LATEST ADDITIONS

When I applied for this job, I wrote a pretend review of the Rogue Audio Sphinx integrated amplifier and emailed it to Stephen Mejias, then Stereophile's deputy editor, who printed it and put it on John Atkinson's desk.

Before I sent it to Stephen, I showed a rough draft to my business agent, Sphere, who said, "Herb, you can't turn this in like this."

"Why?" I asked.

"Because you speak as if you are not an audiophile and think you're superior to audiophiles."

Thursday, February 13, 2020, 6–8pm: You are invited to an Evening at Soundscape, 406 W. Cold Spring Ln., Baltimore, MD, for a chance to talk with special guest Sandy Gross, founder and president of GoldenEar Technology.

The only one who knows this ounce of words is just a token
Is he who has a tongue to tell, but must remain unspoken.—Moondog, 1968

The Lockheed 1011 sits dormant on the ground at Chicago's O'Hare airport. "We have a little light bulb problem here" drawls the pilot in the approved Right Stuff manner. "We don't know if it's the bulb or what, we'll let you know."

As per our ritual, Karim and Dan arrived at my door in late afternoon, bearing our ritual's customary offerings: dark beer, wine, cold pork sandwiches, fruit and chocolate tarts, good music on well-recorded CDs, and audio hardware to try out on the host's hi-fi—on this particular Friday, my hi-fi. It's what we did: break bread while gabbing like regular folk about regular things, then bolt for the listening room for an evening of hi-fi fun.

In Herb Reichert's review of the original Schiit Audio Ragnarok integrated amplifier, he wrote, "Schiit Audio's Ragnarok [is] the first amplifier of my experience that plays earth and sky, mind and body, brown eyes and blue, speakers and headphones, with equal narcotic intensity." Herb's colorful conclusions so persuaded me of the Ragnarok's worth that, when Schiit Audio's Jason Stoddard and Mike Moffatt announced the impending release of the Ragnarok 2, I pitched a Stereophile follow-up review.

I thought I knew what a preamp could do. But when the Dan D'Agostino Master Audio Systems Momentum HD preamplifier ($40,000) arrived for review, all my expectations flew out the window.

Only recently did I learn that successive generations of the Chevrolet Corvette are referred to by the cognoscenti with two-character alpha-numeric identifiers: C1, C2, C3, and so on. I learned this while reading about the most recent version—C8, known to non-cognoscenti as the 2020 Corvette—which happens to be the first version since C2 that impresses me. (I say that as one who used to work for the owner of a C3, a then-middle-aged male who actually boasted, while under the influence, that he and two of his C3-owning friends drove them solely because their juvenile styling attracted juveniles. Rest assured I left his employ within days of that revelation.)