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When I joined Hi-Fi News in the mid-1970s, one of that magazine's stable mates reviewed cars. An automotive writer appeared in the pub one lunchtime—"I rolled another one," he said, as he joined us at the bar. It turned out that one of his tasks was to take a car he was testing to the skid pad to see how many lateral G's the car could handle. Of course, the chances of a consumer turning that car over were minimal, but the reviewer was investigating the edges of the performance envelope.

As I became familiar with audio measurements, it struck me that the equivalent of the skid pan test was the thermal preconditioning we perform when we get an amplifier on the test bench. Even if an end-user doesn't drive his amplifier into thermal meltdown, the edges of the envelope need to be explored.

At the end of 2020, the Federal Trade Commission proposed eliminating what had come to be known as the "Amplifier Rule," which had been in effect since 1974. Then-FTC commissioner Christine S. Wilson wrote, "Freeing businesses from unnecessarily prescriptive requirements benefits consumers."

To me, that made no sense. Far from imposing "unnecessarily prescriptive requirements" on amplifier manufacturers, the Amplifier Rule had long forced manufacturers to clean up their acts.

As I wrote in an article published on the Stereophile website in 2021, in the hi-fi boom that began in the 1960s, the Institute of High Fidelity became alarmed by amplifier manufacturers exaggerating their products' output power. Such mystical numbers as "Peak Power" and "Music Power" were used willy-nilly to produce sales-oriented ratings with little to do with reality.

New companies are springing up all around the web to provide songs for custom CD compilations. (See previous articles 1http://www.stereophile.com/news/10185/">1;, 2http://www.stereophile.com/news/10157/">2;.) You go to the site, choose up to 70 minutes of music from their catalog, and the finished disc is mailed back to you in a couple of days for between 10 and 20 bucks. The challenge for these companies is to have an attractive catalog of artists and songs to choose from.

After two years of COVID-enforced isolation, the ever-dapper Philip O'Hanlon, founder and president of On A Higher Note distribution, flew to the PNW (footnote 1) to present, on October 2, the US premiere of the Graham Audio Limited Anniversary Edition LS8/1 loudspeaker. At $9700/pair with stands, the Graham Anniversary Edition LS8/1 looked right at home in the tastefully appointed, main floor showroom of three-floor Gig Harbor Audio, a dealership located a major swim or easy drive from the Seattle-Tacoma metropolitan area.

"Some say it dates back to 1927, when Gramophone magazine's editor thundered that electrical reproduction was a step backward in sound quality," said the promotional copy for Home Entertainment 2005's opening-day event, "The Great Debate: Subjectivism on Trial." It continued: "But whenever it started, the Great Debate between 'subjectivists,' who hear differences among audio components, and 'objectivists,' who tend to ascribe such differences to the listeners' overheated imaginations, rages just as strongly in the 21st century as it did in the 20th." On April 29 at the Manhattan Hilton, Stereophile editor John Atkinson and one of the Internet's most vocal audio skeptics, Arnold B. Krueger, debated mano a mano where the line should be drawn between honest reporting and audio delusion.

If any single voice was synonymous with the flowering of the LP era, it was that of German baritone Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau. The great artist's death at his home in Bavaria on Friday, May 18, 10 days short of his 87th birthday, sets the final seal on an age in which art song, oratorio, and opera received equal respect from record companies and the listening public.

Equally adept at all three disciplines, Fischer-Dieskau became perhaps the most recorded baritone in history. There was a period in which nary a month went by without another LP from Fischer-Dieskau on which he sang either solo or in ensemble. Even today, when so many recordings have gone out of print, and large number of LPs have never been remastered for CD, arkivmusic.com lists no less than 490 titles that include Fischer-Dieskau's voice. The most recent release, a four-SACD remastered compilation of some of the monaural Schubert lieder (art song) recordings he made with pianists Gerald Moore and Karl Engel early in his career, became available on the website on May 8. Its 39 performances are but a fraction of the Schubert recordings he made in his five decades before the microphone.

The Grid, one of the largest home audio retailers in Texas, will be hosting a private listening event at its Houston showroom on March 28, 2026. Systems that primarily feature gear from Goldmund and Marten will be shown, according to an official press statement, "in a carefully prepared environment, demonstrating their full potential."