LATEST ADDITIONS

It's Wednesday evening just before rush hour, and the traffic is not too bad passing through the outskirts of LV along Interstate 15 heading north. The rest of the Stereophile crew will be arriving during the next few hours and Thursday.

John Atkinson has handed out the assignments:

John Atkinson: expensive speakers
Robert Deutsch: low-mid-priced speakers
Erick Lichte: amplification of all kinds
Jason Serinus: cables, accessories, and headphones
Stephen Mejias: budget gear of all kinds
Jon Iverson: digital products of all kinds

We'll gather tonight at JA's favorite Indian restaurant for dinner, and then coverage will start up in earnest Thursday.

As we recover from our holiday parties and work through the darkness of the post-holiday blues, the March 2011 issue is moving, invisibly, to our friends at the pre-press and we prepare for the 2011 Consumer Electronics Show in glitzy Las Vegas.

Furutech's GTX receptacles are well built, seem made to last forever, look like serious business, and increase your hi-fi security.

Externally, the LHH1000 came as a bit of a surprise to these jaded eyes, over-familiar with plain black or brushed-aluminum boxes. Each enclosure is finished in an almost white, anodized finish, with greenish-gray endcaps (made from zinc alloy, I believe) painted with a nubbly, crackle finish—an attractively utilitarian styling with shades of military-surplus radio equipment, nicely set off by subdued blue fluorescent readouts. Internally, the units are constructed to audiophile standards. The transport uses Philips's top CDM-1 mechanism, which is fabricated from diecast aluminum, compared with the plastic CDM-4 mechanism which appears in less expensive and less well-specified players. The loading tray, too, which is made from metal, has a reassuringly solid feel to it.

The ideal rock singer/songwriter? Someone who addresses adult issues with all the passion of adolescence (than which, believe me, there is none more monomaniacal—there's no righteous indignation like a teenager's). Someone who can sing about him- or herself and strike the universal; someone who can tell a story of what the swells call "the human condition," or of some social injustice, in terms of how it affects a single life in all that life's unique details. In this case, some musical near-illiterate like "The Beloved Entertainer," as it says on the little brass nameplate under the harlequin-painted face exploding from the golden Warner Brothers shield on the cover of Spike—The Little Hands of Concrete himself.

Both HD downloads and vinyl have held their ground, and new equipment continues to pour forth at an astounding rate. But in the overall scheme of things, has this past year been a plus or minus in the audiophile ledger?

Explain your choice in the comments.

Bruce Springsteen's The Promise is fascinating not only because of the high quality of each of its 21 "lost" tracks, but because of the way it bridges 1975's Born to Run and 1978's Darkness on the Edge of Town.