford this? Had I stepped into AlexO's bottomless pit?