Jay Allen Sanford describes his horrifying descent into crack addiction and homelessness. It's not a pretty story, except that he did make it back.

<A HREF="http://www.olive.us">Olive Media Products</A>, manufacturers of audiophile-quality Olive music servers, has partnered with <A HREF="http://www.musicgiants.com">MusicGiants</A&gt;, the leading site for CD-quality music downloads. Olive's well-received Opus line of digital players now allows users to download, store, manage, and play large collections of CD-quality music directly from MusicGiants without needing to buy or rip CDs, select track by track, or use a computer. (You can find John Atkinson's positive review of the Olive Symphony <A HREF="http://www.stereophile.com/mediaservers/406olive/">here</A&gt;.)

Music Matters Jazz, a new audiophile label, starts up this month, reissuing classic Blue Note albums on 180-gram virgin-vinyl LPs pressed at 45 rpm. The test pressings I’ve heard sound extremely promising. The people involved in the company certainly know what they’re doing (Joe Harley of AudioQuest, Steve Hoffman and Kevin Gray of AcousTech, Michael Cuscuna of Mosaic Records, who is more familiar with the Blue Note vaults than anybody).

When we last heard from NBC Universal's CEO Jeff Zucker, he'd refused to renew the network's yearly contract with Apple's iTunes Store, leading Apple <A HREF="http://stereophile.com/news/090307nbc/">to immediately pull NBC shows</A> from the store rather than have them yanked midseason. In addition, Apple managed to control the story so that NBC came off looking clueless and greedy. You'd think Zucker would have learned to keep his mouth shut from that media drubbing.

This last week has generated more mainstream coverage of the vinyl world than we've seen in, say, the last 20 years.

<I>The following was submitted as a letter to <A HREF="http://www.stereophile.com/interviews/66">J. Gordon Holt</A>, in response to his Editorial "<A HREF="http://www.stereophile.com/asweseeit/882awsi">Digital Revenge</A>," in issue #53 (August 1982, Vol.5 No.6). We are publishing it as a guest editorial, because the writer is one of the few audio people whose judgement we respect who disagrees with us about digital's merits. The feeling, it would seem, is mutual.</I>&mdash;<B>Ed.</B>

Many audiophiles will look back on the summer of 1982 as the year the creeping cruds invaded their hallowed halls of hi-fi. In the Conrad Hilton hotel, where most of the high-end contingent gathered at the June 1982 Consumer Electronics Show, one exhibitor was featuring a videodisc presentation with wide-range audio and insisting that this was the way of the future. And at least three others had managed to smuggle in digital tape recorders (all Sony PCM-F1s), and were giving many CES visitors their first taste of real, unadulterated, digital reproduction.

Question: What is it that almost every audiophile takes for granted, yet has more effect on the sound of his system than does any single component in that system? Answer: His listening room.