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April 2013
Surely all of our knowledgeable readers will know that the name Dirac is intimately connected with Nobel-winning physicist Paul Dirac and the experiment whose acronym spells his name: the DImeson Relativistic Atom Complex. As explained at http://dirac.web.cern.ch, the DIRAC experiment uses “a precise magnetic double arm spectrometer, installed in the high intensity proton beam of the CERN Proton Synchrotron,” to simultaneously “measure the lifetime of [π−π+] atoms . . . to observe [π−K+] & [π+K−] atoms . . . and then to measure the [πK] atom lifetime.”
Still with me?
I don’t understand any of that either, but apparently folks who are into quantum mechanics and quantum field theory fully understand Dirac’s incredible gifts as a theoretical physicist and the vast usefulness of his vita opus: the singular delta function. I dropped Physics 101 to avoid a failing grade, so none of this makes sense to me. My field was psychology, and what all this scientific talk means to me is that the guys who named their product after Professor Dirac have giant cojones. That’s a clinical term for folks who dream big.
Oppo Digital has mastered the fine art of juxtaposition, steering a perfect course between value and luxury. Oppo products are bulletproof, yet, at any hint of a problem, customers gain immediate entrée to one of the best tech-support departments in all of consumer electronics. Perhaps best of all, despite the fact that their products come to market designed with exceptional intelligence and fully formed, the engineering staff never stops soliciting feedback from their dedicated clientele. They then use that feedback to make something remarkable even better. Their payoff is a reputation that’s at the pinnacle of the home-theater business.
I’m in the market for a new car. While I’d prefer to buy American, I’m open to anything. My father, other than a dalliance with catfish-styled Citroëns, was a devoted and stalwart Chrysler man. That meant no drama when new-car time came around: Just head to the old Chrysler dealer and order up a big car in his favorite color.
By placing a product in this list, I might as well be anointing it one of my Best of the Year products. Nothing goes on the Christmas list unless it’s the best of what I tested. However, given the economy, I decided on a price ceiling of $400. That puts a couple of receivers, the 
There was a time in the US when a really high-end audio receiver was looked down on. Audiophiles weren’t worth their salt if they didn’t have separates: tuner, preamp, power amp. A few Japanese companies were toying with high-end receivers, but in the US, only McIntosh and Marantz were making “audiophile” receivers. The folks who were buying Audio Research or Mark Levinson or Threshold gear wouldn’t have dreamed of lowering their sights to an all-in-one-box receiver. And the folks who were constrained by price generally weren’t looking for a high-cost receiver. So receivers were relegated to the low end of the mass market, as high-end separates became de rigueur for the aurally obsessed.
It was 20 years ago today, Sgt. Pepper -- oh, wait, that’s a different review.
The Single Best Investment You Can Make to Upgrade Your Sound Today and the Journey It Took to Learn the Lesson the Hard Way
Be careful what you say in public. A couple of months ago, 
My old running buddy John B., raised in the Jesuit schools of Chicago, used to tell the best stories about the shenanigans that went on there. Oh, he never experienced a tinge of the sexual abuse we hear about these days, but he did feel there was plenty of intellectual abuse going on. As he described it, the Jesuits had a distinct way of separating the gifted from the schlubs, with the obvious goal of grooming the former to go out into the world and carry on the Jesuits’ concept of life. A list of the powerful politicos raised in Jesuit schools might amaze you: Pat Buchanan, William F. Buckley, Bill Clinton, John Kerry, Antonin Scalia, and Clarence Thomas, to name a few. I’m not going to go all Dan Brown on you here, but it’s no secret that the Jesuits have always done their best to groom their stars to carry the Church’s beliefs out into the real world.