Register to win a pair of Morrow Audio High-end Speaker Cables with SSI Technology (MSRP $139.00) we are giving away.

According to the company:

"Standard version shown in the photo. Bi-wired & Bi-amped versions also available on the Morrow website. The SP3 (shown) consists of 24 runs of solid core, small gauge and individually insulated, silver coated copper wire (renowned SSI Technology) which is then silver soldered to the termination of choice. Silver coated copper wire was chosen for the excellent balance of sound that it provides. "

[This Sweepstakes is now closed.]

Standing in front of the poster for the November issue of Stereophile, new at the show, is Michael Mandell, who used to provide IT services for the magazine when it was first based in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Michael is wearing a vintage T-shirt with the "Lonely at the Top" illustration we created for our April 1988 "Recommended Components" issue.

The beginning of every audio show is charged with a grinning ear-to-ear sense of audio-industry renewal, but the Rocky Mountain Audio Fest, which started today at Denver's Tech Center Marriott, always takes that hopeful charge to its highest level.

Thursday night, I took the F train to Manhattan's Blue Note, the 8pm set, to see Trio 3—the longstanding improv band, consisting of Oliver Lake on alto sax, Reggie Workman on bass, and Andrew Cyrille on drums—joined by Jason Moran on piano . . . Moran, the most inventive pianist on the scene today, can play anything with anybody.

A lesser known but no less active music town is Northampton, Massachusetts.

To paraphrase the playwright Alan Bennett: When I started Listener magazine, my idea was to create a small, anarchist journal. But people wouldn't obey the rules.

In 2003, when I began writing for Stereophile, I felt very much at home. John Atkinson had one set of rules (footnote 1) to ring us in, us being the codependent communities of audio reviewers and audio manufacturers. Martinet that I am, I layered atop those policies a few rules of my own, to govern interactions with members of the industry. More recently, I began to observe an additional practice—I wouldn't quite call it a policy—meant to prevent mismatches, missteps, misunderstandings, and hard feelings all around: When someone offers me a product of a sort for which I have a consistent and automatic dislike, I tell them so. I say, politely, that I'm disinclined to borrow and write about the thing, because I suspect it will mesh with neither my system nor my tastes.