Stephen Mejias

I was sort of surprised when I saw that Urban Outfitters, the hipster home and apparel shop, had started selling LPs. I was more surprised to learn that they had a headphone listening station&#151you can actually walk into the store with your iPod and audition a bunch of headphones. But now Urban Outfitters is carrying Music Hall turntables and Audioengine powered loudspeakers. I really like this.

Longtime Stereophile contributor and well-respected child psychiatrist, Larry Greenhill, is a fan of Insane Clown Posse.

Will you be in or around Baltimore tomorrow night? Will you be in the mood for music, hi-fi, and wine? If so, this looks fun:

In the conclusion to our CES show report, I wrote: “Hi-fi is about making music. CES is about making money.”

But maybe I was being naïve. Though I’d love to pretend otherwise, high-end audio is as much about commerce as it is about music. This fact is inescapable. Yet the focus on money was so great at CES that I left Las Vegas wondering whether there was some better way. Isn’t there a better, more appropriate way to showcase high-end audio, one that sets aside monetary matters and, at least for a short while, puts music matters first?

I left Seattle last week wondering if we had already found that better way.

Excuse me while I slip into something a little more comfortable.

It’s not unusual to enjoy great music at DeVore Fidelity’s Monkeyhaus, but that music usually comes from LPs, loudspeakers, and tube amplifiers. Last night was a different story: While we did listen to music on the hi-fi, we were also treated to the special, comforting sounds of live, unamplified music. Zentripetal Duo (violinist Lynn Bechtold and cellist Jennifer DeVore) played three pieces&#151Gene Pritsker’s C17H21NO4 (the molecular formula for a drug popular among hipsters, baby boomers, and Wall Street tycoons), Astor Piazzolla’s "Violetas Populares," and Dan Cooper’s Design Duo.

I thought I'd really begin where I always begin: with my band's first album. As I've said before, I know this thing better than I know most anything else. From the creation of a song like "50 Bullets" — sitting on my bed and turning a simple four-note riff into a complicated and violent four-minute explosion — to the recording process, marred by uncomfortable, late-night drives from Clifton to New Brunswick where Jeff">http://www.versioncity.com/">Jeff Baker fooled around with tape reels and watched lazily as we somehow came up with fourteen tracks that we could only almost perform — drunk on Budweiser and stuffed on fried chicken and tired, so damn tired — I know this thing. I know this amazing and ambitious and awful album better than I know most anything.