One way that Steve Davis and his wife Carmen share their multi-decade embrace of Transcendental Meditation with show attendees is by making the experience available to anyone who cares to sit and listen, within as well as without. This table on the lower level, as well as hour-long Introduction to Transcendental Meditation seminars on both Friday and Saturday, helped spread the word.

Don't be deceived by this photo. Despite the short registration line on Friday morning, the line-up continued without let-up through most of the day. Virtually every room I visited on the first day of AXPONA, from the large suites on the basement and lobby levels to the standard and large hotel rooms on the twelfth floor, was filled with people. Registration figures are not yet available, but the JD Events folks are certain that attendance at the first day of the show has well outstripped last year's sterling attendance figures.

On Thursday April 24, Sony announced a new round of reasonably priced products, all of which are capable of high-resolution audio playback. Sony's unequivocal embrace of high-resolution audio—the acronym HRA seems to have become the mutually accepted, industry-wide term—was the main order of business. Defining HRA as everything greater than Red Book CD (16/44.1k) Jeff Hiatt, the company's Director of Home Audio (above), began by stating, "We have sacrificed quality in order to get convenience. MP3 has been degrading the quality of music, and was a quantum leap backwards. The young generation doesn't even realize that they're not listening to music as the artist intended it be heard."

What I failed to make absolutely clear in my April column is that I really, truly, thoroughly enjoyed all three USB DAC–headphone amps that I auditioned: the Audioengine D3 ($189), the AudioQuest DragonFly v1.2 ($149), and the Cambridge Audio DacMagic XS ($199). Each offered a slightly different perspective on the music, but none could be accused of closing lanes on the George Washington Bridge, dumping several feet of snow on top of our car, or doing anything especially wrong.