John Marks

One day in the early 1960s, Arnold Gingrich, <I>Esquire</I> magazine's founder and editor-in-chief, phoned his stockbroker with an unusual request: Gingrich needed a cashier's check for $12,000 right away. Would the broker please sell some of Gingrich's stocks?

We continue the search for the successor to Fried's Q loudspeaker of yore. Renaissance Audio is the former Morel USA, so they have a long track record in both OEM driver manufacture and making complete loudspeakers. As I mentioned in my <A HREF="http://www.stereophile.com/thefifthelement/608fifth/index1.html">June column</A>, their MLP-403.5 loudspeaker is a two-cubic-foot, sealed-box three-way with a dome midrange driver, at the near-improbable price of $1090/pair (footnote 1).

In the 1970s, a small black-and-white ad sometimes ran in the pages of Playboy magazine. The ad pictured an attractive young woman with lots of disheveled hair and a crooked grin. There was little else to the ad other than the headline, which the reader would assume was being spoken by the model: "It takes more than Martinis to build an image, Mister!"

US composer Morten Lauridsen's <I>Lux Aeterna</I> is one of the indisputable masterpieces of the 20th century. John Atkinson has recorded the male vocal group Cantus's performances of Lauridsen's <I>O Magnum Mysterium</I> (on <A HREF="http://www.stereophile.com/musicrecordings/1105cantus"><I>Comfort and Joy: Volume One</I></A>, Cantus CTS-1204) and <I>Ave Maria Dulcissima</I> (on <A HREF="http://www.stereophile.com/news/121007cantus"><I>Cantus</I></A&gt;, Cantus CTS-1207). (And great recordings they are&mdash;one engineer chum thinks JA's Cantus recording of <I>OMM</I> is the single best-engineered choral recording he's ever heard.)

Another gosh-darn write-in competition! Sorry! They're like peanuts (or Campari and tonics). It's almost impossible to stop at just one.

Ars-Sonum is a Spanish audio company that, as far as I can tell, makes only one product&mdash;but it's a doozy (footnote 1). The Filarmon&#237;a SE is a tube integrated amplifier that is, in many ways, an homage to Dynaco's iconic Stereo 70 power amplifier of 1959, but the Filarmon&#237;a is by no means a slavish copy. Get down to specifics, and it's actually more of a clean-sheet-of-paper design.

My "Musical Cultural Literacy for Americans" write-in competition seems to have been a smashing success. I received 65 entries, and only a very few missed the mark. A few more were obvious, so-so, or lacking in passion. Many were good. But a score or more were of enviably high quality. Choosing the top 12 was tough. At the end, who won a prize and who did not was entirely my own subjective decision. The winning entries are posted in full on <I>Stereophile</I>'s website as an <A HREF="http://www.stereophile.com/thefifthelement/407fifth/index3.html">append…; to my <A HREF="http://www.stereophile.com/thefifthelement/407fifth">April column</A>. Here are the points I made online in announcing the results: