LATEST ADDITIONS

I'm writing these words on the flight home from the 2008 Consumer Electronics Show, held January 7–10 in Las Vegas. I wasn't sure what to expect at this year's CES. Though the official stats show that the US economy has grown for the fourth straight year, audio retailers I spoke with before the Show feel that that economic growth has not resulted in any increase in consumers' disposable incomes. In fact, with the drying up of credit, retailers are concerned that 2008 may well be a step back from 2007 in overall sales, and that high-end audio—a niche category within a niche category—will be adversely affected by the relative impoverishment of the middle class.

<A HREF="http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1582330-1,00.html">Her…; an interesting article about Princeton University composer Dmitri Tymoczko, who has string theory mathematics to represent the relationship of musical chords to one another in a graphic form.

Bad news. Last June 15, in my <A HREF= http://blog.stereophile.com/fredkaplan/061507jazz/ >
first entry</A> of the “Jazz Messengers” blog, I broke the news that three months hence, Sonny Rollins, the world’s greatest living tenor saxophone player, would be playing a rare trio concert at Carnegie Hall—with Roy Haynes (one of the two greatest living drummers) and Christian McBride (an outstanding young bassist)—and that his own record label, Doxy, would release the results on CD along with a similar, recently unearthed, never-before-heard trio session that Rollins played at Carnegie 50 years earlier.

UK newspaper <I>The Telegraph</I> reported March 3 that Sir Paul McCartney has signed a $6 million deal to release the Beatles catalog to iTunes for downloading. While <I>The Independent</I> and the <I>Daily Mail</I> have also reported the same thing, there has been no confirmation from Apple, EMI, McCartney, surviving Beatle Ringo Starr, or the families of deceased members John Lennon or George Harrison.

In the April issue of <I>Stereophile</I>, John Marks talks about using Sony's original Playstation as a CD player. What's the most unusual source you've ever used in your system, analog or digital?

<i>Photo credit: Gordon Polatnick/Big Apple Jazz</i>

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