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I've read 'em all—does that make me the King of the Geeks? (And shouldn't Cryptonomicon be in first place?)

Be the hippest kid on your musical block.

On November 12, the audio forum Head-Fi staged a meet at the Adria Ramada Inn and Conference Center in Bayside, NY. You may be asking yourself, What's a Head-Fi meet? That's a complicated question, but the simplest answer is that it's an attempt to provide a real-world equivalent to the sense of community that Head-Fi's forum has engendered on the Internet. It's also a chance for like-minded enthusiasts to share their favorite equipment and software with one another. In a hotel conference room, some 30–40 headphone lovers set up their systems (frequently incorporating more than one headphone amp and multiple sets of headphones) and then everybody started listening, taking turns around the room, and discussing what they'd heard.

Jim Thiel sounded almost bored. "Almost everything about the CS2.4 is pretty standard stuff—short-coil, long-gap, low-distortion drivers, aluminum diaphragms, polystyrene capacitors, spatial coherence, time coherence, reduced diffraction baffles, reduced cabinet vibration, etc., etc. Of course, I think the execution of the 2.4 is more successful than our previous models, but in terms of what's really different, that mechanical crossover is what's special."