At the top of what I'd later learn to call "Arthur's Peak," I looked out onto the jagged, gray city and felt immortal.

Pete gave me the two fingers.

(Who wouldn't feel immortal with hair like that?)

In his essay, "<a href="http://stereophile.com/asweseeit/890awsi/">Can We Agree to Disagree</a>," Peter W. Mitchell states:

This weather is pointless. Pointless! What's the use of all this snow and ice? Don't tell me it looks pretty. I'm just not fit for this sort of cold. It's days like today after windy winter nights like last, when the temperatures plunge into the single digits and my apartment's old pipes freeze, that I wish I had an entire fleet of fiery amps to keep me warm.

I had a wonderful chuckle while reading the reviews of the Finial Laser Turntable in the May 1990 issue of <I>HFN/RR</I>. Perhaps I should preface this by saying that, in the entire quarter-century since I became intensely involved in audio, I have always found the LP an unsatisfactory playback medium for music. As a regular concert-goer in Boston and an addict of WGBH-FM's simply miked, virtually unprocessed live broadcasts of BSO concerts direct from Symphony Hall, I never learned to ignore the many anti-musical distortions endemic to LPs&#151;the ticks and pops, the inner-groove congestion and tracing distortion, the harsh mistracking of high-level climaxes and overcut grooves, the persistent static in dry winter air, the constant slight wow due to off-center spindle holes, the muddy bass due to resonances and feedback, the universal cutting engineer's practice of blending low bass into mono (which wipes out low-frequency hall ambience).