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Mercury Living Presence Resounds Again on May 14

Heads up! Not long after the sellout of both Decca Classics' First Collector's Edition box set of 50 Mercury Living Presence CD reissues, and their box set of six 180gm LP reissues, both drawn from the famed Mercury Living Presence catalog, Collector's Edition 2 arrives on May 14. The CD box's 55 titles include two first-CD issue rarities: Antal Dorati's 1953 Minneapolis Symphony Orchestra mono recording of Stravinsky's groundbreaking ballet, The Rite of Spring, and one of the final Mercury Living Presence recordings, John Corigliano's Concerto for Piano and Orchestra. The Corigliano recording premiere, performed by pianist Hilde Somer and the San Antonio Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Victor Alessandro, is paired with a close to 17-minute interview with Corigliano, conducted by Paul Hume one year after the concerto's 1968 premiere, and the Paregon to Richard Strauss' Sinfonia Domestica, Op.73.

A Unique Attention Screen Recording Concert in NYC, May 19

Update: Though John Atkinson will be recording the concert, Attention Screen welcomes audience members who also want to record it, provided they use battery-powered recorders.


On Sunday, May 19, at 1:30pm, Stereophile readers are invited to attend a very special recording concert. Over the last six years, my quartet, Attention Screen has released three CDs of improvised collaborative jazz on the Stereophile Recordings label. This particular concert will be unique in a number of ways. First, rather than playing grand piano, I'll be performing on the magnificent Ralph and Alice Greenlaw Memorial pipe organ at The Community Church of Douglaston, 39-50 Douglaston Parkway, in New York City's borough of Queens. Second, we will be featuring our newest member, trumpeter Liam Sillery, whose fourth CD, Phenomenology, was awarded five stars by Downbeat magazine in 2010. Finally, rather than performing improvised jazz, we will be playing nine newly composed jazz and classical works by the four individual members of Attention Screen. The pieces are designed to demonstrate the broad range of textures and colors the Greenlaw organ is capable of as well as spotlighting Liam Sillery's unique trumpet phrasing style.

The Lyric Show 2013

Tempo High Fidelity's John Quick, dCS's US distributor, stands beside a dCS Vivaldi stack at Lyric Hi-Fi's annual audio show.


The Lyric Show 2013 was held at Lyric Hi-Fi & Video (1221 Lexington Avenue) in Manhattan, on Friday and Saturday, April 12 and 13. An informal VIP presentation, held on Thursday, April 11, was open to members of the press. Last year, Ariel Bitran and I covered the event; this year, I was on my own.


This year’s event, much like the last, was well-attended. Most guests made their ways casually from one demonstration to the next. Some lingered in between rooms, chatting and enjoying glasses of red or white wine while picking happily at small plates of fine food. Others seemed glued to comfortable seats in one of the several listening rooms. Manufacturer representatives, many of whom were also enjoying refreshments, held tight to iPads and kept close to gorgeous turntables, ready to take music requests. The entire place buzzed with energy and enthusiasm.

The New York Show Starts Friday April 12

What, another audio show? Yes, barely three weeks after the close of Salon Son et Image in Montreal, and five weeks after AXPONA Chicago, the UK-based Chester Group's New York Audio Show gets underway. Running April 12–14 in the New York Palace Hotel (455 Madison Avenue at 50th Street), the show promises perhaps the largest numbers of seminars and live music events of any current audio show in the US.

Gibson To Buy Majority Stake in TEAC

It was announced Friday March 29 that guitar manufacturer Gibson was to buy a majority stake in Japanese company TEAC, which manufactures audio components sold under the TEAC, Tascam, and Esoteric brandnames. From the press release: "Gibson has entered into an agreement, signed today, with Phoenix Capital in which two investment funds operated by Phoenix Capital have agreed to sell to Gibson all the shares they own in TEAC Corporation, or 157,447,000 shares, (54.4% of the issued and outstanding shares), at a price agreed between the parties of 31 JPY per share. . ."

News Flash: Oppo now plays DSD files

There has been a lot of buzz lately generated by show demonstrations of DSD recordings played directly from files and as the opportunity to download DSD files is expanding. The reactions of our writers have ranged from "impressive," to an "epiphany," to my own delight reported in the upcoming May issue of Stereophile. The hardware used has been mostly professional (Sonoma workstation) or semi-professional (Mytek Stereo 192-DSD) or, at the very least, costly enough for the unconvinced to hesitate. Now, in one fell swoop, Oppo has made this possible at no cost at all for those of us who own an Oppo BDP-103 or BDP-105.
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