Saturday, March 3, 3–9pm: The Audio Doctor (112 Sherman Place, Jersey City, NJ) will host an evening of music featuring amplification and sources from Unison Research. Three systems will be utilized, and there will be three separate showings: 3pm, 6pm, and 8:30pm.

Gear will include Unison’s S6 integrated amplifier, Primo amplifier and CD player/DAC, and Unico 50 CDE CD player/DAC; loudspeakers will include models from KEF and Dali. Dave Lalin of the Audio Doctor and Colleen Cardas of Colleen Cardas Imports will be on hand to present the systems.

Space is limited; RSVP with the time slot that works best for you. For more info, e-mail sales@audiodoctor.com, call (877) 428-2873, or visit the Audio Doctor.

Friday, February 17, 5–9pm: David Michael Audio (4341 Delemere Court, Royal Oak, MI) will host an Evening of Turntables and Vinyl featuring outstanding new pressings from ORG. In addition, all ORG releases will be available for purchase. Space is limited. For more info, e-mail info@davidmichaelaudio.com, call (586) 244-8479, or visit David Michael Audio.

Jeff Joseph of Joseph Audio introduced me to this beautiful cassette deck; I spotted the pic at BeoPhile.com.

From the Mouth of the Sun's "Sitting In a Roofless Room," from the new album Woven Tide, released by Experimedia.

Back in the late 1980s, it seemed a good idea: Separate a CD player's transport section from its D/A circuitry so that each could be optimally designed, and, as D/A technology improved, the sound of your CD player could be upgraded by replacing the outboard D/A processor. The catch was that the transport and D/A chassis needed to be connected with a serial data link: S/PDIF in optical or electrical flavors, or balanced AES/EBU. To minimize the number of cables required, the format of that link embedded the clock data within the audio data, which rendered the link sensitive to interface timing uncertainty, or jitter. (See "Bits Is Bits?," by Malcolm Hawksford and Chris Dunn.)