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AudioVision SF (1628 California Street, San Francisco, CA 94109) are having a free event Thursday March 17, 7:30–9:30pm, to preview Technics' new Audiophile 1200GAE 50th Anniversary Limited-Edition turntable and tonearm. This is not the Technics 1200 your local DJ played but a fully redesigned table with just about everything taken upstream except for the basic look!

Dr. Feickert Analogue's top-of-the line turntable, the Firebird ($12,500), is a generously sized record player designed to easily accommodate two 12" tonearms. Its three brushless, three-phase DC motors, arranged around the platter in an equilateral triangle, are connected to a proprietary controller in a phase-locked loop (PLL); according to the Firebird's designer, Dr. Christian Feickert, a reference signal from just one of the motors drives all three—thus one motor is the master while the other two are slaves. (Man, today that is politically incorrect, however descriptively accurate.) Feickert says that the key to this drive system is the motor design, which was done in close consultation with its manufacturer, Pabst. The result is a feedback-based system in which the controller produces the very low jitter levels claimed by Feickert.

Two weeks shy of the Ides of March, Cary Audio has announced its transition from an all-dealer sales model to a direct-to-consumer web store in the U.S. it calls "CaryDirect." But rather than leaving its brick'n'mortar US dealers in the dust, the North Carolina-based company says it has assimilated them into a rather novel hybrid business model.

In an announcement made yesterday on their corporate website, UK-based Chester Group—which, in recent years, has sponsored consumer-audio shows in Vancouver, Brooklyn, and Brighton, UK, among other locales—revealed that they are "deferring" this year's Salon Son et Image, which had been scheduled to take place March 18 through 20 at the Bonaventure Hotel in Montreal.

With the atomization of the playback of digital files into storage, servers, streamers, format converters, and DACs, I find that I've accumulated many miniature power supplies: small pods and wall warts. Most of these are generic switching devices made by companies other than the manufacturers of the components they power, and even those not designed for audio systems are, of necessity, at least adequate for the task. Because many of these supplies are indistinguishable from each other, I've taken to labeling them with sticky notes to remind me which goes with which component. Nonetheless, I'm concerned that they're no more than the commodity power modules available for a few bucks each on eBay. Whenever I think of the four or five of them clustered behind my equipment rack, I begin to suspect them of plotting revolt against the fancy gear they serve.