LATEST ADDITIONS

Season 1 of the HBO comedy series Crashing is available for download starting today.

Jerry Maguire is the middle work in writer-director Cameron Crowe’s trio of deeply pleasurable movies, flanked by Say Anything and Almost Famous (after which…what happened, man?), and it holds up very well. Tom Cruise plays the title character, a callow sports agent, incapable of alone time or failure, who suffers a brief bout of conscience, bats out a moral manifesto, and loses his job, along with all but one of his clients, as a result. As Crowe explains on the commentary track, it was co-producer James Brooks who came up with the idea of starting the movie where most rom-coms end (selfish go-getter has his wee-hours epiphany), then following our anti-hero’s glide to the bottom before carving a new path of success that enshrines intimacy and commitment as well as ambition. It sounds corny, but Crowe and his ensemble cast (at the time all unknowns, except Cruise) pull it off.

Earlier this year Holland-based Miniot raised $50,000 on Kickstarter to fund the Wheel, a unique minimalist turntable that works horizontally or vertically (as in hung on a wall).

PRICE $599

AT A GLANCE
Plus
Designed and made in Germany
Concise and clear sound
Extra comfy
Minus
Plastic earcups break the high-end spell

THE VERDICT
The Amiron Home’s open-back design delivers a rich, yet highly detailed sound and the extreme comfort Beyerdynamic’s headphones are known for.

Beyerdynamic is a pretty conservative company, and its sound hasn’t really changed all that much over the last decade. I started to sense something was up in 2015 when I reviewed the flagship T 1 second-generation headphone that took the brightness down a smidge. Now the smoothing trend continues with the Amiron Home open-back, over-the-ear headphone. The look is also fresher, and this headphone definitely has a warmer, sweeter sound than the model it replaces, the T 90. Beyerdynamic is onto something new, and I like it.