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<I>The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao</I>

On Christmas day, my friend, the Nuyorican goddess Liz Ramirez-Weaver saw me looking at Junot Diaz's The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. "It's good," she said. "You should borrow it."

So I jammed it in my ditty bag along with copies of Hanslick's On the Musically Beautiful and Alperson's introduction to the philosophy of music, What is Music? that her husband Eric had pressed on me. (Serious guy, Eric—I had to fight off his offer of Nietzche's thoughts on music: "Although I have to admit, it reads better in German." BMAFG!)

Of course, TBWLOOW languished in my bag until I…

Helpful Bagheera

Our least trusting cat has inexplicably determined that her favorite perch in the house is on the heavily trafficked threshold between the kitchen and living room. She's training us to step lightly—and as far to the other side as possible.

Cats: training humans for over 100,000 years.

High Ground

Sometimes, Huckleberry simply has to take the high ground and brood. Well, it looks like brooding, but he's not deep, that cat. He's probably thinking How did I get here? How do I get down? What was that middle thing again?

Awards Are Here

The show has just opened its doors and Stereophile's Stephen Mejias holds the new Product of the Year awards to be handed out all day long.

High end audio is spread out around Las Vegas again this year, with exhibitors at the Venetian, Alexis Park, St. Tropez, and hotels scattered in between.

Synergistic Tubes

We ran into SinglePower Inc.'s Mikhail Rotenberg as he was sprinting down the hall to the Synergistic Research room. "Check these out," he said. "These are a 1932 Tung Argon 4327 and a 1943 722A (323), labeled Centennial, but manufactured by Western Electric."

Rotenberg has a warehouse full of NOS treasures like this he bought from a MilSpec supplier near West Point. A few minutes later, we saw them in action, but we could have never guessed what they were being used in.

This is the Synergistic Research/SinglePower Enigma power supply ($6000) for Synergistic's active…

Hot Rod iPod

The new Wadia iTransport detailed above also comes in your choice of hot rod finishes. Well not officially, but they couldn't resist making one for the show.

Wadia iTransport Rear End

The back of the iTransport fully decked out with XLO cabling.

Wadia iTransport

It exists; we saw it for ourselves! Wadia's $349 iTransport can take the digital signal out of an iPod before the DAC, outputting 16-bit/44.1khz resolution for uncompressed files—it doesn't upconvert lower-rez files like MP3s, but it does reformat them to 16/44.1, according to Wadia's John Schaffer.

And then we heard the iTransport driving the $13,500 Wadia 781 player/DAC/preamp and Halcro DM308 power amp and a pair of Verity Parsifals. Wow!

Big, bold, and extremely accurate sound on Van the Man and some baroque lute. We poked around he rear panel and noticed the iTransport…

Roger's Back!

We were stunned to see Roger Skoff in the Ultralink/XLO room—we thought he'd retired years ago. "I did," he explained, "but I was asked to design some new stuff incorporating new technologies and more advanced versions of our existing designs."

But that's not the reason Roger is smiling. Last last night, he was notified by Ultralink/XLO vice-president Don Bouchard's family that he is showing signs of recovery from his recent motorcycle accident. Last night Bouchard partially regained consciousness and moved all of his limbs. We wanted to pass this along to his friends in the audio…

On the Other Side of TA

The Music Player has tons of inputs: USB2.0, iPod (with control and display), S/PDIF digital coaxial, TOSlink digital optical, LAN, W-LAn, and RS232 for update and control interface.

It has two channel audio outputs and an S/PDIF coaxial digital out.

It's internal DAC is a 24-bit 352.8kHz Sigma-Delta design with 8X oversampling. It also has switchable third-order base-linear Bessel analog filters: 60kHz and 100kHz.

"Basically," Trayle bragged, "this is a high-end component that allows you to listen to just about any of your favorite formats in the highest fidelity…