Even as Robert Harley was writing his <I>Stereophile</I> <A HREF="http://www.stereophile.com/solidpreamps/mark_levinson_no38_preamplifier…; of the $3995 Mark Levinson No.38 remote-controlled line preamplifier (it appeared in August '94, Vol.17 No.8, p.98), Madrigal Audio Laboratories announced an upgraded, cost-no-object version, the No.38S (footnote 1). At $6495, the 'S is significantly more expensive than the junior version; although it uses the same chassis, power supply, and circuit topology, it's in all other ways a different preamplifier.

At around this time last week, John Atkinson and I left the office and headed out to Bay Ridge to pack up the large and lovely <a href="http://www.stereophile.com/floorloudspeakers/608revel/index.html">Revel Ultima Salon2</a>, voted our "<a href="http://www.stereophile.com/features/1208poty/index1.html">Joint Loudspeaker of the Year</a>" for 2008 and a speaker that JA absolutely <i>adores</i>. He selected it as his overall product of the year:

I really don't know anything about the Flying Burrito Bros. I know that Gram Parsons was in the band, and that makes them cool. Michelle, the first girl I ever loved, wore a Flying Burrito Brothers t-shirt (baby blue with a metallic gold logo, purchased from some old train station thrift shop in Hackensack-ack-ack-ack-ack), but she was from San Francisco and talked about Haight-Ashbury and rearranged her furniture twice a week and received phone calls from Pauline Oliveros and Marian Zazeela (in her dorm room!), and I figured the t-shirt was just another one of her crazy things. It was only much later, after she had shaved her head and had her name legally changed to Maya Moksha, that I realized Michelle was way cooler (and crazier) than I'd ever understand.