There is always a conflict between the needs of reviewers and the realities of the marketplace. Once a reviewer has invested his time and energy in a review, he would like that product to remain in production for all time, which would allow it to be used as a reliable recommendation forever. But whatever the product and whatever the category, sales of a product almost always follow the same triangular curve: a sharp rise at the product's introduction, a maximum reached sometime thereafter, and then a steady decline to a sustained but low plateau. Marketing-minded manufacturers therefore introduce a new model every three or four years, in hopes of turning that single triangle into a continuous sawtooth wave.

Nine hundred sixty individually cut LPs were used to create the video for Benga’s “I Will Never Change.”

The April NYC edition of Classic Album Sundays will take place on Sunday, April 8, 5–8pm, at Bellwether (594 Union Avenue, Brooklyn). As a bit of solace to fans that couldn’t get tickets to the upcoming Kraftwerk performances at the Museum of Modern Art, Classic Album Sundays will present Kraftwerk’s Autobahn in its entirety. Cool.

2L, the Norwegian label that made audiophile history in 2006 when one their early high-resolution SACDs, Immortal NYSTEDT, received Grammy Award nominations for "Best Surround Sound Album" and "Best Choral Performance," has taken a big step back to the future. After releasing a number of recordings packages that feature both hybrid SACD and hi-resolution Blu-ray discs, as well as making their DXD (352.8kHz/24-bit) recordings available for download, 2L has just ventured into the black hole known as vinyl.