Art Dudley

If home-gallows prices keep coming down, people won't go to public executions anymore. The home brothel has reduced the amount of cash American men spend each year on banging strangers. And thanks to the home sweatshop, the CEOs of all the major clothing manufacturers have been forced to take pay cuts. (I mean, come on: It was either that or something totally unimaginable, like shipping American jobs overseas, or cutting healthcare benefits for the rank and file.)

Here's how God makes audiophiles: He starts with several million blank brain cells, then programs each one, individually, to function as either a love for one single aspect of music reproduction or a hatred for another. There are over a thousand such cells—far too many to list here—but theologians and audio reviewers have worked together to compile this list of the Top 20, which, just like real life, contains a little more love than hate:

It isn't enough to say that engineer <A HREF="http://www.stereophile.com/artdudleylistening/404listening">Denis N. Morecroft</A> is one of contemporary audio's few visionaries: He's one of a <I>very</I> few mature designers whose passion for doing things a certain way hasn't abandoned him in the least, and whose well-argued convictions seem stronger than ever. Thus, as others cave in to commerce&#151;the tube-amp designer who offers a solid-state product just to help his dealers fill a price niche, the source-component manufacturer who rails against digital audio one day and starts cranking out CD players the next&#151;DNM Design remains the likeliest of all modern companies to stay its course.

<I>Stereo Review</I>, the world's most popular audio magazine during most of its time on Earth, was a common target of derision from the hobby's so-called <I>high-end</I> press, not least of all from me. We criticized its nerdy, boring prose, its uniformly positive reviews, and, most of all, its shameless pimping of the notions that measurements reveal all there is to know about a component, and that all competently engineered components sound equally fine.

Janet watched the record spin wildly, mildly awestruck. She nodded its way&#151;a gesture that took in all the other 78rpm discs piled nearby&#151;and asked, "How long have you had those?"

I can't help wondering: how did the mainstream audio press, cheered Dynaco and Marantz and McIntosh and Quad for switching to transistors a couple of generations ago, greet the first tube-revival products from Audio Research and the like? What was the reaction when moving-coil cartridge technology, considered all but dead by the early 1970s, became the perfectionist hi-fi norm just a few years later? And what would the same people make of the fact that a high-mass, transcription-length pickup arm&#151;with interchangeable pickup heads, no less&#151;is one of the most recommendable phono products of 2008? The mind boggles.

My home, which overlooks a dairy farm, is easy to see from a mile away, invisible from the end of its own driveway. Elevation: 1345'. Population: 3.