I've been playing and listening to music for over 40 years. I played trumpet from grade school through college, and now days sing in an acapella octet. I work as a broadcast engineer, run front of house at a large church, and am the sound chair for our local community theater. My favorite speakers are a pair of home made TQWT's in my office at work, and I love making and using various electronic devices.

I bought a pair of VA Soloists for a ridiculously low price at a second hand store. The very scanty information I've found about them indicates that they are well received for having good imaging, and that's about it.

It's frustrating that there's an article here at Stereophile about a Levinson 38 preamp where the reviewer mentions using Soloists as reference speakers, and says that they are reviewed 'elsewhere in this issue' but which issue...?

Reading "Juliet, Naked" this week. Nick Hornby is getting back on a killer track.

I liked but was more lukewarm regarding "Slam!"...but to be fair, I had just read "King Dork" and "Slam!" may be better than I recollect! Funny how that can work.

"How To Be Good" and "A Long way Down" are OK, but didn't get my sympathies up for the characters.

"Juliet, Naked" has lots of music-fan related insight that can be almost too astute!

So far, two thumbs up.

Gold (basis the active Comex December 2009 contract) gapped through old resistance at 1033 last Tuesday. It is now technically (and fundamentally, due to the $USD's continuation of its year-long downtrend) set up to run. Nobody knows how far.

Most of the best miners are still playing catch-up. AUY, GG, NXG, AEM, GOLD, and RGLD still haven't made new all-time highs (exceptions would be GOLD and AEM), but are poised to do so by year-end.

For all you folks who own a CD player that cost under $9000;
your player is now more or less obsolete!

I have been using the Ayre C5xe for the past three years, and before I bought it I listened extensively to everything under 10 grand, and it sounded the best to me so I forked out $6000 for it (which for me was a very big deal). I thought I had bought my last CD player.

11/8 at Le Poisson Rouge, Grand Valley State Univ. Ensemble is performing Terry Riley's seminal "In C"; their CD of the recording is also coming out, with a 2nd CD that's a remix of "In C"

Why am I so keen on this undergrad group of contemporary music-playing fiends? Only because their recording of Steve Reich's sparsely lush and lugubrious "Music for 18 Musicians" was one of my favorite CDs a couple years ago (or was it last year? Early Alzheimers...)

Fred Kaplan's current blog posting (here) has me thinking again about how valuable lossless codecs are, or could be.

Black Saint's and Soul Note's output is one of the great treasures of jazz, but most of it is hard to come by. How much better, how much safer it would be if the catalog were available as FLAC files.