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"I'm going to have my birthday party here!"

We were at Lucky 7, our favorite little bar in downtown Jersey City, and Natalie was shouting above the loud music.

"Cool!" I shouted back.

"Would you want to DJ?"

"Huh?"

"WOULD YOU BE THE DJ AT MY BIRTHDAY PARTY?" She smiled brightly.

"Are you SERIOUS?"

"Yes."

"HERE?"

"Yes!"

The Magico Q1 two-way monitor, first seen at the California Audio Show earlier this year, will make its New York debut during the Grand Opening of the new EarsNova showroom at 3 East 28th Street, in Manhattan.

This story originally appeared at InnerFidelity.com

Kabeer - "I am located in UK, and I have some orthos. Im not sure if its very viable for me to get anything measured?"

Tyll - "I really can't spend too much money on this, so I've limited DIY Ortho testing to the U.S. to keep the shipping costs down. Sorry."

Kabeer - "Id really like to send my Aiwa to you to get measured. I think its pretty great :). Wualta wants to see their measurements too and has kindly offered to pay you the postage back to UK for them."

Tyll - "Okie Dokie. If Wualta wants to see the measurements, it must be good."

You see, while Wualta might be a crusty old curmudgeon, he's also one of the patron saints of Orthodynamic DIYers, and if he thinks something is worthwhile ... well, you just have to have a listen.

By golly, he's right on the mark again!

That is not a typo. The company is named Soulution—as in soul commitment to designing and manufacturing the finest audio gear it knows how, as in souldiering on in the face of skeptics who can't imagine why a power amplifier that puts out 130Wpc into 8 ohms or 260 into 4 ohms should cost $45,000, or weigh as much as a small pickup truck.

At what point does a domestic audio product cease to be an appliance and assume a loftier place in one's home and heart?

We all can agree that a Bose Wave CD player sits at one end of that continuum, a Koetsu Jade Platinum phono cartridge at the other—but what of all the products in between? Scarcity, mode of manufacture, appearance, even sentimentality ("This is just like the one my father used to have!")—each plays a role, but there's no doubt that price tops the list: The more we pay, the more we love (footnote 1).

The September 2011 issue of Stereophile is now on newsstands. On the cover, we feature Oppo’s latest universal disc player, the BDP-95: It slices, it dices, it plays everything and sounds great. In his review, Kal Rubinson installs the BDP-95 in his Manhattan apartment where he compares its two-channel output against that of the Sony SCD-XA5400ES, then he takes the Oppo to his Connecticut home and compares its analog multichannel output against that of Oppo’s earlier BDP-83SE. He comes up with some interesting conclusions.

Also in this issue:

It wasn't so much a vow as a prediction: After selling my last pair of Ticonal-magnet drivers and the homemade horns I'd carted around to three different houses, I supposed I would never again have a Lowther loudspeaker in my humble house.

That remains literally true: The 7" full-range drivers to which I'm listening today are from a German company called Voxativ; the horn-loaded cabinets from which they play were also designed by Voxativ, and are made in Germany by the Wilhelm Schimmel piano company. And, with all due respect to Lowther, the 75-year-old English loudspeaker firm that launched a thousand DIY fantasies—not to mention a thousand very lively wavefronts—the Voxativ drivers and horns take the Lowther concept further than anyone else of whom I'm aware.