On a Thursday night out at Chickie Wah Wah on Canal Street

Stereophile contributing editor John Swenson and I had the good fortune to stumble upon an LP collection the store had purchased and put out in the “new arrivals” section.

Command Performance AV (115 Park Avenue, Suite 2, Falls Church, VA 22046) is holding a Clearaudio event on Saturday December 12 from noon–5pm. Clearaudio founder, Peter Suchy, will be demonstrating the one-of-kind Clearaudio Statement turntable (right) along with the Goldfinger Cartridge and Absolute Phono. This will be the first showing of the new Statement turntable on the East Coast. To highlight the capabilities of the Statement, Garth Leerer and Jesse Luna of Musical Surroundings will be demonstrating the brand-new Eclipse versions of the Aesthetix electronics.

Two letters from readers (see below) started us thinking again about something we've mulled at, off and on, for the past year or so: Does today's high-fidelity equipment, for all its vastly improved performance, actually sound that much better than the best of the early components?

This is an electrostatic column speaker, 6' tall and costing $6000/pair. An integral, fan-cooled amplifier is located in the base. The 2SW is said to cover almost the entire frequency range and is based on a patent, number 3,668,335, issued to manufacturer/designer Harold Beveridge on June 6, 1972. Internal acoustic lenses in front of the electrostatic panels widen the speaker's dispersion: In the Beveridge literature, it says "This 6-foot high device consolidated the entire frequency range into a vertical line source, and uniformly disperses it over a horizontal pattern, 180 degrees wide. The beaming characteristics of the high frequencies are ingeniously translated into the same dispersive pattern as the low frequencies, creating a perfectly balanced cylindrical sound wave front."