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One cliché that never loses its aptness is "end of an era." And it certainly applies to the passing on October 29 of SME’s founder, Alastair Robertson-Aikman. While there remain a handful of survivors from the original "golden age" of audio, few of them were still active in 2006. AR-A, as he was known to friends and staff, wasn’t simply still active: he was still tweaking his sound system and planning new products.

On Ella Fitzgerald and Oscar Peterson's Swiss Radio Days, Vol.15: JATP Lausanne 1953 (TCB 02152), the performances are so extraordinary that only the music itself can fully tell the tale.

Kalman Rubinson enthused over JL Audio's Fathom f113 powered subwoofer in his November "Music in the Round" column. Unfortunately, brainfade on my part when I wrote the text for the cover of that issue of Stereophile meant that the subwoofer was credited to "JL Labs." And in all the proof-reading that goes on while an issue of the magazine is being prepared, we all noted a) that the words "JL Labs" were both spelled correctly on the cover and b) that the words "JL Audio" were also spelled correctly on the contents page and all the way through Kals's column.

On October 27, MarketWatch reportedhttp://www.marketwatch.com/news/story/story.aspx?siteid=mktw&guid=%7BBA…; that EMI Music's chairman and CEO, Alain Levy, told an audience, "The CD as it is right now is dead." Speaking at the London Business School, Levy said that 60% of consumers rip CDs into their home computers in order to listen to them on digital music players.

As we reportedhttp://stereophile.com/news/100406hansen/">reported; in early October, Ayre Acoustics' founder and president Charles Hansen was injured in a bicycling accident. Hansen has established a weblog to express his appreciation for the "outpouring of concern from my family, friends, and the audiophile community" and to help keep us all abreast of news of his continuing rehabilitation.

On October 19, 2006, the Consumer Electronics Association (CEA) honored the latest 12 members of the CEA Hall of Fame at its awards dinner at the San Francisco CEA Industry Forum.

It is a truth, universally acknowledged, that an audiophile in possession of a good hi-fi must be in want of room treatment. The problem, most audiophiles agree, is that said treatment tends to be expensive, big, and fugly. Nucore Technologies, Inc. of Hillsborough, TN and RealTraps of New Milford, CT have some innovative new solutions.