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Salem is full of New Age and Wyccan shoppes and it has an overabundance of "museums" that are more wax museum than serious repositories of history&#151;heck, the place even has a statue of Elizabeth Montgomery in her role as Samantha on <I>Bewitched</I>. But it also has the Salem Witchcraft Trials Tercentenary Memorial.

I walked over to Giles Corey's cenotaph&#151;he is of course, the sole "witch" not hung, but rather pressed to death by heaping large rocks upon him until he was crushed. It took three days. As Arthur Miller memorialized in The Crucible, his last words were, "More weight."

After the driving was complete, Bentley got us an after-hours tour of the Isabella Stewart Gardener Museum. Nice place&#151;especially if your taste runs to Venetian Renaissance palazzos filled with fine art. The tour was eye opening and afterwards we retired to the cloisters for adult beverages and a catered affair, complete with chamber music in the courtyard.

Today is/was/forever will be remembered as: <a href="http://www.stereophile.com/news/11713/index.html">Vinyl Record Day</a>. August 12th, the day Thomas Edison blessed us with the phonograph.

Which brings me to my latest recommendation: Xiu Xiu's <i>Women As Lovers</i> takes its alluring title from a novel by Austrian author Elfriede Jelinek. The album, Xiu Xiu's sixth full-length, was released much earlier this year, but I only got around to it this weekend, during a trip to <a href="http://www.vvinyl.com/">Vintage Vinyl</a> in good ol' Fords, NJ, along rich and wild Route 1.

Who would have guessed? As the CD falls, vinyl rises again. Online readers have probably noticed Stephen Mejias diving deep into the black art this year. What about you? Have you spent any money on your turntable rig (not including records) in the last 12 months?

Loudspeaker designers are dreamers. Something takes hold of a man&#151;the fact that loudspeaker designers are <I>all</I> men must be significant&#151;and he wrestles with recalcitrant wood, arcane drive-units, and sundry coils, capacitors, and cables, to produce something which will be individual in its sound quality yet inherently more true to the original sound. An impossible task. Yet if there were to be an aristocratic subset of those dreamers, it would be those who have taken upon themselves the burden of producing <I>electrostatic</I> loudspeakers. For these farsighted engineers, there is no standing on the shoulders of others, there is no recourse to tried and tested combinations of other manufacturers' drive-units. Every aspect of the design, no matter how apparently insignificant, has to be created afresh from first principles. For a new electrostatic design to produce a sound at all represents a great triumph for its progenitor, let alone having it sound musical. And to produce an electrostatic loudspeaker that is also possessed of great visual beauty is indeed a bonus.