Stereophile Staff

Last week we asked about your favorite review. As promised, this week we'd like to know what your <I>least</I> favorite equipment review in <I>Stereophile</I> has been.

I'm starting to hate computers. They take up all my time. Whether I'm writing, preparing classes to teach, toying with computer-generated music, managing finances, or (too often) upgrading hardware, I'm spending too much time in the computer chair, not enough in the listening chair.

In Hinduism, an avatar is an incarnation of spirit&mdash;a god who descends to earth in bodily form. For Kevin Hayes of the Valve Amplification Company (VAC), the Avatar was meant to be nothing less than his defining statement of the state of the audio designer's art. Drawing on the high-tech refinements and scrupulous attention to individual components that distinguish his flagship high-end amps and preamps, Hayes has filtered it all down into one attractively priced integrated amplifier.

I dig tube amps. When all's said and done, good tube amps seem to sound more like real life than most solid-state gear; even after listening to and enjoying the hell out of musical solid-state designs like the Audio Research D-240 II and the Muse Model One Hundred, once I hook up the big VTL Deluxe 225s again it's just like going home. I could go on about timbral accuracy and clearer midrange textures, but the bottom line is, music just plain <I>sounds better</I> when you shoot it through good tubes, and once most people experience that magic, they're hooked.

Market tests have been conducted, rumors floated, and now official word has arrived that DualDisc, a new two-sided disc format combining a CD on one side with a DVD on the other, will launch this October.

The music industry may be going the way of the dinosaur, but if so, it's going to go down with its army of lawyers fighting all the way to the bitter end.

In a landmark special feature, Chris Dunn & Malcolm Omar Hawksford thoroughly dissect the vicissitudes of the digital interface and jitter in <A HREF="http://www.stereophile.com/features/396bits">Bits is Bits?</A> The authors note, "The <I>theoretical</I> performance obtainable from the 16-bit linear PCM format sampled at 44.1kHz is superior to any analog sources available to the consumer."