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Stereophile Consulting technical editor Robert Harley and I were walking down Brooklyn's Flatbush Avenue trying to remember where we'd parked our rental car. We were in town for the Fall 1993 Audio Engineering Society Convention, and had just had dinner with record reviewer Beth Jacques.

Here we go again---the usual Stereophile suspects rounding up some very unusual suspects of their own, and all collected in "Records To Die For," the highest annual concentration of surprising recommendations in the biz. Reviewers of wares soft and hard pick their absolute most favoritest recordings, each of which must be a) a topnotch performance in b) topnotch stereo sound. But be warned: some of us cheat (if we can get away with it).

Letters? Boy, did we get letters last year when we ran the very first "Records to Die For": subscription renewals, subscription cancellations, groveling gratitude, death threats, paeans, pans, madness, ecstasy, invitations to any number of sanity hearings (we sent our regrets)---and that was just from our own staff. How could we not do it again?

That was the question asked by a reader who was perfectly happy with his CD-based system. He was using the gain control provided by the variable output of his CD player and was apparently in no need of phono playback or greater flexibility. He asked us to answer this question, ignoring for the moment the obvious functions of switching, volume and tone control, and phono preamplification. With those hardly trivial qualifiers—and bearing in mind the high output available from many of today's line sources, CD players in particular—do you really need the added expense and complexity of a preamplifier?