I've always had a thing for the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra's recordings. Their long standing relationship with Telarc is probably why. I've had a long standing relationship with Telarc too. Well before I was a reviewer, I was just a rabid stereophile (the avocation, not the magazine) and I read every issue of Stereophile (the magazine, not the avocation), cover to cover. Telarc and Delos recordings were always spinning on their reviewers' CD players. I bought a few, like Respighi's Pines of Rome , Louis Lane conducting the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra, and Aaron Copland's Appalachian Spring, Rodeo and Fanfare for the Common Man, with Lane at the helm of the ASO once again. The recordings were excellent, No excellent is too tame a word. They were – they still are – exquisite. Expansive as the universe, as civilized as infinity, and punctuated with their trademark Tympani kicks that separated the boys from the men when it came to seeing whose audiophile tweaked system was better than whose.

I never thought picking out 50 songs to download from emusic.com's website would be so difficult. I never thought it would take the full two weeks time I was allotted. Any more than two weeks, and I would have ipso facto agreed to begin having $10 or so deducted from my credit card on a monthly basis, in return for which I'd be entitled to download another 30 songs a month.

Wolfang's Vault is a pretty slick web site where you can continue the journey of rediscovering your musical youth. The fellow that owns the site bought out nearly all of Bill Graham's stuff just before he croaked. This is Bill Graham, owner of the Fillmores, East and West, and other venues, concert promoter extraordinaire, not Billy Graham the evangelist, although, in the end, they're both dead.

I really regretted not being able to go to CES this year. While CEDIA may be more tailored to UltimateAVmag's beat, CES is still the big dog of consumer electronic shows and I missed not getting bitten.

Shane: "It's starting to smell like a fish market during a longshoreman strike."

When my favorite work lamp (relegated to laundry room duty – harrumph!) bit the dust electrically, I pulled it out of the trash and set it aside as a future project. But last weekend when I was out to replace the Grado Reference Sonata cartridge, a cartridge whose interaction with my VPI Aries turntable motor is legion, at least in my mind, the lamp lent a helping hand. I'm about to embark on a series of blogs about converting vinyl to various forms digital, I couldn't have any hum. Or buzz.

Slingbox, makers of an internet aware media server of heretofore limited interest to our readers, has burst into the home theater aficionado market with their newly announced Slingbox PRO. How new? I tried to get one before I went to Japan, but that wasn't going to happen. (….turning to the audience for a soliloquy, Fred reveals that it often takes much time between an announcement and an actual product. Sssh . . . don't tell Bill Gates).