Recommended Components

It's a beautiful drive, considering you're on a freeway. You take I-25 north out of Albuquerque, Sandia Peak to your right and the Jemez Caldera and Mount Taylor dimly visible in the distance to your left. As you broach La Bajada hill south of Santa Fe, the Sangre de Cristo range—the "Blood of Christ Mountains" described by Paul Simon in "Hearts & Bones"—appears before your windshield. You take the Old Pecos Trail exit to the City Different, but before you reach town you bear to the left, then take another left opposite St. Vincent Hospital. There, in a cul-de-sac, you peer up at the street sign: "Stereophile Way," it says (footnote 1). "Not just a street, but a philosophy," I kidded Larry Archibald when the city told him that he could name the road where the magazine's headquarters would one day be situated.

Though it's Stereophile's most popular single feature, "Recommended Components" has many problems. The biggest is that you readers use it—but then, if I didn't want that, why would we publish it? More accurately, problems come from uncritical use, as if only products that "make" "Recommended Components" are worth buying. Alternatively, it's concluded that products which drop out have somehow been consigned to an outer darkness.