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Ron Sutherland makes a strong case for being crowned the king of all phono preamps, though I expect he would blush at any such suggestion. In 1979, with degrees in physics and electronic engineering (where his final project involved designing and building a digital logic–controlled preamp), he teamed up with Gayle Sanders to found electrostatic speaker company MartinLogan. ("Martin" and "Logan" are Sanders' and Sutherland's middle names, respectively.) But after a few years, he found the increasingly corporate mindset at M-L a bit stifling, so he decided to go his own way. Ron wanted to build gear he thought was cool and fun while not being directed solely by its commercial potential. He joined up with his brother to start Sutherland Engineering, creating hi-fi equipment that piqued his own interest and hopefully that of a bunch of customers.

At first, Sutherland made a wide range of components, including preamps, power amps, and DACs, but gradually he focused more and more on phono preamps. Today that's the only thing he makes...

At this late date, it seems impossible that there could still be "lost" albums lingering in the vaults by musicians as important and successful as Johnny Cash and Paul McCartney. And yet Universal Music has just released "new" albums by both artists that significantly add to their already hallowed recording catalogs.

Ah, Denmark. Land of the Vikings and blue-eyed, blond-haired folk with faces sculpted just so. I loved my week there as a Stereophile correspondent and member of a scraggly scrum of audio journalists whisked to DALI headquarters on a promotional junket.

Aside from its universal attractiveness, what struck me during my stay in the southernmost and smallest of the Scandinavian countries was how by North American standards the more densely populated cities I visited, Copenhagen and Aarhus, seemed orderly and clean. Cars, pedestrians, and cyclists kept tightly to their lanes. I saw no cigarette butts on the sidewalk and only sparse pockets of graffiti. There seemed to be a natural, sequential flow to everything—an evenness and balance that was close to idyllic.

Outside its bigger cities, Denmark looks pastoral, with long stretches of grassy fields sporadically interrupted by broad bodies of water, and bucolic towns that seem to have sprouted in the middle of nowhere. It's in these towns that a lot of Danish hi-fi is made: DALI in Nørager (population 1143); Dynaudio in Skanderborg (population 20,000). Skanderborg contains evidence of human settlements belonging to the earliest Nordic Stone Age, starting some 100,000 years ago.

Dynaudio doesn't go back quite that far; the company was founded in 1977...

"Schwabing isn't a neighborhood, but a state of being," declared the Countess Fanny zu Reventlow, an early feminist who scandalized German society by parenting out of wedlock, carrying a revolver, and practicing what today tends to be called ethical nonmonogamy. Thomas Mann described the fellow denizens of this northern corner of Munich as "the most singular, the most delicate, the boldest exotic plants." At the turn of the last century, Schwabing was on its way to becoming the artistic epicenter of Europe, a laboratory for the most progressive social ideas, and arguably the birthplace of modernity. Kandinsky made Western art's first abstract painting while living there; local cafes once patronized by Lenin would soon host a young Adolf Hitler. Some called it Schwabylon.

These days, Schwabing's spotless, freshly paved streets are lined with the glass-and-steel facades of Hiltons and Marriotts. Its proximity to MOC, Munich's titanic convention center, has turned the neighborhood into a destination for business travelers from near and far.

It's the late 1980s, and I'm soldering tube amplifiers on a plywood bench. I decide on a whim that it's time to break down and buy a CD player to supplement the Dynaco tuner and Dual cassette deck in my workroom music system.

I was a slow starter with digital because of my early take on CD sound: It was emotionally drained with grumbling distortions in the bass and an off-timbre midrange, crowned by a thin, artificial treble, and penetrated by an eerie, unnatural silence whenever the musicians stopped playing. I thought cassettes had higher fidelity and that CDs would be a passing fad, but I kept browsing CDs at Tower Records, and the itch to buy some was getting pretty strong.

One of my friends said, "Maybe it's not the conversion principle that's to blame but something else, like an imperfect CD player?" That interesting thought had not occurred to me, and it obviously occurred to lots of engineers, because they are still trying to improve the quality of CD playback by adjusting the mechanism.

Modern turntables are a paradox. The ever-evolving technology beneath their sleek exteriors fascinates me. The high-end turntable market these days can feel less like a haven for music lovers and more like a brutalist arms race in pursuit of maximum audio extraction.

Yet, it's not all about performance. Many new 'tables are adorned with outlandish, purely cosmetic flourishes that cause me to chuckle. Some super-bling record players, with their jutting angles and industrial menace, evoke the chrome carcass of the Battlestar Galactica, a testament to mechanical might. Others are even more menacing, channeling the mirror-finish abyss of Darth Vader's helmet, gleaming with a promise of sonic domination—but is that an invitation or a threat?

Setting aside those cosmetic affectations, it's a war, and the enemy—well, the main enemy anyway—is vibrations, which may seem strange considering that vibrations are the whole point of the endeavor.

EISA, or the Expert Imaging and Sound Association, is an organisation representing 56 of the most respected special interest publications and websites from 27 countries that cover Hi-Fi, Home Theater Video, Home Theater Audio, Photography, Mobile Devices, and In-Car Electronics. Every year EISA's Expert Group members, including editors from this publication, test a very wide range of new products from their field of expertise before comparing results and voting to decide on the cream of every product category.