Ramblings.(Editorial)

Welcome to Issue #88, our annual Staff Picks issue. We bring you the equipment recommendations of our contributors, who pass along advice on everything from individual components to complete systems. By letting each contributor publish his own list, rather than produce one homogenized list, we have presented these recommendations in a way that allows readers to see what the individual tastes and subjective preferences of each reviewer are. To my way of thinking, this is more helpful to readers than it would be for me to come up with my own master list. I might not agree with every recommendation made, but the final choice of what to accept and what to reject should be left up to you, the reader, rather then me, the editor. There is some really helpful advice to be found in these recommendations, and I hope you enjoy reading through what our staff has to pass along.

In addition to the Staff Picks, we also bring you some reviews of both equipment and recordings. The one thing we have not included this time, sadly enough, is our Forum section. Perhaps the tragic events of September 11 have us all feeling a bit down, and venting our feelings about audio equipment has slipped way down our list of priorities. I do hope, however, that the consoling power of great music has been felt by many of our readers over the past couple of months.

First, the Bad News: The music recording industry, most notably the classical music recording industry, seems to be imploding, with every part of the system--musicians, orchestras, recording companies, distributors, retailers, and customers--feeling the effects. Some folks believe that the Internet will replace traditional distribution systems, but from my perspective at least, the problems in the distribution system are only symptoms, not the disease. SACD and DVD-A seem to be doing little ...