Greetings,
I've got a few questions for anyone who cares to give input. Here's my situation. I'm a video editor and am revamping my edit suite. The one area that is currently lacking is audio. Eventually I plan to mix work and pleasure with a hi-fi edit suite that caters to screening films, and run my music though it as well. However, as I do this piece by piece I also need the system to operate, even if incomplete. So my questions are:

So I've been ripping my CDs to Apple Lossless. What's a good software to burn Apple Lossless to Audio CD-R? And any difference between regular old stack of CD-Rs bought at Staples and those more expensive ones? Some people claim that in conversion from wav to lossless, something's lost & they could hear it. Is there something to this claim? I thought wav -> lossless -> wav was "lossless"...

Someone actually took some time and compiled this statistical data. I think it's a hoot!!!

http://forum.ecoustics.com/bbs/messages/34579/194117.html

http://www.entertainment.msn.com/music/article.aspx/?news=322457&GT1=28102

I thought it was nice to see that they found people that enjoy the "warm" sound, and not just the nostalgia

I have been experiencing a lot of problems with the forum website lately.

Sometimes it doesn't appear at all. At other times I get a stream of SQL error messages.

Today I can get on, but it looks odd and the buttons do not all work as expected. For example, if I click on "main index" I get the Stereophile home page.

Are others having like problems?

Any chance we might see a review of the Channel Islands VDA-2 (and VAC-1 power supply) DAC anytime in Stereophile? I see lots of reviews, followups, references, etc. for the Benchmark DAC1 and may folks feel the VDA-2 is competitive for less money.
Thanks!

All the best to Sam. I hope his recovery is going well. I missed his column in this issue. Come back soon, Sam/Tom

Reading the letter posted by Tom Craggs of Blue Oasis Audio, chiding Sam Tellig for turning the readers onto headphones and their availability on the Internet, made me grind my teeth. When are audio dealers going to understand the concept of competition? When are they going to understand the concept of price competition? You can't hide your head in the sand pretending the Internet and Internet based bargains don't exist and then blame writers for pointing out that there is an Internet and dealers selling the same products there.