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"Reviewed in the box!" is what <I>Stereophile</I>'s founder, the late <A HREF="http://www.stereophile.com/news/j_gordon_holt">J. Gordon Holt</A>, used to call it. You might think you're reading a review, but the realization slowly dawns that there's nothing in the text that could not have been gleaned from the manufacturer's brochure, nothing to indicate that the writer had even opened the box the product came in. When I read a review in another publication or online, I judge it by doing what I recommend <I>Stereophile</I>'s readers do when they read <I>this</I> magazine: I look for the nugget I <I>didn't</I> already know, the facet I <I>wasn't</I> expecting, the concluding jewel I <I>couldn't</I> have predicted without ever having tried the component myself. Sadly, all too often too many of what are promoted as "reviews" on the Web are merely descriptions.

<B>Jeff Beck: <I>Emotion &amp; Commotion</I></B><BR>
Atco R2 523695 (CD), R1 523695 (LP). 2010. Steve Lipson, prod., eng., mix; Trevor Horn, exec. prod. DDD. TT: 40:26<BR>
Performance *****<BR>
Sonics ***&#189;

I did not find what I was looking for at <a href="http://blog.stereophile.com/stephenmejias/jersey_city_record_riot/">the Jersey City Record Riot</a>, but I did find two reasonably priced Tom Waits albums (<i>Blue Valentine</i> and <i>Rain Dogs</i>) and Peter Lang’s debut, <i>The Thing at the Nursery Room Window</i>, on John Fahey’s Takoma label. I had forced myself to be extremely selective, and, though the many kind and interesting vendors were making it difficult for me to hold back from buying more, I did in fact hold back.

“What does it mean to love your father?” the therapist asked.

Over the past two and a half years, I've auditioned and reviewed a number of digital audio products. It has been a fascinating experience both to watch digital playback technology evolve and to listen to the results of various design philosophies. The road to more musical digital audio has been a slow and steady climb, with occasional jumps forward made possible by new techniques and technologies. Making this odyssey even more interesting (and confounding), digital processors seem to offer varying interpretations of the music rather than striving toward a common ideal of presenting what's on the disc without editorial interjection.

It is a widely held belief that musicians do not assess hi-fi equipment in the same way as "audiophiles." I remember the British conductor Norman Del Mar&#151;an underrated conductor if ever there was one&#151;still being perfectly satisfied in 1981 with his 78 player, never having felt the need to go to LP, let alone to stereo. And some musicians do seem oblivious to the worst that modern technology can do. I was present at the infamous Salzburg CD conference in 1982, for example, where Herbert von Karajan, following one of the most unpleasant sound demonstrations in recorded history, announced that "All else is gaslight!" compared with what we had just heard. J. Gordon Holt proposed a couple of years back ("<A HREF="http://www.stereophile.com/asweseeit/348">As We See It</A>," Vol.8 No.1) that sound is not one of the things in <I>reproduced</I> music to which musicians listen. I have also heard it said that even the highest fidelity is so far removed from live music that a musician, immersed in the real thing, regards the difference between the best and the worst reproduced sound as irrelevant to the musical message: both are off the scale of his or her personal quality meter.

Many loudspeakers come with five-way binding posts, allowing a choice of connectors. Others are specific to one type of connector. How do you terminate your speaker cables on the speaker end?