LATEST ADDITIONS

<a href="http://blog.stereophile.com/stephenmejias/moving/">The move</a> is going fairly well. I’m almost completely settled in. I didn’t feel like waiting for the movers, so I just moved myself. Because all Source Interlink employees at 261 Madison Avenue will now be on a single floor, some people lost their private offices. While some are now sharing offices, I took a cubicle. So I no longer have a view onto sunny decks, no redbrick walls, no green trees; the only thing I can see from my seat is a gray cloth partition.

<a href="http://www.audyssey.com/">Audyssey</a&gt;, a company specializing in room equalization technologies (ask <a href="http://www.stereophile.com/musicintheround/music_in_the_round_40/index1…;), has launched a sweepstakes for fans of high-quality sound. There are some cool prizes, including a Marantz NR1601 slimline home theater receiver and an 8GB iPod Touch. To participate, become a fan of Audyssey <a href="http://www.facebook.com/Audyssey">on Facebook</a> and fill out a short questionnaire. For complete details, click <a href="http://wildfireapp.com/website/6/contests/52020">here</a&gt;.

Jeff Tweedy, John Stirratt, Pat Sansone at the Solid Sound Festival, North Adams, Mass. August 14th, 2010. Photo in this and the preceding entry by Charles Harris.

I’m so much more impressed by good, <i>affordable</i> systems than I am by those costing tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars. I find it difficult to concentrate on music when I’m overwhelmed by the high prices of the gear delivering it. Price should never be the most impressive aspect of hi-fi.

As long as you're spinning an LP for your listening pleasure, and if digitizing it at a resolution of 24-bit/192kHz is transparent to the analog source, why not record and store the LP on your computer at that high sampling rate for future convenient playback via iTunes or for iPod use, or for burning to CD-R? And, while you're at it, why not record the LP unequalized and apply the RIAA curve in the digital domain, where you're not dependent on capacitors and resistors that are imprecise to begin with, and can drift over time? With no drift of phase or value, the virtual filter's results should be better than with any analog filter. And in the digital domain, you can program in any curve known, and select it at the click of a mouse. Aside from the sweat equity invested in programming it in the first place, it wouldn't add a penny to the program's cost.

The minuscule electrical output of an analog signal from a moving-coil cartridge needs to be boosted before it can be converted to digital and equalized in the digital domain. Of course, you could use your current phono preamplifier and record an equalized signal to hard disk, but then you wouldn't get to experience Pure Vinyl's digital RIAA correction&#151;nor would you be able to avail yourself of all the equalization curves provide by <A HREF="http://www.stereophile.com/computeraudio/pure_vinyl_lp_recording_amp_ed… Vinyl</A>, of which there are almost too many to count.

For just a few days now I’ve been receiving mysterious e-mails from “Jazz on the Tube.” At first I wondered if they were spam, and I was afraid to click on the links inside. But they all seemed harmless enough: A few kind and thoughtful words, a passion for jazz, a hand held out in friendship, a smile. So I clicked the link and was taken to a simple page with a narrow, white field against a black border and a YouTube video at the center.