A LONG TIME AGO
IN A AUDIO GALAXY FAR FAR AWAY...
or . . . The Audiophile Anthropologist Strikes Back :-)

You will never know what you will find when you start rummaging around in old equipment boxes and piles of papers. One customer came upon a 1990 catalog from a certain well known audiophile mail order company (which shall remain nameless ) and passed it along to me thinking that I'd get a chuckle from it. Sure enough, he was right. When I opened the first page of this catalog to see the original PS Audio Digital Link (one of the first D/A converter products available) and started reading through the ad copy (see above) I couldn't help myself! For example, I'd like to get Paul McGowan (PS Audio head honcho) thoughts today on this quote from him about 12 years ago ... "A few months ago I put the Digital Link in my system and haven't listened to a record since! I was a die-hard LP listener, but the Digital Link makes my CDs sound better than LP's did on my $3,500 turntable system."  I'm not intentionally picking on Paul here (I'm sure he has listened to at least a few LPs in the past 12 years ), but it is fun to see where we have been and how far and fast things have progressed in the past 12 years in this hobby of ours (and not to mention how funny old ad-copy can be ).  Anyway,   I just had to post this and hope that you will get the same kick out of it as I did.

Paging along further through this same 12 year old catalog led to another page which I thought would be fun to post (see below). While most of you are probably familiar with the floorstanding VSM  and the stand mounted TSM loudspeaker models my friends at Merlin Music Systems have been making for the past several years, many of you have probably never seen the series of Merlin products that were made in the years before the VSM went into production. The excerpt from the catalogue below mentions only two of the several different models Merlin made at that time (all technologically & cosmetically similar to what is shown below). While rather different in looks and design from current models, there are certain interesting similarities which keen Merlin owners/fans will pick out.