Six years after Hans-Ole Vitus, the founder of Danish company Vitus Audio, visited the United States to premier his first three products at CES 2004, Michael Fremer went gaga over the company's top-line MP-P201 Masterpiece Series phono preamplifier. Thirteen years later, at AXPONA 2023, it was my turn to be blown away, this time by the sound of a $385,000 Vitus Audio top-of-the-line Masterpiece series front-end and amplifiers that sang through price-commensurate Estelon Extreme Mk II loudspeakers.

In between—and not for want of trying—Vitus's presence in these pages has been limited to show reports. It's time to change that.

I sometimes joke about how audio designers create products that resemble themselves, not just in how they look, but also in the design approach used, and especially the way they sound. So, we have tall, cool, pragmatic Scandinavians making gear like the lean, elegant Børresen loudspeakers, while the Italians build luscious curvy equipment endowed with natural wood and leather, like Sonus Faber speakers and Unison Research amplifiers. Continuing this blatant stereotyping, we have Acoustic Signature founder Gunther Frohnhöfer, a stout German known for creating precision-built turntables that are as solid-looking as he is.

When I visited the Acoustic Signature factory in 2023, I watched as they hewed massive slabs of aluminum into beautiful, heavyweight turntables. This approach is the opposite of the lightweight-but-rigid philosophy embraced by Rega, and while the resulting performance has different strengths, I would argue that it is at least equally valid. As with Rega, Acoustic Signature products have a purposeful simplicity, in a way that would allow a nonaudiophile to instantly recognize what their function is.

For all its insidious ferocity, the COVID ordeal also spawned a new musical genre: pandemic records. Stuck indoors like everyone else, some musicians found ways to express their creativity at home, often exploring new repertoire. While some of the resulting albums were myopic and indulgent, others—McCartney III for example—confirmed that artists who need to create will find ways. Trapped indoors, New York singer/actor Hilary Gardner found her musical muse wandering toward an unexpected place. "The songs I was initially drawn to—because I'm in this one-bedroom apartment in downtown Brooklyn—were about life on the trail, out in the natural world, generally being alone," she told me in a recent Zoom call, recalling the claustrophobia of that time. "They were songs that either embraced that feeling or were kind of rolling around in the melancholy of solitude. I wanted that thematic thread of being on the trail to connect all the tunes."

After 27 years, yesterday was the final day AVTech's webmaster Jon Iverson was responsible for overseeing the company's websites, including this one. Now in his mid-60s, Jon felt it was time for him to retire while he still had the energy to explore his other interests.