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Everyone knows the story: Isaac Newton got hit on the head by an apple and suddenly discovered the physics of gravitation. Like the one about Archimedes discovering the basics of hydrostatics while taking a bath, this story turns up everywhere. Even Michael Stipe, in R.E.M.'s "Man in the Moon," sings "Newton got beaned by the apple good."

<I>Editor's Note: Stephen Mejias has never attended CES before, and does not claim to be an audiophile. But he's distinquished himself enough around the </I>Stereophile<I> office that it seemed a good idea to register his first-time impressions of audio's greatest show on earth.</I>

It's hard to know what the best strategy is for digital upgrades. Maybe you bought your first CD player when you became convinced that the format was going to succeed, and it seemed that players were about as good as they were going to get. Some time later, you tried one of the new outboard digital processors, and the sonic improvement was such that you just had to have it. Then you replaced the player itself with a CD transport, so you could benefit from improvements in servo control and digital output circuitry. At this point you were generally happy with your digital front-end&mdash;until you read about how 16-bit DACs (which is what your processor had) were old hat now that 20-bit DACs were available. But alas, your processor couldn't be upgraded, and was worth maybe 30% of what you'd paid for it. So you took a loss and bought a new-generation digital processor, and things were fine and dandy...for a while.

In the age of iTunes and Amazon.com, do brick and mortar music retailers have a future? Perhaps&mdash;if they downsize a bit.

Chris Keeler was the first guy I ever knew with an exotic turntable and a record library that most radio stations would envy. The love of music was a driving force throughout his life, one that sustained him right to the end.

With the new power and furniture arrangements in my multichannel room, I've begun to reexamine all the other things that affect system performance, including power conditioning and signal cables. However, I could not get my wife to accept the presence in that room of an <A HREF="http://www.stereophile.com/musicintheround/904music/index1.html">ASC Sub Trap</A>, which lifted my <A HREF="http://www.stereophile.com/loudspeakerreviews/955">Paradigm Servo-15</A> subwoofer to eye level. Not that I protested the Trap's departure all that much&mdash;at that height, Trap and sub partly blocked direct radiation from my rear left speaker. But I felt its absence immediately, as my system returned to the usual somewhat boomy, overly punchy bass. The ASC left me with the determination to deal with room problems, particularly in the bass.

When <A HREF="http://www.stereophile.com/interviews/232">Ken Kantor</A> helped to found Now Hear This, Inc. (most commonly referred to by its initials, NHT) in 1986, he brought with him a wealth of design and production experience learned from stints with NAD and Acoustic Research. He also brought a desire to build and market products that a wide range of people could afford. NHT began by producing small, two-way designs distinguished by the angled front baffle which remains the company's trademark. The latter is no gimmick, but was designed to optimize the loudspeakers' radiation pattern, a matter of keen interest to Kantor ever since his undergraduate thesis work at MIT. This interest continued at AR, where he was responsible for the MGC-1 loudspeaker&mdash;probably his best known pre-NHT loudspeaker design.