LATEST ADDITIONS

Ada Calhoun writes about the summer she swanned around New York under the influence of Neil Gaiman's <I>Sandman</I>.

Regular readers of this here blog may wonder why I've linked so many times to maps of the London Underground. I've always loved the clean design of Harry Beck's 1933 map because it looks so much like a circuit diagram and conveys complex three-dimensional information so clearly in 2D.

Leon Bambrick's guitar tutorial eliminates all the boring parts. You don't even learn to tune until lesson five&mdash;and then it goes like this:
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"Buy a tuner and ask your girlfriend to learn how to use it. If you can't afford either of these then ask either a roadie or the band playing after you to tune the guitar for you."

CD sales are sliding, and the download market is still up for grabs. If you ran a major record label, what would be your next move?

We reported in 2005 on the Recording Industry Association of America's (RIAA) <A HREF="http://www.stereophile.com/news/082205riaa/">lawsuit against Patricia Santangelo</A> and her suit in response to the trade group's allegations that she had participated in peer-to-peer file sharing. The record companies dropped their legal actions against Ms. Santangelo in December 2006, instead deciding to charge two of her children, Robert (16) and Michelle (20), with downloading songs from Kazaa.

California company Now Hear This (NHT), which has been around since 1986, has always taken a no-nonsense route based on good engineering principles and innovative thinking. Two of their strikingly good ideas were the use of side-firing woofers, and integrating an active subwoofer with a pair of small monitor speakers. Both philosophies culminated in the Xd series of DSP-EQ'd active loudspeakers, which I had the pleasure of <A HREF="http://www.stereophile.com/standloudspeakers/1105nht">reviewing</A&gt; in the November 2005 issue. My first reaction to the concept was "Why hasn't anyone done this before?" The results completely justified an approach that, I believe, points loudspeaker design in a new direction.

Thiel Audio, headed up by <A HREF="http://www.stereophile.com/interviews/221">Jim Thiel</A> (President and chief designer) and Kathy Gornik (Marketing Director), sets itself apart from other speaker manufacturers not only by making what I feel to be almost uniformly excellent products, but also by serving as a kind of hallmark for the good dealer: Although not all good dealers sell Thiel, just about every Thiel dealer is a good one. This comes about because, in spite of just about uniformly positive reviews and excellent customer relations, Thiel (primarily in the person of Ms. Gornik) has insisted on limited distribution through retailers they know will give their product a good demonstration. There are a few other such companies performing this hallmark function, though only Mark Levinson Audio Systems readily comes to mind. Most other successful companies prefer as wide a geographical distribution as possible, in spite of the occasional necessary compromises in dealer quality.