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Audiophiles often prefer to listen for themselves before committing to a purchase. But brick-and-mortar retailers are succumbing right and left, partly a result of the economy and partly owing to the trend to online sales. What is the future of high-end audio retailing?

Richard Sequerra was born in 1929 and raised in various parts of the US by his mother, who worked for the Department of State. By the time he was 20, he had launched a freelance career that has since spanned a wide range of technologies. During a stint at Marantz in the 1960s, he worked with Sidney Smith on that firm's famed Marantz 10B tuner, which was sold from 1964 through 1970. Subsequent products have included the Sequerra 1 tuner and the Metronome 7 loudspeaker, originally produced by Sequerra's firm Pyramid and now hand-assembled by its creator, who offers the most recent version via his <A HREF="http://www.sequerra.com">website</A&gt;, for less than half what it cost through retail channels when Sam Tellig praised it in the July 2007 <I>Stereophile</I>. Sequerra's newest transducers&#151;a self-amplified nearfield speaker and matching subwoofer designed for Internet music listening&#151;remain in prototype form; he hopes to sell or license the designs rather than manufacture and market them himself.

I have an article in the Arts & Leisure section of today’s <I>New York Times</I> about Andy Warhol’s album covers. Everyone’s seen the covers he designed for <I>The Velvet Underground & Nico</I>, with the banana that peels, and the Rolling Stones’ <I>Sticky Fingers</I>, with the zipper that unzips. But who knew that the pioneer of Pop art designed over 50 covers over the entire span of his career, and not just for pop albums but also for jazz, classical, and opera? His work, often signed, appeared on Blue Note, RCA, Columbia—all the giants—and echoed, or often anticipated, the style that he would cultivate not just as a commercial designer but as a gallery-and-museum artist (though he rarely distinguished between the two). A new, lavishly illustrated, fastidiously documented book, <I>Andy Warhol: The Record Covers, 1949-1987</I>, lays them all out. Read about it <A HREF= http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/26/arts/music/26kapl.html?ref=music >here</A>. Buy the book <A HREF= http://www.amazon.com/Andy-Warhol-1949-1987-Catalogue-Raisonne/dp/37913… >here</A>.

At around this time last week, John Atkinson and I left the office and headed out to Bay Ridge to pack up the large and lovely <a href="http://www.stereophile.com/floorloudspeakers/608revel/index.html">Revel Ultima Salon2</a>, voted our "<a href="http://www.stereophile.com/features/1208poty/index1.html">Joint Loudspeaker of the Year</a>" for 2008 and a speaker that JA absolutely <i>adores</i>. He selected it as his overall product of the year:

I really don't know anything about the Flying Burrito Bros. I know that Gram Parsons was in the band, and that makes them cool. Michelle, the first girl I ever loved, wore a Flying Burrito Brothers t-shirt (baby blue with a metallic gold logo, purchased from some old train station thrift shop in Hackensack-ack-ack-ack-ack), but she was from San Francisco and talked about Haight-Ashbury and rearranged her furniture twice a week and received phone calls from Pauline Oliveros and Marian Zazeela (in her dorm room!), and I figured the t-shirt was just another one of her crazy things. It was only much later, after she had shaved her head and had her name legally changed to Maya Moksha, that I realized Michelle was way cooler (and crazier) than I'd ever understand.

Under the soft blue light: Grails' most awesome <i>Interpretations of Three Psychedelic Rock Songs from around the World</i> goes for the ride of its life on the massive SME 20/12 turntable.

Grails' <i>Interpretations of Three Psychedelic Rock Songs from around the World</i>, part of Southern Records' incredibly dope, limited-edition <a href="http://www.southern.com/southern/label/LTT/">Latitudes</a&gt; series, was a gift from Michael Lavorgna. Note the radical etching of the white vinyl. Only 700 copies are/were available.