News

With SACD and DVD-Audio rumbling off in the distance, is the high-end CD player dead? Michael Fremer takes a listen to the Musical Fidelity Nu-Vista 3D CD player and reports that the company decided it was "better to concentrate efforts on trying to optimize the sound of the two billion CDs already in play than divert company resources into developing technology and products aimed at an uncertain digital future and an unsettled customer base."

For his Fine Tunes #40, Jonathan Scull takes a trip to France, where he finds that, with the right tweaks, even the most modest of systems can rise to the audiophile occasion.

Next, we have Jon Iverson's "As We See It" from this October, One Small Step.... Iverson finds that there may be advantages to setting up your music library on a computer's hard drive.

Finally, we have the next installment in our "Recording of the Month" series for the online archives: Recording of October 2001: John Hiatt: The Tiki Bar is Open. Music Editor Robert Baird reports that after a bumpy ride, Hiatt's career as a songwriter is back on track.