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When Wayne Carter told me that his company, San Diego-based Wayne Carter Audio, designed audio systems for rock stars and also distributed Margules Audio tube products, I knew I had to pair one room with the other. The potential contrast between Carter's "vintage mastering system from 30 years ago"—assembled partly for fun and partly as a tool to help customers understand what was and is possible—and Margules's diminutive gear was too delicious to resist.

Two rooms, side-by-side at T.H.E. Show 2021, with two entirely different but equally valid windows on sound. To the left—we are not talking politics here—the UK's ATC loudspeaker company, manufacturer of time-honored active and passive loudspeakers. Courtesy of their reps, Las Vegas-based Lone Mountain Audio, we are hearing the US show debut of SCM100ASLT Active Driver Tower loudspeaker ($41,999/pair, or $50,999/pair in this particular glossy finish). This is a bigger speaker than the two other speakers that the company usually shows, and the music played via file, wireless Tidal streaming, and LP included an international line-up of Mark Knopfler, Bob Marley, and Charles Mingus.

It's been a long time coming, but it is finally happening. As I write these words, T.H.E. Show (aka The Home Entertainment Show), the successor to the late Richard Beers' original T.H.E. Show that began as an alternative high-end showplace to CES, is about to begin in the Long Beach Hilton. (That's Long Beach, California, for the uninitiated.) Dealers and exhibitors have set up in 20 or so rooms and numerous marketplace booths, said their prayers, enjoyed dinner in the hotel or in downtown Long Beach, and begun to burrow in for the night. As they do, components cook, cables settle, and the acoustic gods and karmic gatekeepers prepare to hold their traditional midnight meeting of the minds to decide each exhibitor's fate.

As ALF would say, "There's more than one way to cook a cat." We've been so overwhelmed with linear pulse-code modulation (PCM) recording, we forget there are other ways to pass from the analog domain to the digital.

One of these is delta modulation. The Greek delta (which in its upper-case, block-letter form, looks like an equilateral triangle) is the mathematical symbol for the difference between two quantities; accordingly, in delta modulation, we record not the absolute value of a signal sample, but the difference between successive samples.

In 1978, when I reviewed Sony's first audiophile-type PCM-1 converter, I earned the undying scorn of a large segment of audiophilia by reporting that, on the basis of a rather short testing period (which did however include some live recording), I was unable to hear anything the matter with its sound. Four years later, but after substantially more testing, I am obliged to report the same thing about the PCM-l's son, the PCM-Fl.

MQA has once again floated to the surface of the perfectionist-audio pond—not belly-up as some have hoped but forced there by relentless pursuit by anti-MQA predators posing as impartial jellyfish.

Danish String Quartet: Prism III, Rachmaninoff: Symphony No.2, Schubert: Winterreise and Shostakovich: Symphonies Nos. 9 & 10.