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To remain profitable, many hi-fi companies have outsourced production to faraway countries with lower labor costs. That, certainly, is a legitimate way of doing business. Yet many other hi-fi makers have chosen to work with suppliers that are local, regional, or at least domestic. There are good reasons for doing so, those manufacturers maintain.

Some of the advantages are obvious. Local labor may cost more, but shipping what they make is much cheaper.

Prior to this review, I had expectations about the product under review, the Leak Stereo 230 ($1695 with the walnut enclosure), based on, among other factors, price.

Even more recently, I dipped my toe into Dolby Atmos, which made it necessary to lash up at least four more channels. That was a big problem, since neither JRiver nor Roon can support and sync more than one output device at a time, and the multichannel DACs I already owned tap out at eight channels.

I turned to the Arvus H2-4D Renderer, which offers 16 channels of digital output over AES3 and 16 channels of balanced-analog output. This worked, but piping everything through the Arvus meant forswearing DSP, including DiracLive. I really needed a DAC with at least 12 channels.

The Merging+Hapi has been around for years...

In my house, I have a little stack of CDs that I bring out once a year—for Christmas Eve and Christmas day. I then put them away on the shelf until the following year. This annual Festival of Christmas Albums is met with varying degrees of pleasure and resignation by the family members present; listening is non-negotiable, though we may not make it through all of them. Once in a while a new Christmas album will make the cut and be added to the stack, but not every year.

Beatles fans span at least four generations, and the group's promotion machine is looking to hook today's youth, and perhaps rekindle old flames, with 50th Anniversary deluxe reissues of the "Red" (1962-1966) and "Blue" (1967-1970) compilations. These expanded editions—12 new tracks on Red and nine on Blue, including the new-old single "Now & Then"—sport remixes performed since 2015.