I arrived in Berlin early Wednesday morning and was picked up by a fellow named Frank Wonneberg, who I didn't really know, though I think we may have met years earlier at the High End Show when it was in Frankfurt, probably in 1996. He offered to pick me up and take me to the hotel, which was beyond kind. He also took me on a tour of Berlin. It was May 1st, which is a holiday in Germany so the streets were open though there were tourists and others at the big sights. I saw the Reichstag, and other similar touristy spots but Frank also took me to some amazing record-centric spots that few people know about including a small, run down little car repair joint that once was where the Odeon record label started in the early 20th century. It's where two sided records were born.

In a pre-Munich press release, SAT announced the debut in Munich of its new XD1 Record Player System that will be presented in room F214 in Atrium 4 along with Marten Audio loudspeakers.

The two day event "Making Vinyl" Berlin begins Thursday, May 2nd. Munich High-End 2019 begins Thursday May 9th. What to do in between?

This was supposed to be my report on analog gear at Home Entertainment 2004 West. The San Francisco show was canceled because of a hotel-workers’ lockout, but my column wasn’t! Fortunately, I’d gotten an early start on what was to be next month’s column because I wanted to actually get ahead on the audio-reviewing assembly line. No such luck.

The cartridge featured "blind" in the recent post titled "How Much Would You Pay for This Cartridge?" pictured above is "The Vessel" A3SE, which sells for $99.00.

At AXPONA 2019 Western Electric's Charles Whitener introduced me to Russ Hamm, president of Sonic Presence, a company that manufactures the VR15-USB Spatial Microphone™ a headphone-like in-ear microphone system that turns your head into a virtual "dummy head", which for some of us is easy! While that was interesting, it was Mr. Hamm's earlier experience as president of Gotham Audio in New York that got my interest.

The picture purposely obscures this moving magnet cartridge installed in the Rega Planar 8 tonearm plugged into the Graham Slee Accession. That's because I don't want you to know its identity. Rather, please listen to the file and tell everyone how much you'd be willing to pay for it and how you think it sounds.

"Making Vinyl" Berlin is a week away (May 2nd and 3rd). AnalogPlanet editor Michael Fremer will attend and moderate a few interesting panels. No doubt there will be news and an update on the progress being made to realize the promise of HD Vinyl. However, at last fall's "Making Vinyl" in Detroit there was HD Vinyl news that got "caught in the cracks" and was never published.