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It's a beautiful drive, considering you're on a freeway. You take I-25 north out of Albuquerque, Sandia Peak to your right and the Jemez Caldera and Mount Taylor dimly visible in the distance to your left. As you broach La Bajada hill south of Santa Fe, the Sangre de Cristo range—the "Blood of Christ Mountains" described by Paul Simon in "Hearts & Bones"—appears before your windshield. You take the Old Pecos Trail exit to the City Different, but before you reach town you bear to the left, then take another left opposite St. Vincent Hospital. There, in a cul-de-sac, you peer up at the street sign: "Stereophile Way," it says (footnote 1). "Not just a street, but a philosophy," I kidded Larry Archibald when the city told him that he could name the road where the magazine's headquarters would one day be situated.

"The Sonus Faber Cremona is the finest cabinet-built speaker I have heard for under $10,000/pair," wrote the usually reticent Sam Tellig in the January 2003 <I>Stereophile</I>. "<I>Bravissimo...Molto, molto bene</I>" he added to his paean of praise for the Italian speaker manufacturer's founder and chief engineer, Franco Serblin.

Its future as a format may also be debatable, but does DVD-Audio have the sonic goods? Have you been able to spend much time with DVD-Audio? If so, what do you think about the way it sounds?

Bits is bits? In the December 1990 issue, John Atkinson explored in <A HREF="http://www.stereophile.com/reference/1290jitter">"Jitter, Bits, & Sound Quality"</A> why digital audio turns out to be a complicated process. He writes, "As my violin teacher used to say, 'The right note in the wrong place is the wrong note.'" And so it is with digital data, as JA explains in this groundbreaking report.

Electronics retailers may be bouncing back from a long slump, according to a couple of recent reports.

Recorded music as a packaged-goods commodity continues to decline, according to figures released March 4 by the <A HREF="http://www.riaa.com/news/newsletter/030404.asp">Recording Industry Association of America</A> (RIAA).

Four short years ago, rock band Metallica angered part of its fan base by <A HREF="http://www.stereophile.com/news/10746/index.html">going after</A> downloaders who used the online file-trading service Napster. At that time, the band provided Napster with the screen names of 335,000 users reputed to be pirating Metallica's music, and demanded they be removed from the service. The group was also the <A HREF="http://www.stereophile.com/news/10725/">first to sue</A> the fledgling company.