LATEST ADDITIONS

I’ve reported from Salon Son et Image almost every year since joining Stereophile in 2003, and as much as I enjoy the show itself, my favorite part remains the evening before the opening day. That’s when, in accordance with an informal tradition, members of the industry and the press gather together at the Hilton Bonaventure’s hotel bar—which also happens to serve the best food of any hotel bar in my experience—to shake the dust of the town from our boots, as it were. Pictured here, from left to right, are Peter McGrath (Wilson Audio), Mike Manousselis (Dynaudio), Lionel Goodfield (Simaudio), Keith Pray (publisher, Stereophile), Philip O’Hanlon (On a Higher Note), and Costa Koulisakis (Simaudio).

Back in high-end audio's golden days—for the purposes of this story, the mid- to late 1980s—my audio store, Audio Ecstasy, had a service tech named Tom Hewitt. Were he still with us (and I wish he were), Tom would appreciate the radical case design of the MSB Analog DAC. Tom loved not only to fix things, but to see what happened when things were violently stressed. He tested the limits of component construction.

Here’s the trick to show reporting: accomplish as much as possible ahead-of-time. Thus my decision, while riding the Amtrak train from Albany, NY to Montreal for this year’s Salon Son et Image, to write about the journey itself, and to illustrate my post with a photo of something I’d seen along the way.