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I spent yesterday at my mom's house, celebrating my sister's 14th birthday. Uncles and aunts and cousins are scattered around the house, laughing and eating and shouting at the television screen as if someone is just going to die if the Celtics don't win this game. See me and my sister sitting side by side, somehow apart from it all: She's absolutely engrossed in <i>Weird N.J., Vol.1</i> (I'm very proud of her), and I'm similarly rapt by Acoustic Sounds' "<a href="http://store.acousticsounds.com/sale.cfm?sale=undertheradar">Under the Radar</a>" list.

Reader Walter Woody realizes that caring about sound quality is nothing to be ashamed of. He asks: What is your proudest audiophile moment?

This review should have appeared more than a few months ago. When I reviewed <A HREF="http://www.stereophile.com/phonocartridges/987linn">Linn's Troika cartridge</A> back in the Fall of 1987, in Vol.10 No.6, Audiophile Systems also supplied me with a sample of the Linn LK1 preamplifier and the LK2 power amplifier, which I had intended to review in the due course of things. As it transpired, however, I was less than impressed with the LK2, finding, as did Alvin Gold back in Vol.9 No.2, that while it had a somewhat laid-back balance, it also suffered a pervasive "gray" coloration, which dried out recorded ambience and obscured fine detail.

Some of the old audio names, such as Eico and Pilot, are gone. Others&mdash;Fisher, AR, KLH, H.H. Scott, etc.&mdash;have been rendered meaningless by corporate mergers and acquisitions. Yet more than 50 years after their founding, McIntosh and Marantz, arguably the two most prestigious names in American high-quality audio electronics, survive. The products they make today are probably closer in spirit to their original classics of half a century ago than at any time since the early 1970s.

<i>CG?</i>

I sent some crazed e-mails to my audiophile friends, all like: <i>Dude, I'm at my wit's end over here. I can't make sense of any of it. I know so-and-so uses a VPI and what's-his-name uses a Nitty Gritty, but what's YOUR method? Huh, huh, huh?</i>

<i>"I can't see anyone getting into analog without a record-cleaning machine."</i><br>
<b>&#151Michael Fremer, <i>Stereophile</i>, Vol.19 No.6, 1996</b>