LATEST ADDITIONS

My plan was to begin by revealing the highest sum I've paid for a wristwatch. It wasn't very much, and that would have been the point.

I began writing this essay on New Year's Day 2007. The passing of the old year reminded me that I am now in the 21st year of editing Stereophile, my 25th of being the editor-in-chief of a mainstream audio magazine, and my 31st of working full-time as an audio journalist. (Prior to joining Stereophile in 1986, I had worked for 10 years at British magazine Hi-Fi News & Record Review, the final four as its editor.) Back in the innocent 1970s, reviewers and editors generally picked and chose what products to review based on their own interest and what they felt appropriate for their readers to know about. Back then, there was only a tiny fraction of the audio brands now available to the audiophile, and even with fewer review pages than we now have, it was possible each year to cover a representative sample of the products being offered our readers. But such was the explosion in high-end audio throughout the 1980s that, by 1989, I felt it necessary to impose some restrictions on what products we choose for full review coverage in Stereophile.

KINGS OF LEON: <I>Because of the Times</I><BR>
RCA (CD). 2007. Ethan Johns, prod., eng.; Lowell Reynolds, asst. eng. AAD? TT: 51:41<BR>
Performance ****&#189;<BR>
Sonics ****

Exploring the randomness of the iPod's random function.

Bed head? Huckleberry has bed <I>everything</I>.

The trouble with Tasers, <I>CrunchGear</I> explains, is "there appears to be an aggressive effort by [Taser International] to silence critics and to control data and, on occasion, manipulate statistics with the intent of preserving an illusion of safety surrounding its products."