Bless Ray Kimber's heart. For at least the last three years, Kimber Kable has transported live musicians to RMAF so that we could always have a fresh, live reference in our heads as we traipsed room-to-room listening to canned performances.

Pictured is clarinetist Russell Harlow, who prefaced John Atkinson's final installment of his seminar on dynamic range compression, with a lovely short performance of Bach. Sitting up close, no one could miss that the clarinet's sound has no sharp digital edge, and that the exaggerated breathiness we often hear around recorded winds is much less apparent in live performance.