LATEST ADDITIONS

My friend Ed (not necessarily his name) used to be an audiophile. Ed had a great-sounding pair of floorstanding Joseph speakers, optimally placed so as to create a magic soundstage when he sat in the sweet spot. His component rack featured such famous high-end names as Mark Levinson, Meridian, and Z-Systems. But then Ed went DSL and discovered MP3s. Pretty soon, he was hanging as many hard drives on his PC as he could manage. His Josephs and his Levinson CD player gathered dust. Ed was enjoying his music sitting in front of his high-end Dell, with an active NHT Pro mini on either side of the monitor.

I'm a tinkerer. From homemade audio isolation and room-treatment products to a local area network (LAN) connecting my Macintosh laptops, I'm always building or modifying something. One of my latest projects is a combination of parts swaps and custom-machined bits to better adapt the ergonomics of my exotic Italian Bimota motorcycle to my distinctly un-Italian 6'3" frame. But regardless of what I'm into, I can't resist the urge to tinker.

The fate of a new format is often tied to a great demo on the showroom floor. Has your local high-end audio shop done SACD and/or DVD-Audio justice?

The received wisdom has it that among the billions of humans on earth, no two have identical fingerprints, no matter how closely related they are.

As Larry Greenhill reports in his review of the <A HREF="http://www.stereophile.com//digitalsourcereviews/469/">Sony SCD-C555ES SACD changer</A>, "I didn't know what to expect from multichannel SACD. Would a multichannel music-only disc give me high-energy dramatics? Would there be any room for meditative, closed-eyed, total progressive muscular relaxation?" As Greenhill says, "The best was yet to come."

Over-the-air classical music broadcasting is becoming increasingly rare, but classical has got a huge listenership on the Internet, according to a survey by rating service <A HREF="http://www.arbitron.com">Arbitron, Inc.</A>, which early this month announced that three classical music stations were among the five most listened to on the Internet.

As I sit down to write a year's-end musical retrospective, I feel that the old column-writing joke between Stereophile editor John Atkinson and myself about first needing a subject and, second, needing it to make sense, will not be a problem this time out. For me, the music and almost everything else about 2001 have been dwarfed in importance by the mayhem wreaked on New York on September 11.