Ah, Denmark. Land of the Vikings and blue-eyed, blond-haired folk with faces sculpted just so. I loved my week there as a Stereophile correspondent and member of a scraggly scrum of audio journalists whisked to DALI headquarters on a promotional junket.

Aside from its universal attractiveness, what struck me during my stay in the southernmost and smallest of the Scandinavian countries was how by North American standards the more densely populated cities I visited, Copenhagen and Aarhus, seemed orderly and clean. Cars, pedestrians, and cyclists kept tightly to their lanes. I saw no cigarette butts on the sidewalk and only sparse pockets of graffiti. There seemed to be a natural, sequential flow to everything—an evenness and balance that was close to idyllic.

Outside its bigger cities, Denmark looks pastoral, with long stretches of grassy fields sporadically interrupted by broad bodies of water, and bucolic towns that seem to have sprouted in the middle of nowhere. It's in these towns that a lot of Danish hi-fi is made: DALI in Nørager (population 1143); Dynaudio in Skanderborg (population 20,000). Skanderborg contains evidence of human settlements belonging to the earliest Nordic Stone Age, starting some 100,000 years ago.

Dynaudio doesn't go back quite that far; the company was founded in 1977...

One of the pleasures of reviewing—and also using—products from Pass Laboratories is an encounter with Nelson Pass's writing, which can usually be found in the owner's manual and is always competent, insightful, and sometimes funny. How often do you get real pleasure and insight from reading an owner's manual?

Pass Labs has a lot of owner's manuals online. Reading through one, I encountered the following passage; you'll find the same or similar language in other manuals and on the Pass Labs website. I present it not only because I admire it and agree with the philosophy it expresses but also because it captures the spirit of the product under review—the XP-27 phono preamplifier ($12,075 in silver)—at least as I've experienced it during an extended review period. Here it is, quoted at length with some slight adjustments to make it consistent with Stereophile's editorial style...

"Schwabing isn't a neighborhood, but a state of being," declared the Countess Fanny zu Reventlow, an early feminist who scandalized German society by parenting out of wedlock, carrying a revolver, and practicing what today tends to be called ethical nonmonogamy. Thomas Mann described the fellow denizens of this northern corner of Munich as "the most singular, the most delicate, the boldest exotic plants." At the turn of the last century, Schwabing was on its way to becoming the artistic epicenter of Europe, a laboratory for the most progressive social ideas, and arguably the birthplace of modernity. Kandinsky made Western art's first abstract painting while living there; local cafes once patronized by Lenin would soon host a young Adolf Hitler. Some called it Schwabylon.

These days, Schwabing's spotless, freshly paved streets are lined with the glass-and-steel facades of Hiltons and Marriotts. Its proximity to MOC, Munich's titanic convention center, has turned the neighborhood into a destination for business travelers from near and far.