Stereophile February 2024

On this page in Stereophile’s December issue, contributing editor (and mastering engineer) Tom Fine and I described a press event at which Apple Corps (the Beatles umbrella corporation) presented the news about the (at the time) forthcoming new Beatles single and the forthcoming “remixed” reissues of the “Red” and “Blue” Beatles compilations.1 Tom attended the event—which, notably, was held at Dolby headquarters here in New York City, reflecting, apparently, Apple Corps’ interest in Dolby Atmos. At the event, demos were presented in the Atmos format only—no stereo. A key point of that column was that Apple Corps, at least—and who knows how many others in the music industry—are abandoning high-quality Atmos in favor of that streamed by Apple Music. Tom and I criticized this development in no uncertain terms, concluding…

Herb’s taste Whenever, exactly, did Herb end the LSD thing, anyway? (Gramophone Dreams, December 2023). Thank God for mind expansion, whatever the source. You go Herb—don’t ever stop! Ken Perkins Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania BBC oops! Greetings from England. I’m sure I’m not the only subscriber who gasped on reading that the BBC began broadcasting in 1936 (review of the Leak 230, January 2024) and to cry out, “It was actually 1922!” The big news of 1936 was the inauguration by the BBC of the world’s first “high definition” television broadcasting service. I’m perhaps more than ordinarily interested because my father spent his working life with the Marconi Company in Chelmsford, Essex, who were at the center of the new radio operation and then of innovations for the armed forces during WWII…

AUDIO VIDEO 2023, AKA “THE WARSAW SHOW” Jason Victor Serinus At the risk of writing hyperbole, I will state that Audio Video 2023 was unlike any other audio show I’ve attended. At no other audio show have I encountered so many young people, so many women, and so many brands unknown in the United States. Not even in Munich have I encountered crowds as dense as those that mobbed the show’s biggest site, the National Stadium of Poland, PGE Narodowy, on Saturday. A press badge counts for nothing when you’re 11" short of 6'3", attempting to see far enough into a huge room to spy a seat. Any seat. Happily, the majority of attendees at the Warsaw Show did not come to yap away about the stock market or the…

ATTENTION ALL AUDIO SOCIETIES: We have a page on the Stereophile website devoted to you: stereophile.com/audiophile-societies. If you’d like to have your audio-society information posted on the site, email Chris Vogel at vgl@cfl.rr.com. (Please note the new email address.) It is inappropriate for a retailer to promote a new product line in “Calendar” unless it is associated with a seminar or similar event. CALIFORNIA ◼ Friday evenings, 5–7pm PST: The San Francisco Audiophile Society hosts a virtual happy hour via Zoom. This is open to anyone who’d like to join us to talk about hi-fi and whatever else is on your mind. For more information and registration, visit bit.ly/3RyaqX9. FLORIDA ◼ February 16–18, 2024: The Florida Audio Expo will take place at the Embassy Suites by Hilton Tampa Westshore, 555…

I always say I can’t find what I’m not looking for, which doesn’t mean I always know what I’m looking for. And not knowing what I want is unsettling. Recently, I was reminded of the thoughts of French polymath-philosopher René Girard (1923–2015), who suggested that people are not actually motivated by specific things like lust or capital or power, as major philosophers have declared, but by subtle, disconcerting forces of existential desire for something outside ourselves, never actually knowing what that something is.1 Girard explains how this not knowing drives history and invention. His main premise is that we feel desire but, not knowing what we desire, mimic the desires of others. These “others” we mimic constitute a third element, interrupting the lines of force between a person and the…

I said to Hank Williams, how lonely does it get?Hank Williams hasn’t answered yetBut I hear him coughing all night longOh, a hundred floors above me in the tower of song —LEONARD COHEN, “Tower of Song” When I was a child growing up in Moscow in the 1970s, our pop-musical landscape was dominated by the so-called bards. They were Soviet counterparts to singer-songwriters from the West, and they sang literate, knowing lyrics while accompanying themselves on acoustic guitars. Even the word used to describe them—bard’i—was adapted from English. And because they sometimes sang about aspects of day-to-day life that were off limits in public, their music rarely appeared on records and was circulated mostly on fuzzy-sounding homemade tapes. The best known among the bards were a Georgian-Armenian poet named Bulat…