Does the SLP in the <A HREF="http://www.stereophile.com/amplificationreviews/204cary">Cary SLP-98P tube preamplifier</A>'s name stand for "sweet little preamplifier"? Art Dudley sets out to determine if Cary's latest version in the SLP preamp series lives up to the moniker.

What's in a name?

Two new companies have formed in recent weeks to bring audiophile cable and connector products to market.

Back in January of 2002, we <A HREF="http://www.stereophile.com/news/11252/index.html">reported</A&gt; that loudspeaker manufacturer <A HREF="http://www.nhthifi.com">NHT</A&gt; and <A HREF="http://www.deqx.com/">DEQX</A&gt; (then known as ClarityEQ) had begun to co-develop a new line of active loudspeakers using DEQX's custom digital <A HREF="http://www.stereophile.com/news/10969/index.html">room correction technology</A>. It's two years later, and NHT says it is finally ready to unveil the first speaker system incorporating digital signal processing (DSP) developed during the alliance.

I've been in a nostalgic funk of late. What started it was visiting Golden, Colorado, where I spent my graduate-school days, and seeing all of the changes, not to mention the lecture halls full of kids who couldn't be a day over 12. When I commented on how young the freshmen looked, our host&mdash;a colleague of mine from grad school, now a professor&mdash;responded, "Those are seniors, Brian." I felt a little old.

I've been in a nostalgic funk of late. What started it was visiting Golden, Colorado, where I spent my graduate-school days, and seeing all of the changes, not to mention the lecture halls full of kids who couldn't be a day over 12. When I commented on how young the freshmen looked, our host&mdash;a colleague of mine from grad school, now a professor&mdash;responded, "Those are seniors, Brian." I felt a little old.

I've been in a nostalgic funk of late. What started it was visiting Golden, Colorado, where I spent my graduate-school days, and seeing all of the changes, not to mention the lecture halls full of kids who couldn't be a day over 12. When I commented on how young the freshmen looked, our host&mdash;a colleague of mine from grad school, now a professor&mdash;responded, "Those are seniors, Brian." I felt a little old.

I've been in a nostalgic funk of late. What started it was visiting Golden, Colorado, where I spent my graduate-school days, and seeing all of the changes, not to mention the lecture halls full of kids who couldn't be a day over 12. When I commented on how young the freshmen looked, our host&mdash;a colleague of mine from grad school, now a professor&mdash;responded, "Those are seniors, Brian." I felt a little old.

We audiophiles are ever hopeful that, however satisfying our present equipment and setup, we can achieve even greater enjoyment with a tweak or an upgrade. And we never stop: It was only 16 years (and three turntables) ago that I bought what I declared would be my last turntable, and there's no doubt that this "dead" format has improved substantially since then. Now, even as we make another (but less paradigm-shifting) format transition, from CD to SACD and DVD-Audio, new two-channel DACs continue to appear that show us how far we still are from wresting all the music from the original "Red Book" 16-bit CD format. I reviewed the wonderful <A HREF="http://www.stereophile.com/digitalsourcereviews/781">Weiss Medea DAC</A> in February 2003, and there are still on my auditioning rack are two more Swiss DACs that might redefine the category: the Orpheus 1 and the Nagra DAP.

We audiophiles are ever hopeful that, however satisfying our present equipment and setup, we can achieve even greater enjoyment with a tweak or an upgrade. And we never stop: It was only 16 years (and three turntables) ago that I bought what I declared would be my last turntable, and there's no doubt that this "dead" format has improved substantially since then. Now, even as we make another (but less paradigm-shifting) format transition, from CD to SACD and DVD-Audio, new two-channel DACs continue to appear that show us how far we still are from wresting all the music from the original "Red Book" 16-bit CD format. I reviewed the wonderful <A HREF="http://www.stereophile.com/digitalsourcereviews/781">Weiss Medea DAC</A> in February 2003, and there are still on my auditioning rack are two more Swiss DACs that might redefine the category: the Orpheus 1 and the Nagra DAP.