Predictions for the New Year

1. We will see people cryo’ing entire amplifiers, cd players, and pre-amplifiers.

2. TAS will finally match Stereophile in number of subscribers and number of copies printed.

3. Somebody will make a blu-ray high-end audio cd player which will not sell well.

4. Somebody will make a blu-ray high-end video player that sounds almost as good as the best high-end audio SACD players which will open the market for true high-end Audio+Video systems and the dredging up of all sorts of video to go with the large, currently video-less, music catalogs from the last 100 years. This will stave off the recording industries demise until broadband is capable of downloading the equivalent of a 70GB blu-ray disc in finite time.

5. The official CES High-end ‘High Performance’ Audio Show and the Stereophile Home Entertainment Show continue to dwindle.

Wishes for the New Year

1. We see larger and larger diamond drivers culminating in six-foot tall diamond drivers for a high-resolution single-driver speaker.

2. The current bear market for high-end audio turns into a bull market (i.e. it becomes popular) and drives down costs by a factor of two every six to eigthteen months (like the digital video market today) and today’s $150K speaker costs $5K in 5 years.

3. The recording industry goes bankrupt (fiscally this time) and the resulting Laissez Faire environment which allows actual talent to rise to the top results in a new revolution in music similar to that which occured in the 60s.

4. Someone will make a component that has built-in vibration mitigation from, say, HRS, a custom designed power cord and internal wiring that was tuned for the component from, say, Nordost, the best capacitors and resistors and silver transformers from, say, Audio Note, and…etc…. so that there is no need for aftermarket tweaks or modders to do any work on the piece. Oh! And it comes broken in already. REALLY broken in. So it sounds good as soon as you take it home.

5. Mike will learn how to spell, or at least get a spell-checker for the blog.

Humor for the New Year

1. Every single home audio company will now offer a $2oK turntable…. no matter if they are a cable company, an equipment rack company, a speaker company or an amplifier company.

Including Bose.

……………………… And Rockport.

All of which will receive rave reviews.

2. The Stereophile Show collapses and gets split up into 50 shows per year, one per state capital, and once per week. This ends up putting many overly exuberant show attendees out of work and overly exuberant exhibitors into bancruptcy court, and the court creates a new ‘Chapter 50’ for these poor souls.