LATEST ADDITIONS

In the grand scheme of things, there’s no such thing as a “new year.” Nor are there “weeks” or “months” really. I know these are just convenient constructs for the human mind to wrap around something complex and inexorable like “time.”

Yet even knowing this, I can’t help but get a little nostalgic this time of year. The idea of one thing ending and another thing beginning brings to mind, well, this one thing ending and this other thing beginning, but in a nostalgic way.

I speak, as I so often do, of Star Wars.

The home theater system’s beating heart is the audio/video receiver. It supports a heroic workload: routing video and audio signals from source components to display and speakers, gussying up the video, decoding audio formats, massaging audio signals with listening modes, cabalistically correcting room acoustics—and last but not least, performing the heavy lifting necessary to drive loudspeakers. The final item on that list is among the AVR’s most significant attributes. But in the race to jam in as many features as possible, amplification is in danger of becoming an afterthought. In Harman Kardon’s AVR 3650, the top model in its new receiver line, the manufacturer took the road less often traveled and acts more like a high-end boutique manufacturer than a mass marketer. It went the extra mile to make this AVR sound great and rigorously stripped it of back-panel clutter. The result offers comfort to the music lover who cares about the fundamentals of performance.

Editor’s Note: Brett Milano originally submitted this for one of his “This Week in Music” columns, but the CD’s release date was bumped . . . and bumped . . . and bumped. We only just learned that the set finally appeared on December 16. Accordingly, we can’t let Brett’s write-up go to waste. So, just in time to be the soundtrack for your New Year’s Eve party . .