Zagat calls Sound by Singer a " superb audio emporium" near Union Square "where sound dreams are realized" selling components that "are - or will soon be - part of MoMA's collections" while the "hi-fi euphoria" comes at a high cost, the"staff is helpful even to those on strict budget. Why High-End Audio/Video? Performance! With High-End equipment, you pay for performance not bells and whistles, and the result is obvious: a more accurate, "true to life" sound /picture.

DCS: The Scarlatti Inheritance

For almost 10 years the dCS Verdi Encore/Elgar Plus have occupied the universally-recognized position as the best sounding CD/SACD playback system in the world. Those days are over. With the introduction of the dCS Scarlatti STT CD/SACD transport ($32,999.00) and Scarlatti SDC d/a converter ($23,999.00) a new standard in digital playback has been set, one which I, personally, would not have believed possible. Say it any way you want, "there's a new sheriff in town"; "the king is dead, long live the king"! Or, "meet the new heavyweight champion of the world". Use any metaphor you can think of to describe a palpable superiority in performance and you are only scratching the surface of how musical and how much better sounding the Scarlatti system is than the Verdi Encore/Elgar Plus. This is due not only to dCS' new advanced algorithm but also to a level of construction quality and parts selection which is an order of magnitude better than its forebear. The Scarlatti transport/DAC are built like the proverbial brick s-- houses. Most impressively, the Scarlatti transport employs Esoteric's finest VRDS/Neo transport mechanism which is available only in the Scarlatti STT CD/SACD transport and the Esoteric P/01.

I have a turntable/tonearm/cartridge/phono stage set up which tips the price scale north of $90,000 and, frankly, I could not tell the difference between 90% of the source material played on the Scarlatti versus my turntable. Yikes!

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Everybody has one, and with memory becoming cheaper and cheaper every day, your computer is rapidly evolving into an excellent storage device for all of your music.

In the past, you could only buy or download music in a highly compressed format called MP3. Now with the advent of a number of new audiophile websites it is possible to download music not only in CD quality but even in HD audio quality (24 bit /176K). That capability wouldn’t mean anything if we were still playing the music from our computer’s soundcard directly