I leave today for Manila, The Philippines to do a turntable set-up seminar at a HiFi Show November 9th and 10th.

Don't miss this two hour PBS special on the life of Jimi Hendrix November 5th on PBS.

I drove to record producer and musician John Simon’s Catskill mountaintop home on a gorgeous, unusually mild November 1st day. Simon is best known for producing Songs of Leonard Cohen, BS&T’s Child is Father to the Man, Big Brother and the Holding Company’s Cheap Thrills and of course The Band albums Music From Big Pink, The Band and The Last Waltz

After I saw my MP3 e-mail exchange with the editor of the "Circuits" section of the New York Times in the February Stereophile, I began to think that publishing it hadn't been such a great idea. If the exchange had burned my bridge to the Times, publishing it in this column had probably NATO-bombed it.

But eventually I made peace with my decision and forgot about it. Mikey vs the Times was a dead issue no matter what I did or didn't do, and at least Stereophile subscribers got to read what happened. Some of you thought it made the Times look bad, some of you thought it made me look like a hothead.

So, after all that, after explaining to the "Circuits" editor that, whatever benefits MP3 offers, "CD-quality" sound isn't among them, guess what appeared on the front page of the "Circuits" section of Thursday, June 17? An article titled "The Beat Goes on Line, and Sometimes It's Legal," by David Kushner, the lead sentence of which read "If there is a 'Phantom Menace' of the Internet, it's MP3, the compression software that enables CD-quality music to be sent on line. Like the film, MP3 comes with a considerable amount of hyperbole, promise and, alas, science fiction."

Harry Weisfeld has "ring around the collar".

In Part 2 of our VPI Industries factory tour we see, among other things, the inner workings of VPI's radical new direct drive motor.

The editor visited VPI Industries today. The original purpose was to tour the factory and pick up a new VPI Direct Drive turntable for review.

Analogplanet has been wiping away the spam and by far so far, this is the funniest spam message yet!

Lou Reed died today. Not a good day.