Added to the Archives This Week

Recognizing that high-end audio is anything but plug'n'play, Jonathan Scull examines the details of getting the best from alternating current in "Fines Tunes" #8. As Jonathan writes: "Bill Gates would have you believe we live in a plug'n'play world. Apple has proselytized same since day one. But I'm here to tell you it just isn't so for high-end audio."

Next, we go back a few years to the dawn of CD and bring you J. Gordon Holt's legendary review of the Sony CDP-101. JGH comments: "We all know that digital must have problems, right? Right. . . . What I can say is that the worst problem we have been hearing from many (if not most) digitally mastered analog discs—harsh, irritating high end, particularly from massed strings—was not audible from any of the material I listened to on the CD unit. But I did hear some things I questioned."

Included with JGH's review is a scathing article from 1983, "CD: A Lie Repeated Often Enough Becomes Truth." Written by Doug Sax and Larry Archibald at the advent of digital sound, this piece laid out many of the anti-CD positions with terrific impact. Sax writes: "It [the CD] is a finite, low-resolution, synthesized model of its input. The only thing infinite about the CD is the BS."

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