The marriage of little streaming computers to DACs was at first a shotgun thing, a way to add Swiss Army knife capabilities at a price point. That was back when it was cutting-edge to have a NAS server full of digital files on the home network, and when commercial streaming was new, primitive, and lossy. Remember Pandora? Cool idea, but who wants to sit through ads and not be able to skip over more than a handful of disliked tunes every hour. Then Spotify came along. Then Apple and Amazon jumped in, and that's all she wrote. Eventually, streaming even got around to us audiophiles who desired lossless audio of at least CD resolution. Viva Qobuz!

The EXN100 is Cambridge Audio's state-of-the-art streaming DAC. It's half of the new EX line; the other half is the EXA100 integrated amplifier.

Ernie Fisher, founder and longtime editor of Canada's The Inner Ear Magazine, passed away.

I think I just found the perfect Herb speaker. It uses a hand-crafted 5" wide-range driver with a cone made from Japanese calligraphy paper. It rolls off around 50Hz at the bottom and 30kHz at the top. It has no crossover. Its cabinet is made of MDF that responds loudly when I tap it with my fingernails. Inside is what its designer calls a "short horn," which appears to harmlessly disperse back-cone energy while adding energy below the driver's cutoff frequency. Mainly, though, it's a perfect Herb speaker because it is naturally phase coherent. And sparkplug fast. And completely unmuffled.

This speaker I'm describing is Voxativ's new Hagen2 Monitor. To say it is a "Herb speaker" is to distinguish it from a John, Jason, or Kal speaker, or even a Ken or Alex speaker. If you want to know what kind of sound an audio reviewer values, notice which speakers they embrace, how well they understand them, and how long they stick with them.