2005 is a banner year for air travel for me. I’ve flown to Indianapolis for CEDIA, California for a cousin’s wedding and Florida four times for vacations and business. I know, I’m hardly a jet-setter or one of many people I meet in my travels who earn my sympathy for being away from home more than they’re not, but still, for me? A banner year.

Before the advent of Tivo and cable TV’s equivalent, video-on-demand, getting comfortable with a new television series in September was something of a crap shoot. If you missed the first couple of episodes of a new show before you heard good things about it from friends, you could either jump in late without the knowledge of the usually critical first few weeks, or you could wait until the summer rerun season and start afresh. I completely missed the boat on the first three seasons of “24,” forcing me to take a third, and costlier, path: TV on DVD. In the case of a highly addictive show like “24,” the ability to watch 2 or 4 episodes in one sitting more than compensated for the cost of the discs. This year, however, I planned well, and my Directv Tivo box made the new season easy to manage.

The real prize in my two-channel system, at least the prize du jour, is the resurrection of the Stax SRX headphones and SRD-7 headphone amplifier. Well, it’s not really an amplifier, just a transformer. You wire it to the output of your real amplifier with these pretty cheesy (at least by audiophile standards) wires that are hard-soldered inside the unit. Then you screw down your beefier audiophile speaker cable (or in my case, the equally cheesy Radio Shack 16 gauge) to the terminals provided on the back of the SRD-7 and use a switch on the front panel to choose between headphones or speakers.