Welcome to The Abso!ute Sound online! We explore music and the reproduction of music in the home. We believe that the sound of music, unamplified, occurring in a real space is a philosophic absolute against which we may judge the performance of devices designed to reproduce music. Our goal is to provide the resources consumers need to judge how a component's sound either honors or departs from the music's truth, and to make sound purchasing decisions that maximize their experience of reproduced sound. Below is our Issue 195, September 2009 contents and editorial.

Read this edition's editorial by clicking here.

 

Articles & Reviews In This Issue
8 Letters

10 From the Editor
The 2009 TAS Editors' Choice Awards How We Choose

12 Future TAS
New products on the horizon.

15 Industry News
We report from the Munich High-End Show.

132 HP's Workshop
HP hands out his own Editors' Choice Awards for 2009.

 

Equipment Reports
21 The 2009 Editors' Choice Awards
This is the Big One! Forty-two pages of the best gear in every category at every price.

108 Spendor SA1 Loudspeaker
Steven Stone on why you must hear Spendor's latest effort in small loudspeakers.

114 Vincent V-60 Integrated Amplifier
Neil Gader falls in love with tubes all over again, courtesy of this German-designed and Chinese-built integrated.

118 Odyssey Khartago Power Amplifier
Jonathan Valin reviews a sub-$1k power amplifier? And loves it? You heard right.

124 Vienna Acoustics “The Music” Loudspeaker

 

Music
138 Feature
Blues for the 21st Century: Will a New Queen Arise?
David McGee on three vocalists who redefine the way we think about the ladies who sing the blues.

140 Rock
New releases from Wilco, Jesse Winchester, and Rhonda Vincent, a four-disc retrospective of songmeister Richard Thompson, and Jennifer Warnes' The Hunter on Cisco vinyl.

144 Classical
Mozart, Grieg, Wagner, and Bruckner on newly recorded SACDs, Prokofiev reissued on CD, and Esoteric's ultra-high-end and very pricey remasters of three classics on SACD and vinyl.

148 Jazz
Recent offerings from Allen Toussaint, Five Peace Band, and Grant Geissman, plus reissues of Freddie Hubbard on CD and Thelonious Monk on LP.

 

151 Top Ten
Wayne Garcia's choices for the best rock concerts on DVD. 

152 Back Page
Charlie Randall of McIntosh Labs talks with Neil Gader.

 

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