I dig tube amps. When all's said and done, good tube amps seem to sound more like real life than most solid-state gear; even after listening to and enjoying the hell out of musical solid-state designs like the Audio Research D-240 II and the Muse Model One Hundred, once I hook up the big VTL Deluxe 225s again it's just like going home. I could go on about timbral accuracy and clearer midrange textures, but the bottom line is, music just plain <I>sounds better</I> when you shoot it through good tubes, and once most people experience that magic, they're hooked.

I dig tube amps. When all's said and done, good tube amps seem to sound more like real life than most solid-state gear; even after listening to and enjoying the hell out of musical solid-state designs like the Audio Research D-240 II and the Muse Model One Hundred, once I hook up the big VTL Deluxe 225s again it's just like going home. I could go on about timbral accuracy and clearer midrange textures, but the bottom line is, music just plain <I>sounds better</I> when you shoot it through good tubes, and once most people experience that magic, they're hooked.

I dig tube amps. When all's said and done, good tube amps seem to sound more like real life than most solid-state gear; even after listening to and enjoying the hell out of musical solid-state designs like the Audio Research D-240 II and the Muse Model One Hundred, once I hook up the big VTL Deluxe 225s again it's just like going home. I could go on about timbral accuracy and clearer midrange textures, but the bottom line is, music just plain <I>sounds better</I> when you shoot it through good tubes, and once most people experience that magic, they're hooked.

I dig tube amps. When all's said and done, good tube amps seem to sound more like real life than most solid-state gear; even after listening to and enjoying the hell out of musical solid-state designs like the Audio Research D-240 II and the Muse Model One Hundred, once I hook up the big VTL Deluxe 225s again it's just like going home. I could go on about timbral accuracy and clearer midrange textures, but the bottom line is, music just plain <I>sounds better</I> when you shoot it through good tubes, and once most people experience that magic, they're hooked.

Market tests have been conducted, rumors floated, and now official word has arrived that DualDisc, a new two-sided disc format combining a CD on one side with a DVD on the other, will launch this October.

One of the most fascinating aspects of the digital age is that clever students&mdash;or sometimes, clever dropouts&mdash;can undo the work of teams of PhD engineers.

The music industry may be going the way of the dinosaur, but if so, it's going to go down with its army of lawyers fighting all the way to the bitter end.

In a landmark special feature, Chris Dunn & Malcolm Omar Hawksford thoroughly dissect the vicissitudes of the digital interface and jitter in <A HREF="http://www.stereophile.com/features/396bits">Bits is Bits?</A> The authors note, "The <I>theoretical</I> performance obtainable from the 16-bit linear PCM format sampled at 44.1kHz is superior to any analog sources available to the consumer."

It was a powder blue Pinto. Brand new, it drove like a bowl of Jello with wheels. No matter how firmly I gripped the steering wheel, I had no confidence that it had any kind of relationship with the wheels on the road. And pickup? There was none. But because its designers had sacrificed all quality to build it cheaply, the Ford Pinto was equally cheap to rent when I did so back in 1980.