The two Big Eye IPAs I had enjoyed with dinner were doing the trick. I was feeling weightless even before stepping onto the ferry. Beautiful people crowded the front, holding onto railings and each other, while some sat inside the old, wooden frame. Lower Manhattan was soft, quiet, and blue, and two towers of light shot high into the night sky. Suddenly, imperceptibly, the unreal city became smaller and more distant: I hadn’t noticed that the ferry had departed. We could just as easily have been riding a magic carpet. Robert Baird and I were on our way to see John Prine at Governors Island, just a short ferry trip away from Ground Zero in Manhattan.

One of my favorite parental duties is dispensing advice that's calculated to make me sound wiser than I am. Among those pearls: Every so often you should change your point of view&#151;your <I>philosophies</I>&#151;just to see if your opinions can stand the strain. In doing so, you may discover a few things that are better than you expected them to be!

One of my favorite parental duties is dispensing advice that's calculated to make me sound wiser than I am. Among those pearls: Every so often you should change your point of view&#151;your <I>philosophies</I>&#151;just to see if your opinions can stand the strain. In doing so, you may discover a few things that are better than you expected them to be!

One of my favorite parental duties is dispensing advice that's calculated to make me sound wiser than I am. Among those pearls: Every so often you should change your point of view&#151;your <I>philosophies</I>&#151;just to see if your opinions can stand the strain. In doing so, you may discover a few things that are better than you expected them to be!

One of my favorite parental duties is dispensing advice that's calculated to make me sound wiser than I am. Among those pearls: Every so often you should change your point of view&#151;your <I>philosophies</I>&#151;just to see if your opinions can stand the strain. In doing so, you may discover a few things that are better than you expected them to be!

One of my favorite parental duties is dispensing advice that's calculated to make me sound wiser than I am. Among those pearls: Every so often you should change your point of view&#151;your <I>philosophies</I>&#151;just to see if your opinions can stand the strain. In doing so, you may discover a few things that are better than you expected them to be!

One of my favorite parental duties is dispensing advice that's calculated to make me sound wiser than I am. Among those pearls: Every so often you should change your point of view&#151;your <I>philosophies</I>&#151;just to see if your opinions can stand the strain. In doing so, you may discover a few things that are better than you expected them to be!

I'm a basically a tube guy, but I've never warmed up to most lower-powered integrated tube amps. Although I quite enjoyed the time I spent with the Cayin A-50T, which I <A HREF="http://www.stereophile.com/integratedamps/308cay">reviewed</A&gt; in the March 2008 issue of <I>Stereophile</I>, over the years I've typically found I'd rather spend time with mid-priced, solid-state integrateds from Creek, Musical Fidelity, or Simaudio than deal with the loss of definition at the frequency extremes that I've heard from many lower-powered tube models. So it was with a bit of trepidation that I approached the VSi60, a 50Wpc integrated amplifier from Audio Research Corporation.