In the September 1988 issue of Stereophile, I wrote a rave review about the first speaker, the AE1, from what was to me a totally unknown English company, Acoustic Energy. Though tiny, and possessing an intrinsically limited low-frequency response, the $1500/pair AE1 was one of the most musical loudspeakers I have ever used, throwing a deep, beautifully defined soundstage, and possessed of a clean treble and a sweet, if rather forward-balanced, midband.

I went everywhere!

Attending the two-day Making Vinyl Berlin B2B conference on May 2 and 3, 2019 was an obvious decision for me, even if Day 1's "Physical Media World Conference" panel discussion was more about optical digital media than it was about analog vinyl.

When I joined Hi-Fi News in the mid-1970s, one of that magazine's stable mates reviewed cars. An automotive writer appeared in the pub one lunchtime—"I rolled another one," he said, as he joined us at the bar. It turned out that one of his tasks was to take a car he was testing to the skid pad to see how many lateral G's the car could handle. Of course, the chances of a consumer turning that car over were minimal, but the reviewer was investigating the edges of the performance envelope.

As I became familiar with audio measurements, it struck me that the equivalent of the skid pan test was the thermal preconditioning we perform when we get an amplifier on the test bench. Even if an end-user doesn't drive his amplifier into thermal meltdown, the edges of the envelope need to be explored.

Béla Bartók: String Quartets Nos.1, 3 & 5, Nicholas Cords: Touch Harmonious and Joseph C. Phillips Jr.: The Grey Land: A Mono-Opera.

Diana Krall: This Dream of You, Ella Fitzgerald: Ella: The Lost Berlin Tapes and Charles Mingus: @ Bremen 1964 & 1975.

Nick Cave: Idiot Prayer: Nick Cave Alone at Alexandra Palace, Brian Eno: Film Music 1976-2020 and Anna McClellan: I Saw First Light.