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I've read 'em all&mdash;does that make me the King of the Geeks? (And shouldn't <I>Cryptonomicon</I> be in first place?)

From the frontiers of neurobiology.

Be the hippest kid on your musical block.

On November 12, the audio forum <A HREF="http://www4.head-fi.org/forums/index.php?">Head-Fi</A&gt; staged a meet at the Adria Ramada Inn and Conference Center in Bayside, NY. You may be asking yourself, <I>What's a Head-Fi meet?</I> That's a complicated question, but the simplest answer is that it's an attempt to provide a real-world equivalent to the sense of community that Head-Fi's forum has engendered on the Internet. It's also a chance for like-minded enthusiasts to share their favorite equipment and software with one another. In a hotel conference room, some 30&ndash;40 headphone lovers set up their systems (frequently incorporating more than one headphone amp and multiple sets of headphones) and then everybody started listening, taking turns around the room, and discussing what they'd heard.

After posting a <A HREF="http://www.stereophile.com/news/110705sony/">round-up</A&gt; of the news about Sony BMG's F4i's XCP digital rights management system (DRM), which hid itself inside consumers' computers' root-kit code, I spent a frantic week simply trying to keep up with all of the breaking news on the issue on my <A HREF="http://blog.stereophile.com/wesphillips/">blog</A&gt;. During the week of November 7, I posted no fewer than 9 URLs outlining breaking news on the Sony story. However, by the end of the week, the company was reeling from the news that hackers had managed to install malware (malicious programs that dismantle a computer's firewall protection) on consumers' computers that masked its presence by using the hidden software placed there by Sony BMG's DRM system.

Michael Fremer's review of the AudioPhysic Caldera III loudspeaker in this issue (p.81) reminded me of a subject I have written about many times in the past: what happens when a manufacturer submits a faulty sample for review. I formalized Stereophile's policy on this matter in late 1988, following both an unfortunate series of reviews in which the samples either arrived broken or broke during the auditioning, and my learning about how much went on behind closed doors at other audio magazines, where reviewers and editors too often appeared to collude with manufacturers.1 I wrote back then that:

"The large peak at 16kHz reported by <I>Stereophile</I>...was nowhere in evidence...The most probable explanation of this discrepancy is that the [Waveform supertweeter's] very light ribbon depends on the air load for damping, and that load is much smaller in the thin air up there at 7000' in Santa Fe than at altitudes where less lightheaded and scientifically more accountable reviewers dwell." Thus spake Peter Aczel (footnote 1), erstwhile loudspeaker designer and Editor/Publisher of the reincarnated <I>The Audio Critic</I>, a publication that advertises itself as having "unusual credibility among the top professionals in audio."