LATEST ADDITIONS

It's no secret that brick-and-mortar stores have had a rough time lately, with closures at an alarming rate. It's rare to encounter a new store that is devoted to high-performance audio and video. A store that fits this description opened recently in the picturesque village of Unionville, just outside Toronto.

Due to some upgrades we are making to this web site, posting comments or gallery photos will be disabled this weekend.

No one can say precisely how or when the ancient 300B triode tube made its cross-kingdom leap to the modern world of consumer audio, but we've got the where pretty much nailed down: It all began in Asia, where the best of the West is sometimes held in reverence rather than left to drown in consumerism's wake. Asia is the final resting place for the great Western Electric cinema systems of the 1940s—and that's where the 300B earned its un-American second act. By the mid-1990s, the tube had captured the hearts of hobbyists who, consciously or not, sensed that the audio refineries of the day had lost the plot, not to mention the body.