Our meeting was propitious and totally unexpected. The locus was Los Angeles' Sheraton Gateway Hotel last May, on which we had all descended for Home Entertainment 2006. As a contributor to <I>Stereophile</I>'s <A HREF="http://blog.stereophile.com/he2006">Show blog</A>, my assignment was as liberal as they come: Go where you are drawn, listen as you will, and record your impressions.
I've been in love with British sports cars ever since a visiting highway engineer brought a green MGB-GT to my tiny Nebraska town 30 years ago. Since then, there's been a steady stream of ferocious little cars in my life. Triumphs, MGs, Healeys, you name it—right up to my current crop, a Triumph TR6 and roughly two-and-a-half Jensen-Healeys.
They say that time flies on faster wings once you pass 40, something that I have found to be more true than I care to think about. Yet even considering the unfortunately subjective nature of time, it hardly seems possible that it was 10 years ago, in those golden days of the first Conrad-Johnson preamplifier, <A HREF="http://www.stereophile.com/floorloudspeakers/579infinity">Infinity RS4.5</A> and Hill Plasmatronic loudspeakers, Infinity class-A and Audio Research D110B power amplifiers, that a small San Francisco company, led by a drummer and mechanical engineer who had previously worked on laser-fusion target design at Lawrence Livermore Laboratory, virtually invented the high-end cable industry. I say "virtually," because Jean Hiraga in France, Robert Fulton in the US, and Saboru Egawa in Japan had laid down considerable experimental work in the mid-'70s showing that interconnects and speaker cables were hardly the passive devices conventional engineering considered them, and the highly capacitative Cobra Cable, distributed in the US by Polk and in the UK by Monitor Audio, was already destroying marginally stable power amplifiers in 1977.
Some days the music business reminds us of that old Tom Lehrer quote: "Political satire became obsolete the day they awarded the Nobel Peace Prize to Henry Kissinger." It also seems that you can't out-stupid the record industry.
On Thursday, June 28, the US Supreme Court voted 5-4 that manufacturers could impose minimum prices if "they promote competition." The case—<I>Leegin v. PSKS</I>—involved Leegin Creative Leather Products, Inc., a California-based manufacturer of women's fashion accessories, which argued that it had the right to set minimum consumer prices on its products to maintain price consistency among the niche retailers it sold to. Those stores, Leegin argued, emphasized customer service, which allowed them to compete with discount retailers that are selling more widely distributed, inexpensive products.
It just goes to show, you never know <I>what</I> lurks in some men's souls. White House press spokesman Tony Snow playing a not-at-all-terrible blues flute. For the video (via YouTube and Matt Yglesias' blog), click <A HREF="http://matthewyglesias.theatlantic.com/archives/2007/06/your_moment_of_…;.
Huckleberry, on the other hand, just brazens it out. <I>What table? Oh, the one beneath me? Are you sure that counts? Well, I was tired of sitting here anyway.</I>
Bagheera, like all cats, is a lawyer. <I>It's not a table, it's a counter, in the sun—in the cattery.</I>
Those <A HREF="http://www.sciencenews.org/articles/20070428/bob9.asp">rubber duckies</A> oceanographers have been tracking since 1992 are about to make landfall in the UK. Not the first time Old Blighty has been menaced by an armada.
