Rather than debut its new $13,000 DSX1000 Network Music Player in the UK, where the company is based, Chord founder and chief scientist, John Franks (above), traveled to Mountain View, CA on November 8 for the unveiling. The site was the spacious, extremely attractive Northern California showroom of Audio High, one of the high-end dealers in the US that display Chord's top-end Reference products.

It was no accident that residential architect Mark Cronander, aka Variac, scheduled the Sixth Burning Amp DIY Fest for October 28, on the same weekend that the AES Convention (Audio Engineering Society) took place in San Francisco. Not only did Cronander attract a fair number of new folks who came into town for the convention, but he also scored, as a speaker, class-D amplification expert Bruno Putzeys of Belgium's Hypex Electronics.

I've heard a lot of great audio components over the years, but even in that steady stream of excellence, a few have stood out as something special. These are the products that, in their day, set a new standard for performance, and many of them are ones I wish I'd hung on to. Among these products are three preamps from Audio Research: the SP3A, the SP6B, and the SP10 (footnote 1). I know I'm not alone in viewing these models as classics.