Oh, I talk a good game when it comes to the whole music-lover-<I>vs</I>-audiophile thing. But I admit that when it comes to record players, I'm just another hardware junkie. I love turntables and tonearms for more than the musical enjoyment they give me. Turntables and tonearms are my favorite toys.

Kalman Rubinson fires up the <A HREF="http://www.stereophile.com//amplificationreviews/769/">Sonic Frontiers Line 2 line preamplifier</A>, commenting, "I began this review grudgingly because I'd made a decision a while back to no longer pursue vacuum-tube electronics." But it's where KR ends up after months of listening that counts.

One area where DVD-Audio so far has an advantage over SACD is on the computer. To date there are no SACD-compatible personal computers on the consumer market, allowing the playback of a single-layer stereo or multichannel DSD format disc. One can, however, play a DVD-Audio disc on a PC using, for example, a <A HREF="http://www.stereophile.com/news/11454/">Sound Blaster Audigy 2 sound card</A>.

Incubus is following the Dixie Chicks' lead.

The continuing recession is hitting <A HREF="http://www.circuitcity.com">Circuit City</A> hard.

The Swedes have found a new way to kill time on those long, cold Scandinavian winter nights. On February 7, <A HREF="http://www.sr.se">Swedish Radio</A> (SR) announced that it had begun multichannel test transmissions from the Sirius 2 satellite, utilizing <A HREF="http://www.dtsonline.com">DTS</A>'s Coherent Acoustics compression/ decompression algorithm. The tests are intended to run until the end of April 2003.

The <A HREF="http://www.ce.org">Consumer Electronics Association</A> (CEA) has responded to an ongoing copyright infringement <A HREF="http://www.stereophile.com/news/11562/">suit</A&gt; being pursued in a US District Court by the music industry against Verizon Communications, Inc.

"What? <I>What???</I> No Smiths?" asks reader Steven J. Wilder in this issue's "Letters" (p.9), regarding my interjection in the "<A HREF="http://www.stereophile.com//features/710/index4.html">Honorable Mentions</A>" sidebar of last November's "40 Essential Albums." Hey, I think The Smiths suck&mdash;okay, Mr. Wilder? Morrissey's self-absorbed adolescent whining had no place on a list that included music from such grownups as Morrison, Mitchell, and Mingus. I'm not alone in this sentiment. Jon Iverson, www.stereophile.com's webmaster, almost stapled together the pages of <I>Mojo</I> magazine's April 2001 retrospective of Morrissey's and Marr's music so he could skip over it without running the risk of the veins on his forehead exploding.