Call me perverse, or perhaps I've just been around too many musicians for too long, but the part of Exhibitionism, The Rolling Stones traveling show that I liked best was the very opening display in which you walk into a facsimile of the apartment that the five band members once shared in London when they were starting out. You could almost smell the rotting garbage and unwashed socks and underwear.

The path of an audiophile is one of arduous sonic pursuit. Such a worthy cause is often accompanied by an unquenchable aesthetic thirst.

With this video we introduce the "1 Minute Audiophile Escape": the first of many in our series of experiential segments purely dedicated to audiophile eye candy.

The power-amp saga continues. For months, I've been plowing through the market, searching for something to drive my three front speakers. (I use a two-channel amp for the surrounds.) It can be a three-channel amp or three monoblocks—it just has to sound great with my speakers, and be light enough that I can lift it by myself when I need to rearrange my system. I'd finally settled on Classé's Sigma Monos for their transparency, and because I can manage their weight, one at a time. At the CEDIA Expo in September 2016, I saw two more candidates worthy of consideration. Review samples of both arrived here almost simultaneously.

New England Audio Resource's NEAR-50M is a cyborg: metal innards in a wooden body. It represents NEAR's top statement in the firm's Metal Diaphragm Technology speaker line, which features the "NEAR-Perfect" driver cone. Metal—in this case an anodized aluminum alloy—is much more rigid than paper or plastic. Hence, a driver with a metal cone acts more nearly as a true piston. When it comes to loudspeaker cones, breaking up is not hard to do. When that happens, the cone flexes in a complex pattern, generating harmonic distortion. A typical plastic or paper 8" woofer may experience its first breakup mode at a frequency as low as 500Hz. The NEAR 8" metal-cone woofer's first breakup mode is said to be well above 2kHz, and their 4" metal-cone midrange does much better than that.