For many people, the Internet means access to email, social networking sites, weblogs, forums, countless apps and other crap. For me, the Internet will inevitably mean Computer Audio.

And when the time comes for me to dive into Computer Audio, I’ll rely on Michael Lavorgna’s AudioStream to lead the way.

Wednesday, September 19, 6–9pm: Innovative Audio Video (150 East 58th Street, New York) will hold a “Meet the Innovators” event, featuring Dan D’Agostino, who will introduce and demonstrate the new D'Agostino Master Audio Systems Momentum Analog preamplifier. Refreshments will be served. Space is limited. RSVP: (212) 634-4444 or info@iavny.com.

Full of major chords and glorious crescendos, littered with screeching electronic noise and dressed up with sweeping violins, America is bold, ambitious, arrogant, pretentious, and really beautiful.

When I began my junior year at Fairleigh Dickinson University, in Teaneck, New Jersey, I'd already fulfilled the main requirements for graduation, but still had a number of credits to put toward elective studies. The courses in yoga and bowling were already closed, so I devised an independent course in experimental music. Thinking about it now, it seems a strange miracle that the university allowed me to come up with such a thing. Fairleigh's music department had long been abandoned, forgotten, traded in for the money that comes with well-publicized investments in business, economics, and a fast-growing foreign-exchange program. To me, however, FDU's decision to neglect the arts was a blessing: There, in the quietest corridors of Weiner Library, was a world full of LPs, turntables, music journals, and more—all a bit dusty, perhaps, but nonetheless beautiful, and all seemingly reserved for me.