I’m amazed that the hi-fi business continues to prosper and proliferate, considering London Calling is the only album worth listening to loud— everything else sounds as good on the radio as it ever will. Perhaps, in these troubled times, it’s encouraging that people still want their own record players to dance to their own music, even if it isn’t the Clash.

At the moment, hi-fi manufacturers are vaguely coping with past, present, and future. On one hand, they’re manufacturing fantastically expensive components to follow up obscure electronic theories. On the other hand, they’re trying to bring prices down to sell more of everything. Neither hand pays particular attention to what the other does, and the confusion is multiplied by wholesale price breakthroughs in integrated circuits that have, for example, made last year’s $600 cassette machine into this year’s $300cassette machine.