I am writing this copy on a venerable Radio Shack TRS-100 portable computer while flying via TWA from St. Louis to Albuquerque, the very fact of doing so having reminded me of what I wanted to write about in this month's column: hardware reliability. J. Gordon Holt touched on this subject in last June's "As We See It," but I felt it worth readdressing in light of recent events.

<I>Big Rock Candy Mountain</I> has posted two of Owens' best: "Close Up the Honky Tonks" and "Streets of Bakersfield." Listen and remember.

Really, really good advice.

When Dorothy Parker left her estate to MLK and the NAACP, she didn't expect one detail to have such long lasting consequences: Appointing Lillian Hellman as executor actually affected her literary reputation. Marion Meade unravels a tangled tale.

The premise is simple: Prepare a history of the world based on events referenced to (or shown) in movies. Man, I had no idea that Bouvet Island, Antarctica was such a happening place. (<I>Alien vs Predator</I>).

Aside from a few grumbles about the small size of some of the rooms, the 2006 FSI was a resounding success with exhibitors as well as attendees. Show organizer Marie-Christine Prin has managed to maintain the show's appeal to hard-core audiophiles while broadening the show's coverage to include products for the video/MP3/iPod generation. As always, Marie-Christine and her stalwart assistants, C&#233;line Roy, and Diane H&#233;bert, joined for this show by Sarah Bouhali and Elisa Fernandez, ran the show with grace and efficiency. Merci!

Manufacturers exhibiting at FSI for the first time have often told me that the Montreal-area audiophiles attending the show seem to be an unusually enthusiastic and knowledgeable group. This impression is confirmed by the existence of the Montreal Audiophile Association. The Association&mdash;which always has a booth at FSI&mdash;is a highly active one, with over 100 members. They meet twice a month (they rent space in a school for this purpose), one meeting devoted to equipment (<I>eg</I>, talks by audio designers) and the other to classical music (<I>eg</I>, comparison of recordings of piano concertos). Pictured: members Yves Lepage, who is also an occasional contributor to <I>Son & Image</I> magazine, and webmaster Serge Tremblay. A fun pair of guys&mdash;I quite enjoyed talking to them.

"What did you think of the Sonus Faber/Ayre system?" I always feel like I'm being put on the spot when being asked this kind of question, and I usually say something vaguely positive but noncommittal. "Um, it sounded nice." I had listened to that system only briefly at that point, and had just a general favorable impression. I went back later, listened some more, and came to the conclusion that this was one of the most natural-sounding systems at the show. Not loud and spectacular in an obvious way, just "natural." But then I don't think I've ever heard a non-musical-sounding Sonus Faber speaker, and these Amati anniversarios (to be reviewed by John Atkinson in the May issue of <I>Stereophile</I>) were perfectly complemented by <A HREF="http://www.stereophile.com/hirezplayers/705ayre">Ayre C-5xe</A> universal disc player (<I>Stereophile</I>'s Joint Product of 2005), K-1xe preamp and V-1xe power amp.

The Elac FS 609 XP-1 is a speaker that has intrigued me since I first saw it, but somehow never got a chance to listen to it. On the Friday, my first day at FSI, I was in the room where they had a pair of these speakers, but, wouldn't you know it, they were not the ones being played. Then, on Sunday morning, I saw Vince Scalzitti, the importer, and said "Vince, do you by any chance..." but he didn't let me finish. "You want to hear the bigger Elacs, right? They're playing in the room next door." And indeed they were. Demo'd by the genial Jack Bakerdjian of Audio Gallery, a Toronto Elac dealer, the FS 609 XP-1 (catchy name, what?) driven by Korato tube electronics sounded quite promising, with a very spacious sound, even though the room was almost certainly too small for them. The FS 609 XP-1 ($17,000) uses an improved version of the famous Heil driver, with an omnidirectional supertweeter on top.