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Professional digital audio is like gravity to consumer audio's antigravity: pro gear draws music into digital files, and consumer audio releases those same notes back out again.

It's not surprising, then, that many audiophile digital-to-analog converters come to us from the pro-audio industry, which has a hierarchy similar to the consumer side: value-oriented products all the way up to ultimate-performance brands. Examples of pro-audio companies that also offer audiophile DACs for consumers abound: Benchmark, CEntrance, Grace Design, Korg, Mytek, and Nagra, to name a few.

What a difference a change of location can make! What was originally a major challenge—AudioVision SF, one of the country's major dealerships, literally had the rug pulled out from under them by their landlord last spring, and needed to raise money and scurry to a new location—has turned into a major opportunity: a spanking new venue, whose main listening room sounds much—that's much, as in much—better than before.

"Kevin Voecks is a genius, no ifs, ands, or buts." I wrote those words nearly 30 years ago, in a review of the Mirage 750, where I had also recommended Mirage's 350 bookshelf model. The 350, which costs $300/pair, was the first affordable bookshelf loudspeaker whose sound actually excited me. When I think now of how that speaker sounded back then, I chuckle. By today's standards, the Mirage 350 had some shortcomings.

The French do things differently. I first heard Triangle loudspeakers at the 1981 Festival du Son, in Paris. That was, of course, after I had obtained admission to the show, in a nonintuitive process in which members of the press obtained their credentials at a booth inside the show. But my experience of the Triangle speaker, a small, three-way floorstander, was positive: It sounded clean and uncolored, and nothing like the BBC-inspired speakers I preferred at that time. The Triangle wasn't as neutral as the English norm, but there was something appealing about its sound—something that, I later learned, Stereophile's founder, J. Gordon Holt, referred to as jump factor.

It's like hearing the name of an old friend and then seeing him, in your mind's eye, as he was when you were both much younger: Whenever talk turns to Boulder, Colorado–based PS Audio, I can't help picturing that company's Model IV preamplifier, of the early 1980s—most likely because that was the preamp I longed to own at the time. (Tragically, I couldn't afford to buy it, so I struggled on with my NAD 1020.)

Amy LaVere: Runaway's Diary
Archer ARR 319611/2 (LP/CD). 2014. Luther Dickinson, prod.; Kevin Houston, eng., Daniel Lyon, asst. eng. ADA/ADD. TT: 38:27.

"It's not your average gal that drinks bourbon neat, walks around with a pocket atlas and drives a big white gear van. I thought she was charming and awfully funny."

Talent and humor has never been a problem for Amy LaVere. Not long after high school she led Last Minute, a Detroit punk band. When we next hear of her, she's in Nashville as part of a husband-and-wife folk/country duo, The Gabe and Amy Show, who released a single, "Blankets of Love," b/w Johnny Cash's "Big River."

Snatching my prize for best sound on the third floor, the world premiere of the new Wells Audio Innamorata Signature amplifier ($13,000), enhanced by the new crystal technology in Jack Bybee's A/V Signal Enhancers ($119.95) and Bybee Technologies power cables ($1500), blew me away. Whoever expected, on Reference Recordings' new Kansas City Symphony recording of the suite from Prokofiev's Love for Three Oranges, such impeccably detailed, superbly controlled full-range sound in such a small room?