For musicians' sake, the terms "sure thing" or "a hit" should be permanently stricken from the music business lexicon. Like Beetlejuice, if you say it enough, bad things are sure to occur. But in the long annals of the music business crushing the dreams of artists who were a "sure thing" and singles or albums that were guaranteed to be "a hit," few have risen higher and fallen faster than Lone Justice. Rising stars on the Los Angeles music scene in the early 1980s, they melded punk-rock attitude and ethos with a love for classic country music. The New York Times called them "Impressive, ingenious, and forceful." After seeing them, both Linda Ronstadt and Dolly Parton genuinely praised their sassy young singer, Maria McKee.

No fewer than eight boxes, powered by six after-market power cables, comprise my current reference front-end. As much as separate boxes can afford superior isolation and provide far more room for visionary engineers to work their magic, the advantages of a single box, which requires a single power cable and far fewer after-market interconnects, are obvious.

Enter Simaudio's Moon 891 network player/preamplifier ($25,000; footnote 2). Also called a "streaming preamplifier,"it includes a DAC that converts PCM and MQA files up to 32/384 (with 24-bit files upconverted to 32-bit) and DSD files up to 256. It also includes what Simaudio company co-owner Costa Koulisakis describes as "a fully configurable" MC/MM phono stage. Both theoretically and practically, it's an ideal solution for someone with space and/or budget constraints.