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I ain't no digital techie. Big headphones and me? Never gonna happen. But these guys from Warwick Acoustics, Martin Roberts and Orazio Pollaci, they've got a certain je ne sais quoi. We were knocking back drinks in the packed Hilton bar, and they were so damn charming, I ended up in their room. What a night. What a blast.

It's important for readers to remember that I've spent my adult life as an artist and mechanic. Making things. Working as a tradesperson during the day then at an easel or workbench at night.

When I finished high school, all I wanted to do was work in a fancy, well-equipped shop building drag race engines. Engine building was something I had already shown a talent for, but my parents insisted I go to college. Unfortunately, my high school grade point average was so low I was turned down by every college I applied to. Consequently, my parents forced me to attend Wright Junior College in Chicago, a place where teachers rolled joints for their students. And I got straight A's. Those easy A's got me into Western Illinois University, a small state college in a tiny rural town called Macomb near the Mississippi River. My mother was so proud, she told everybody she knew that her son was accepted into "university," but she could never remember which one.

This decision led to some interesting contests. In Loudspeakers, for example, high-value minimonitors compete with cost-no-object floorstanders. In Analog Products, turntables compete with tonearms, phono cartridges, and phono preamplifiers. And in Amplification, single-box integrated amplifiers go up against separates, and low-power tube designs compete with high-power, solid state behemoths. In Budget Product of the Year and Product of the Year, products from every category competed against each other: Out of all the products that Stereophile reviewed over the whole year, which product offered the best bang for the buck or sounded the best overall?