"We've tried making it more powerful. When I was away on holiday, some of our people cooked up a more powerful version and presented it to me on my return. It sounded awful."

"We've tried making it more powerful. When I was away on holiday, some of our people cooked up a more powerful version and presented it to me on my return. It sounded awful."

"We've tried making it more powerful. When I was away on holiday, some of our people cooked up a more powerful version and presented it to me on my return. It sounded awful."

"We've tried making it more powerful. When I was away on holiday, some of our people cooked up a more powerful version and presented it to me on my return. It sounded awful."

"We've tried making it more powerful. When I was away on holiday, some of our people cooked up a more powerful version and presented it to me on my return. It sounded awful."

The Melbourne Symphony plays music on VB bottles. My kind of musc.
<P ALIGN=Center
<object width="425" height="373"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/cLzvdpoiibE&rel=1&border=1"></param><param name="wmode" value="transparent"></param><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/cLzvdpoiibE&rel=1&border=1&quot; type="application/x-shockwave-flash" wmode="transparent" width="425" height="373"></embed></object>

Audio Research, one of the companies that created the Silver Age of American high-end audio 38 years ago, was acquired by Italian private equity firm Quadrivio SGR on January 25. Quadrivio, which acquired Sonus Faber in 2007, intends to keep Audio Research's current management team in place.

What’s the point of having a blog if you can’t be self-indulgent now and then? So allow me to plug my new book, <I>Daydream Believers: How a Few Grand Ideas Wrecked American Power</I> (Wiley & Sons). As the subtitle may suggest, it is not a biography of the Monkees but rather a journalistic dissection of <I>why</I> the United States’ global adventures and image have gone to hell in recent years. Some of you may know that I write a twice-weekly column in <I>Slate</I> about such matters. My book is <I>not</I> a compilation of my columns; it’s all new stuff. The official pub date is February 4, but it’s already in stock in many bookstores and on amazon.