If you can put aside the fact that what was once a rock 'n' roll band has now grown into a merciless money machine, and a somewhat creaky repetitive live act that hasn't made a great record since 1978, they still do deserve a nod for never saying die. To borrow a famous line from Midnight Cowboy, those boys are gonna die on the stage. And yes, we will certainly miss them when they're gone!

One day before the Los Angeles Audio Show, Jason Victor Serinus, his fresh haircut, and I visited VTL Amplifiers, Inc. in Chino, California. We were given a tour of the factory by Bea Lam and Luke Manley, who were featured in this 2007 interview by Jason.

Palmer Audio's 2.5 turntable, with its laminated plinth of Baltic birch and metallic features, looks Scandinavian but is made in the UK. It shares a few conceptual similarities with the turntables made by Nottingham Analogue, another British brand. The review sample had the optional side panels of cherrywood veneer.

Bernie Krause: Citadels of Mystery
Mobile Fidelity MFSL 1-505 (LP).

This is a very hyped, contrived recording, but then nobody ever pretended that this kind of musical construction was supposed to approximate the sound of a live performance. The strings are quite steely on this but, in all other respects, the recording is is stupendous—unctuously rich, smooth and limpidly clear, with some awesomely taut low end and cuttingly crisp percussion sounds.

When you graduate from mass-market hi-fi to high-end audio, one of the first things you notice is that audiophile gear dispenses with the gadgets and gimmicks that clutter up the front panels of most stereo receivers and integrated amplifiers. The dominant philosophy in mass-market design is that features sell products: the more functions a product has, the more desirable it will seem in the store. High-end designers, on the other hand, prefer the KISS approach: Keep It Simple, Stupid!

Better known for their speaker cables and interconnects, The Absolute Reference Audio Labs (TARA Labs) has quietly branched out into electronics and loudspeakers. Their Passage is a line-level–only preamp. I actually favor such a modular approach to preamp design. Standing as we are at the dawn of the digital audio age, the breakup of the traditional preamp into separate phono and line-level stages represents a more flexible, cost-effective design approach.