LATEST ADDITIONS

Boris is new to me, but <i>Smile</i> is the Japanese trio's 14th full-length album. The album boasts a metallic silver gatefold jacket and is limited to just 1000 copies.

<i>Smile</i> opens to this nightmarish orange scene of rocket ships and industrial revolution. Or something.

And there's <i>more</i>. You remove the inner sleeves from the outer jacket to find not only are they sturdy and colorful, but they are accompanied by a large, full-color poster!

The Oracle Delphi Mk.II ($1250) is both a turntable and work of art. It is a visually stunning product, retaining a level of styling that, in my view, has never been equalled by any other audio component. It also adds enough sonic improvements to the original Delphi that it ranks close to the VPI HW-19, and is superior, in naturalness of sound quality, to the SOTA Star Sapphire.

Blame the Puritans! say I. The high end has always had an ostinato accompaniment of grumbles from those who appear to feel that it is immoral to want to listen to music with as high a quality as possible. In a recent letter, for example, <I>Fanfare</I> and <I>Stereo Review</I> contributor and <A HREF="http://www.stereophile.com/reference/101">author Howard Ferstler</A> states that "the audio world has more products of bogus quality and shills promoting them than any other industry, bar none," and trots out the old saw that audiophiles "end up spending an excessive amount of money on equipment or tweaking techniques of surprisingly dubious quality."

Sometimes stock is simply not good enough. Reader "EG" would like to know how many readers have used an after-market component-modification service to improve standard high-end gear. If you have, have you been satisfied or not? Why?

A couple of weeks back, a staff writer from <a href="http://www.observer-reporter.com/OR/Story/08-15-turntables">the Observer Reporter</a> contacted me.