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Just like last year, I saved retailer Audiophile Experts' room for last. I stopped by their room at the 5pm closing hour on Sunday, as the crowd headed home and exhibitors started dismantling their setups. That's because Stacy and Mathieu, proprietors of Audiophile Experts, like to cap off my harried show reporting with a soulful, uninterrupted musical performance, usually from an analog-fronted rig.

This year's source was a B77 MkIII reel-to-reel machine by Revox, for which Audiophile Experts is the exclusive Canadian dealer. The system also included an Accuphase C-3900S…

Description: Solid state, class-AB, dual-channel, configurable, modular power amplifier. Inputs: two balanced XLR, two single-ended RCA, two single-ended BNC, USB port, Ethernet port (as configured for review). Outputs: two XLR balanced outputs (pass through for daisy-chaining), two pairs of speaker binding posts per channel. Power output, Stereo Mode: 2 × 300W into 8 ohms (24.8dBW), 22 × 550W into 4 ohms (24.4dBW), 2 × 900W into 2 ohms (23.5dBW); Mono Mode: 1 × 600W into 4 ohms (24.8dBW), 1 × 1000W into 2 ohms (24.0dBW), 1 × 1600W into 1 ohm (23.0dBW); Bridged…

When the Wigmore Hall Live label was launched in 2005, the great mezzo-soprano Lorraine Hunt Lieberson had only a few months to live: She died of breast cancer in July 2006, age 52. The hunt for lost recordings to memorialize her artistry led directly to her November 30, 1998, Wigmore Hall recital, broadcast that day as part of BBC Radio 3's Noonday Concert series and preserved in the BBC archives. That recital was released on the Wigmore Hall Live label on January 1, 2007, six months after Hunt Lieberson's passing.

How is it that an archival broadcast recording became a widely…