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No matter how well you think you know the specialized world of high-end audio, there are always new companies, new technologies, and new products you just haven't gotten around to knowing yet.

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Managing Editor, Elizabeth Donovan, and I have spent all day in a training session for Adobe InDesign. We are finally switching over from Quark. It's going to be great, I think, but right now isn't the best time to spend an entire day in a training session. Elizabeth is also trying to ship the June issue.

The audiophile psyche is deep and complex. Or is it? What do you hope to accomplish by being interested in audio reproduction?

We all have biases. The trick is knowing your biases so they don't get in your way. Mine are pretty obvious. I don't like "fussy" gear that demands special care and feeding. I'm lazy&mdash;I want to just turn stuff on and begin listening. Perhaps that's why I have a positive bias toward <A HREF="http://www.stereophile.com/interviews/1191pass">Nelson Pass</A>'s designs. They're reliable, untweaky, and usually sound good.

At a "Meet the Designers" panel discussion at the 1992 Los Angeles <I>Stereophile</I> High-End Hi-Fi Show, I asked a group of successful digital designers (footnote 1) each to state how much of a digital front end's sound quality they believed was due to the transport, digital processor, and interface between the two. There was virtual unanimity: Nearly everyone agreed that a digital processor accounts for about 50% of a digital source's sound quality, the transport 30%, and interface 20%.

Remember <a href="http://forum.stereophile.com/forum/showflat.php?Cat=0&Number=35628&an=0… forum thread</a> <a href="http://blog.stereophile.com/stephenmejias/040108id/">I mentioned</a>? It's still going on. It reminds me of one of the black and white films I watched in my avant-garde cinema class. Jean-Paul Sartre and Jean-Paul Sartre is staring into a mirror is staring into a mirror, with a with a with a knife in his hand knife in his hand, demanding demanding that the image that the image in the mirror mirror answer his questions his questions. He is outraged because the image in the mirror refuses to answer his questions. Answer his questions. Answer my questions! Demanding. Outrage!