LATEST ADDITIONS

In last month's Re-Tales column, I discussed the impact the current economy is having on the hi-fi industry. Some hi-fi companies said sales have "normalized" after widespread, dramatic increases during the COVID years—which is to say, sales are down relative to their peak but still strong. Others have noticed customers biding time before making expensive purchases or opting to buy less-expensive equipment than originally planned. Yet, even in this risky economic climate, a few people are taking the risk and opening new brick-and-mortar retail stores.

I never collected baseball cards, played Cops & Robbers, or was a Boy Scout. From the moment I heard the opening guitar riff of Blondie's "One Way or Another," at age 6, it was clear that music would be central to everything I was going to do. It was my first important big thing, and my last.

If you're reasonably handy, you can probably build your own digital-to-analog converter. It won't cost much, and if you're careful, and knowledgeable enough to understand and follow some rather technical instructions, or if you have patience enough to follow advice from a few different online discussion forums—and the judgment to distinguish the good advice from the bad—then the DAC you make may end up sounding very good.

Three or four years ago, coming back from hip surgery, I put in a stint of physical therapy. The assistant trainer, a 24-year-old named Caitlin, was a big pop music fan, as am I, although, to borrow from one of Hank Williams Jr.'s songs about his daddy, Caitlin's kind of pop and mine ain't exactly the same.

Everyone knows I'm a lucky guy. I was born in Chicago in nineteen-hundred and forty-nine, and as far as I can tell, that was the perfect year to be born. I missed the war, plague, and Depression horrors of the first half of the 20th century, and I witnessed the art, music, and cinema inventions of the second half.

Register to win a Dire Straits Money For Nothing Vinyl LP (Total value $37.49 ea) we are giving away.

About the prize:

On June 17, Rhino will reissue Money For Nothing, the first Dire Straits greatest hits collection (featuring songs from the band's first five albums), which was originally released in October 1988. Newly remastered by Bob Ludwig, Money For Nothing will be made available in digital and double vinyl formats in early 2023.

All you have to do to enter is leave a comment about your favorite record shop on this post (feel free to tell us the name of your favorite record store/vinyl shop, where it is located, and why you love shopping for vinyl there!). Click on the picture above for details on how to enter.

[This Sweepstakes is now closed.]

"A 10" two-way?!?!" I couldn't help gasping in surprise when I unboxed the MoFi Electronics SourcePoint 10 standmounted loudspeakers, which cost $3699/pair.

Some background is in order. Using a large-diameter woofer endows a conventional two-way speaker with potentially high sensitivity and extended low frequencies. However, the large woofer's radiation pattern narrows at the top of its passband, whereas that of a tweeter mounted on a flat baffle is at its widest at the bottom of its passband. Even if the drive units' outputs are well-matched in the speaker's on-axis response, this discontinuity in the speaker's off-axis behavior results in an in-room balance that will sound bright. This is why favorably reviewed two-way designs tend to use a woofer with a 6.5" or even smaller diameter.