The Los Angeles and Orange County Audio Society (LAOCAS) has chosen John Atkinson, former editor-in-chief and now technical editor of Stereophile, as the winner of its 29th annual Founder's Award.

I have this friend, a smart, good-looking young physicist from Argentina. Naturally, I call him "Gaucho." He lives in a glistening-white steel-and-glass apartment overlooking lower Manhattan. I visit him regularly, usually with a group of audio friends, mainly to compare recordings, drink wine, and talk hi-fi.

Parisian high-end audio dealer AnaMighty Sound's room, F114 in Atrium 4, showed several products made in Switzerland from darTZeel, Stenheim, and Nagra. The room also became a mini-concert venue for a couple of demo sessions on Saturday that incorporated live music: Jazz saxophonist Jérôme Sabbagh played solo, accompanied by playback of his No Filter album bandmates on the room's system. They played 24-bit/96kHz versions of the tracks with Sabbagh's sax parts/tracks omitted.

Melco, the Japanese maker of the N50 Music Library featured in this review, is not a household name among US audiophiles. Veterans may recall the Melco 3560 turntable, which was considered extravagant at its 1978 launch, in part because it supported three tonearms. Confusingly, several subsidiaries of the giant keiretsu Mitsubishi are called MELCO (for "Mitsubishi Electric Corporation"), but the maker of the N50 is not one of those MELCOs. This "Melco" is, rather, short for "Maki Engineering Laboratory Company," and though it got its start in hi-fi, these days its best-known products are network-attached RAID arrays made by Melco's American division, Buffalo Americas.

In audio reviewing, there's a tension between scientific explanations for the qualities of the sound we hear and how the music, as conveyed through our equipment, makes us feel. Insights from the new field of interpersonal neurobiology can help us understand this conflict.

The Wadax room brought huge gear and huge sound to Munich High End, along with a couple of new product introductions. Their main demo, in Atrium 4.2's E207 room presented the Wadax Atlantis Reference Server ($64,900) with a new, upgraded Reference PSU external power supply ($49,000) that's said to improve performance (as well it should). Its output noise is said to be crazy low: reportedly setting a record of 200nV of RMS noise from 0.1Hz to 20kHz. It uses a feedforward topology that adjusts its power regulation circuitry in real time based on current load requirements; this helps minimize current variations, CEO Javier Guadalajara (above) explained.