I've long been impressed by the design, construction, and sound of the tubed electronics produced by Vladimir Lamm, but I'd never had a Lamm Industries product in my house. So I asked for a review sample of Lamm's flagship line-stage preamplifier, the LL1 Signature.

Once, on a cold, dank, soundless day deep in the Eastern bloc, I watched a man spend over a million dollars on an audio system: a turntable, a fancy horn tweeter, a few wires, and some amplification for his modified Klipschorns. I asked him what he did for a living, and he told me he was a notary public.

The CD-200 is the new CD-only player from TASCAM, the professional-audio division of TEAC (footnote 1). It has unbalanced analog outputs, and RCA and optical digital outputs. The CD-200 also has a new transport, the CD-5020A, designed by TEAC for audio use.

Unlike many affordable disc-spinning devices with slot-loading transports (eg, inexpensive DVD players starting at $29.99), the CD-200 has a traditional drawer mechanism that has been upgraded to minimize the noise of loading and clamping a disc. TASCAM also claims improvements in the internal clock function, for smoother sound and lower jitter.

Has it really been 30 years since an engineer named William H. Firebaugh unleashed on the audio world his radical and decidedly affordable Well Tempered Arm? (footnote 1) Indeed it has—and today, at 82, Bill Firebaugh seems busier than ever, with so many irons in the fire that he's been forced to give up the noble game of golf—an irony, as you'll see in a moment.