Walmart and John Grisham's Ford County

Call it due diligence...Okay, my work is close to a Walmart so I went there on my lunch hour. I got into the mood by getting a quarter pounder from the in store McDonald's, read a copy of US Magazine to find out why the Bachelor dumped Melissa Rycroft, then went to find Ford County, John Grisham's short story collection 16.99. The store was pretty busy, but I was the only person in the book section there.

It was in a shelf marked best sellers which was dominated by a huge quantity of copies of Twilight and its sequels (there were so many I thought the display itself was painted black and I suppose this supports my theories that Walmart really is a big box take on Vampirism). I did not, however find a collection of short stories by Stephanie Meyer. In terms of number of copies stocked, the Grisham was second to Twilight.

Ford County was directly in between a book by Danielle Steel and one by Nicholas Sparks. On the far right of the display, they had a book by Glenn Beck. On the far left, they had a book by Rush Limbaugh (just kidding about the Rush, there was no book from anyone left of Glenn Beck there). I live in the middle of Northern California btw where teabagging remains something you mix either with hot water or with another consenting adult so it was surprising to see the Beck book there as the lone political tome on the shelf.

Ford County was on the only book of short stories on the bestseller display. I did later find a copy of Olive Kitteredge on a distant bottom shelf sitting next to a single copy of Angela's Ashes. There were also multiple copies of Tuesdays with Mori and Mitch Ablom's complete opus of inspirational writing on a high shelf. Interestingly, no Harry Potter. My last visit to the book section of Wal Mart was all Harry Potter. btw I'm a big Harry Potter fan,even to the point that I would probably buy and read a JK Rowling literary novel.

No, I didn't read the whole book or even all of a story (that would be wrong). I did read the first pages of most of the seven stories, skimmed a bit, and checked the endings of the 7 stories. The stories are all really long, actually too long to be posted here even on novellas. While this isn't completely fair, I'm told that standard slushpile practice is to read the first page then make a quick decision.

I'd forgotten that Grisham is a wonderfully clear writer. You know where you are, what he's talking about, and you don't trip over any sentences, all with a minimum of effort. I think that serves him well in his thrillers. My one venture into a regular Grisham book, it struck me that he wasn't necessarily great at setting mood, evoking place, or finding imaginative ways to describe things (he's no Michael Chabon that way). Not a lot of metaphor, imagery, symbolism, etc. Anyway, this virtue also is something of a handicap to me because it leads to a sort of flatness of tone and the impression the insights aren't all that deep either. That may just be me, I notice that writers who see detail, make the language sing, and know how to cast shadows with their description and bring out ambiguities also often have deeper insights.

He tosses in some Southern Grotesque, on page one he tells us that someone's mom is 400 pounds (that one may be American normal or at least fast food normal these days vs. Flannery O'connor grotesque though) and there are similar details about the good old boy protagonists who wind up at a strip club instead of donating blood for their friend.

I don't think it was length alone that kept these stories out of the New Yorker. They may, however, be perfectly enjoyable stories. I'd have to read them all the way through to know that. There's definitely more to a story than style and voice and those things might be in those stories. Still, when I think Ford and short stories, I'll probably think of Richard rather than Ford County.

That said, I'd love to get my own book into Walmart someday. My guess is they sell a lot of books.


chancelucky

The Second Chancelucky in Line

I’ve been reading a lot of Haruki Murakami lately and enjoying it. I’m also worried that it’s starting to affect my regular life. As I’ve mentioned, I write fiction some times when I’m not blogging. Judging from the last few months, I must have been writing a lot of fiction :}. I certainly haven’t been blogging.

Anyway, a couple months ago I was looking to see what the deadline for the University of Iowa’s Short Story Collection competition happened to be this year. I’d entered the year before, but I knew that I didn’t have much of a chance. I used the competition more as an opportunity to put together something that looked like a collection than a serious run at winning it. I opened the web page and much to my shock the winner was Kathryn Ma, someone I actually knew. As it happens, Kathryn went to both the same college and graduate school that I did. We weren’t good friends, but we certainly knew one another. She’s a terrific writer and very deserving. One of the shocks was that I had no idea that she wrote at all. I later learned that she didn’t start until she was 40.

Had someone told me that the winner of the Iowa contest would be a Chinese-American writer who set stories in Northern California and the same writer had gone to school x and school y at such and such a time, I would have started celebrating. Certainly, that could only have been me. Slightly less odd, the judge for the contest was Curtis Sittenfeld (American Wife) who went to the same high school I did and attended the same college that Kathryn and I went to though ten years later. After the publication (part of the prize) of All That Work and Still No Boys (Kathryn’s collection), I sent her an e-mail through Facebook and decided to go to one of her readings in Berkeley. I’ve been to any number of readings by authors, but I don’t know that I’d ever seen anyone who had prepared quite as well as Kathryn. She thanked the owners of Mrs. Dalloway’s , the bookstore/garden supply store hosting the reading, delivered a brief-engaging talk about her history as a fiction writer, read a selection from the book that she timed out at exactly 8 minutes (I assume that’s an ideal length somehow), and answered questions with poise and charm for the 30 or so people there.

I bought a copy of her book then got in line to have her sign it. After a minute of standing in line, a younger Asian man inadvertently stepped in front of me. Eventually, he turned around and I think it dawned on me that he’d cut in front of me and he offered to switch places. I told him not to worry about it. We waited our turn, then he came up to Kathryn and she said, “Who do I make this out to?”

The guy says “Sign it to Chants Lucky.”

My eyes-widened and I imagined the books flying off the shelves and rearranging in odd patterns.

Kathryn says, “Oh, you’re Chants Lucky. Thanks for your e-mail.”

“The guy finishes his visit and turns to leave, but I get to say, “Is your name really Chance Lucky?”

He nods then takes off.

My turn comes up and I tell Kathryn, “You’re not going to believe this, but I’m Chancelucky. You know we went to X and Y together.”

Kathryn smiles and acts like this happens a lot. We catch up a bit in the way that 2 people who barely remember one another might. She signs my book and says, “Ah yes, Chance Lucky with two C’s right?”

I compliment her on her memory (it does make me feel a bit better, end the visit since there are several people behind me in line several of whom may also have names Chants Lucky, Ciance Lucky, Chans Lucky, Chentz Lucky.

As my friend and I left the bookstore, it occurred to me that I should have stopped Chants Lucky to get his story. I would then have learned a bit more about alternate universes etc. and maybe gotten published in some journal of theoretical physics for Star Trek fans who also read Murakami. I didn’t. Maybe,I was afraid of the possible anti-matter matter explosion from a Chance encounter of this kind.

Instead, maybe I'm fated to stay the second Chance Lucky waiting in line to talk to Kathryn Ma. It may be all that's holding the cosmos as we know it in place.
chancelucky

Thought I'd mention it

My story Tears for the River God was nominated by Grey Sparrow Journal for a Pushcart prize. I'd like to thank both Diane Smith (the founder of the journal) and Sue Haigh the fiction editor for that edition.

Cave Painting (fiction)

Medici chapel,

Story appears in the current issue of Lacuna Journal.





Fred Plotkin's Amazon page. He knows way more about this stuff than I do.

chancelucky

National Defense University on the Iraq War

Grand Slam

Two weeks ago, a work friend gave me two tickets for the Giants-Rockies game. It turned out to be an important late season game, the first in many years in San Francisco. After blowing a three run lead in the fourteenth inning last Monday to fall four games behind in the wild card race to the Rockies, the Giants had gotten within a game by going 4-1 at home. I invited a friend who got me to my last major league game three years ago to see the A’s and we were all set to watch Matt Cain, arguably the best pitcher in the league this year, put away the Rockies.

We got to our seats in the deep right field bleachers midway through the Star Spangled Banner and I found myself next to a seven or eight year old boy, his older sister, and their dad who was keeping score with an old-fashioned scorebook. Virtually everyone around us had some sort of Stanford paraphernalia on. The current Giants management is very good at family promotions. They have little kids announce the hitters. They let little kids ride in the golf cart with a mascot who circles the stadium and throws t-shirts into the crowd. They show little kids cheering on the Jumbotron. They have a t-ball park near the Coke bottle that’s a replica of ATT park, so really little kids can pretend to play baseball. It’s a simple idea, get the kids addicted. On the other hand, it’s about forty bucks a ticket or more. If you go with the family to a Giants game, you’re looking at a three hundred dollar outing.

For many years, I’ve mostly noticed how any children near me at baseball games are mostly interested in the vendors and hardly look at the game. About ten years ago, we went with a friend and his son who made it through maybe six innings, whined every time someone was selling soda or ice cream, and who may or may not have known the score of the game at any given point. I’m just not that on sitting next to kids at baseball games. I did take my daughter once a few years ago, but she’s my kid so there really wasn’t anything she could have done wrong and unlike me she didn’t turn into a baseball fan.

Anyway, this kid had the garlic fries, the licorice, etc. and I was all set to be annoyed particularly since the game started badly. Cain went 0-2 on the first hitter then walked him. The guy stole second base, went to third on a ground ball, then Tulowitzki doubled off the centerfield fence. In turn, the Giants spent the next three innings popping up the first pitch. I think the Rockies starter went 3 scoreless innings on 22 pitches. Cain steadied some and the Giants got a sacrifice fly from Schierholz to tie the game in the fourth. The kid next to me stands up and cheers the fly ball. In the meantime, his dad is quietly marking things in the scorebook and his older sister, who looks like Lyndsay Lohan when Lyndsay Lohan was a cute kid, is explaining things to him like how hit and runs work and why you’d intentionally walk a number 8 hitter. More impressive, the boy is listening the whole time and hasn’t gotten up to go to the bathroom repeatedly.

It occurs to me that I was his age when I saw my first baseball game at Candlestick Park in 1963, the day after Marichal and Spahn went 16 innings in a 1-0 night game there won on a Willie Mays home run. My dad used to tell me that the moment I saw the big green field, my face lit up and that he knew right then that I’d always be a baseball fan. Of course, I stayed up the entire night before to listen to the Marichal-Spahn duel at age 7, so it was already sort of a no-brainer. We didn’t have video games then or the internet, so listening to baseball on the radio was one of the few kid friendly media of the time. Btw, my wife and I love Mad Men, but how is it that none of those people are baseball fans? I get that Don Draper wouldn’t care, but no one in that office even makes Mets jokes.

I look at the boy next to me and realize that he’s just like me only he wasn’t nerdy enough to bring a baseball glove to the park just in case he got found by a really-really long home run. Also forty plus years ago, I don’t know that he’d have had an older sister explaining the nuances of the game to him though my mother did sometimes take me to Giants games without my dad. One time I had a 102 temperature and she took me to a night game at Candlestick just because Sandy Koufax (my favorite player- I know that’s treason) was pitching. Koufax was left-handed like me and he was Jewish which back then was as close as any star athletes got to being Chinese until Masanori Murakami got signed by the Giants the next year. Anyway, when Koufax pitched against the Giants, I’d secretly root for the Dodgers, something that ended a couple years later when Koufax and Marichal faced off and Marichal hit Roseboro with the bat. My parents and I were far up the left field line that day. Dad and I went to the stadium the night before to get tickets.

So the Giants tied the game 1-1 in the fourth and I’m happy that the kids around me are actually into the game. Cain then comes out for the fifth and gives up 800 feet worth of back to back homers to Helton and Tulowitzki, 3-1 Rockies. A couple innings later it’s 5-2 Rockies. Giants get men on second and third with no outs and somehow don’t score a run. They’re best pitcher didn’t have it and everyone knows this year’s Giants can’t hit.

Somehow, the Giants get a double, a walk, and a hit by pitch to load the bases, but then somehow make two outs. Somewhat disappointing free agent, Edgar Renteria, comes up and I turn to my friend and say “He’s actually one of the best hitters with men on base in the majors.” It’s just one of those weird things that stuck in my head a few months ago.
Edgar Renteria actually has been one of the better hitting shortstops in baseball for many years, but he’s not exactly a household name. Besides, once you sign with the Giants you lose thirty points off your batting average. In this case he came here as a .288 hitter and has been at .259.

The guy takes a pitch from Rafael Betancort, there’s that sound of wood on ball, and the whole park is standing and screaming except the fat guy in the Tulowitzki jersey a couple rows away from us. Renteria’s ball climbs into the lower part of the left field bleachers just inside the foul line. A disappointing game suddenly turns into the most exciting sports event I’ve seen in years. Franklin Morales went from being the reliever who got two strikeouts with two on in the last inning to the bum who loaded the bases and set up the grand slam. Renteria went from sort of disappointing free agent to indelible Giants memory a la Rob Pruitt ( Iwas there) and Brian Johnson and the Giants suddenly became serious playoff contenders going into September. I figure if this can happen this suddenly at ATT park, maybe the same thing can happen with the economy and universal affordable health care.

An inning later, the Giants load the bases but still have just a one run lead and a bunch of their own relievers not looking terribly effective. The manager sends Ryan Rollinger, a shortstop who has never had a hit in the majors, to pinch hit. He doubles and the crowd goes almost as wild as they did for Renteria. The little boy next to me is jumping around and screaming his head off.

The week started with the Giants losing to the Rockies on a grand slam in the 14th. It ends with the Giants winning on a grand slam in the 7th. I got to go to a baseball game with an old friend. You know those people you don’t see for three years and you do and you just start talking again like no time has passed. I see this little boy who makes me remember how I became a baseball fan, his very cool sister, and the dad with the pen and the paper scorebook. Even bigger, I got to see hope pulse through forty thousand people all at the same moment. It’s a trivial thing, but it’s not. Hope’s been in short supply lately and baseball was one of those things that held America together the last time things were this scary.

Funny thing to suddenly remember what it’s like to be a fan.

chancelucky

A Cross Thief?

Last Sunday, Belle, our four year old Sheltie, was hit by our new neighbor’s truck late at night. The dog was walking across the street and apparently the neighbor didn’t see her. My wife was very attached to Belle at least partly because our youngest left for college back East about a year ago. To note the passing of our dog, she put up a white wooden cross in a flower pot near the front of our driveway. It’s not a large cross. She made it from strips of leftover floor molding from our garage and painted it herself.

Two days later, she came out to the front yard early in the morning to discover that the cross was missing. Nothing else in our yard was disturbed. Shortly after that, my wife made a second cross, stuck it in the same flower pot, attached a pair of notes explaining that they were for our dog near the new white cross and you guessed it some time last night (3 days later), the cross was stolen again. My wife thinks its someone who hates Christian symbols. I think it’s our crazy rageaholic neighbor who kidnapped our other dog once and demanded two thousand dollars in ransom. One of my colleagues thinks it’s the neighbor who happened to run the dog over. I haven’t eliminated the possibility that something supernatural is going on as well. One of the oddities is that we haven’t found any signs of the stolen crosses nearby.

I’d assume that it is someone who lives near us. It also seems to be happening very early in the morning or very late at night. A few people have suggested installing a video security camera. Mostly though, it just seems to be one of these thoughtlessly mean acts that’s compounded our sadness about losing our dog. I try to think the best of most everyone, but this is just one of those “Why would anyone be this cruel?”

In the meantime, my wife’s been getting cards, calls, and even flowers from other neighbors, friends, and relatives about Belle. It reminds me that there’s still a lot of kindness out there.
chancelucky

Hlly t-90 (cheap class D amp with actual power)

Ever since I first fell for the Sonic Impact t-amp, I've been intrigued about the prospects of a higher-powered Class D amp. As most people who follow these things know, Tripath went under a couple years ago, but they made higher-power chips. Sonic-Impact was promising one a couple years ago as was Mark Schifter's av-123, X-electronics. It's just that both turned out to be vaporware. PopPulse has also marketed an amplifier based on the Tripath 2022, a higher-powered chip, but I still haven't found a serious review.

Hlly electronics is a Chinese company that has offered a handful of Tripath-based amplifiers via E-bay and a North American distributor p-mac audio. They aren't the only Chinese company that has tried to capitalize on the success of the Sonic Impact and the Trends Audio, a more audiophile t-2024-based amp that was reviewed very positively. In many ways, they typify the joys and frustrations of doing business with Chinese audio companies.

My first experience with Hlly was with their T-2020 based amp, similar to the Trends but slightly more powerful (nothing significant). It sounded good initially, but it suddenly fried on me. They were glad to either refund me or replace, but wanted me to pay shipping to China. Unfortunately, the amp was 68 dollars and the shipping was 22. I give Hlly credit though, we worked something out and I wound up having them ship me a T-90, Hlly's own t-2022-based amp which boasted a promising 90 watts into 4 ohms. In other words, it promised to deliver tripath sound to speakers that aren't either horn-loaded, single driver, or meant to play from two feet away.

Unfortunately Hlly's original release of the t-90 was premature. It made a noise at idle and the muting circuit may or may not have been overly finicky. A few weeks earlier, the company had announced the implementation of new board for the t-90 and apparently dealt with the persistent hiss/noise issue.I was in one of those what the hell moods, so I took the chance. Hlly was very good about returning e-mails and was very straight in their dealings with me though there was a bit of a language barrier.

Before I review the t-90, I also want to mention that Hlly has landed their new amp in a peculiar market spot. The Virtue Audio One, 30 watts/channel (the Hlly is 60 into 8 ohms btw), but numerous rave reviews, is $250.00 which is more than the Hlly $180, delivered from China. I haven't heard the Virtue, but my guess is that a lot of people might prefer the “known quantity” aspect of the Virtue for what's not that big a price difference. Incidentally, the Virtue recently sold out all of its stock, either a clever marketing ploy or a sign of terrific marketing success in a tough market for audiophile toys.They rather ingeniously sold their products as a budget amp or a second audiophile-level amp for your computer.

When my Hlly-t90 arrived I was surprised by the size and weight of the package. The t-20 was well-built, but resembled a headphone amp in size. The t-90 was hefty and quite deep, maybe a little too deep to stick on a desktop next to your computer. Instead of including a switch mode power supply that plugged into the body, the t-90 has a toroidal transformer in the case, a surprisngly heavy transformer. Like the t-90, it has a solid metal case with a thick-milled aluminum front. The power switch is on the front and it includes a volume pot for possible use as an integrated amp.

I started the t-90 on my office system through a run of the mill laptop soundcard and a pair of Radio Shack Lx-5 speakers (late version). I loved the sound, but was surprised to find that the Hlly didn't sound a lot “louder” than the Sonic-Impact. My laptop soundcard doesn't have a lot of gain and I had noticed that the Sonic Impact had surprisingly good sensitivity. My initial impression was that the Hlly t-90 sounded very different. Where the SI T-amp is beguilingly light and airy, notably so, the Hlly is darker and more solid sounding. It may be that it restores the bottom octaves while the little t-amp had a filter below 100 hz. I was favorably impressed with the Hlly though, just wasn't sure that it's a good match for low end low output sound cards or medium-sized desks. Cards like the m-audios and even middling fare like the sound blaster audigies would probably do fine btw.

I took the Hlly home to try it in a higher-end system. For me, that's a relative term. I haven't bought big money equipment in years, but have had two great but very different amps in the past (both died). I had an early Richard Marsh-Bill Westerfield amp Mosfet AB huge power, incredibly fast, terrific authority (though not in the bottom bottom octave a mosfet thing), and unbelievable clarity. I also had a 300B with Western Electrics (NOS) push-pull from Canary Audio that one day stopped working (still have the tubes, though there are some brown spots on top of the glass) 18 watts but as harmonically beguiling as anything I've ever heard, wondrous midrange, pretty but slightly rounded bass, and clear-sweet highs. I've also built speakers for years and had design help with my Scanspeak monitors from Brian Smith.

I first tried the Hlly with a tubed preamp, the Scanspeaks (6.5 inch Kevlar 2 ways with a Revelator tweeters), and my older Sony ES CD player. Even with a pre-amp, the Hlly did better with the volume pot well past 12 O'clock, but it has plenty of subjective power. I noticed the following.

There's something about this amp and the human voice. Voices as different as Louis Armstrong, Rickie Lee Jones, Joni Mitchell, Johnny Hartman, and James Taylor sounded both distinct from one another and natural. For instance, I noticed that I understood lyrics and heard phrasing much more readily than I usually do. Where some, amps reproduce voices with tonal purity, the Hlly has that sonic quality that leads you to believe that you can see the shapes the singer makes with his or her mouth. Even more impressive, you can pick up the number of voices in a chorus and overdub effects to prevent older singers voices from sounding thin on the higher notes. With one singer I won't name, they were doubling her voice with just a touch of echo.

The second real glory of the amp is that it reproduces classical woodwinds with the same level of articulation. It's very good with timbres and you can identify things like bassoons, oboes, and clarinets quite easily while also picking up differences between the real thing and sythesized versions of these sounds dropped into the mix. This is often a sign of very good control of intermodulation distortion, something it shares with the lower-powered Tripath amps and my old 300 B-based amp.

Utterly unlike lower-powered amps though, the Hlly90 has real bass. Electric bass in particular has authority and bloom as does the bowed string bass. If there's one place I'd fault it here though, it's that the attack isn't as good with percussion as I've heard with the best AB and Class A transistor amps, though the Hlly is much less rubbery than low-powered tubes or the Tripath 2024.You feel like the amp really does control the woofer, I just wouldn't say that it has the slam of a really well-designed AB amp or maybe even my gainclone amps (3886-based powered speakers).

Conventional wisdom is that tubes are great on the back-end (overtone) end of the sonic envelope and that transistors are much better with the attack or the front-end. A lot of people note that the Tripaths and other digital amps split the difference. There's a bloom and airy quality to the sound of tubes at which even relatively inexpensive tubed amps excel. Transistor amps have traditionally done things like drums with authority, but you often have to pay serious money to get a transistor amp that breathes well, either that or you have to go to low-power Class A. The Hlly actually does both well, though not world class well (what do you expect for $180?)

One sign of a good amp is that it doesn't get confused with complex musical passages. There are points in say Prokofiev where the different sections of orchestra do very different things. A really good amp lets you hear the pluck of massed strings and the metal in unison brass sections. The Hlly not only lets you hear the sections of the orchestra as distinct and tonally different, but it lets you hear the different timbres and overtones within that section. It does equally well with rock music. It's quite good with detail, but intriguingly doesn't sound “detailed”. A lot of times, I was just really surprised to listen in and pick things up like which drum the drummer was hitting and with what or whether the pianist was using the sustain pedal. While it's not an overtly fast amp, I really did like it with rock and roll and with full orchestra at least partly because the Hlly tends to sound more open and fuller as you turn up the volume. The image is big and wide, but it's not super deep. For instance, the brass in an orchestra should sound several feet behind the soloist and it doesn't quite reproduce the depth and the height, though that could be a function of my source equipment.

I also brought the Hlly into the living room to test with my 8” 3 way floor standers (accuton mid and tweeter with cabasse woofer, about 88 db) . I didn't use a pre-amp here and matched it with a very inexpensive vhs-dvd player from Toshiba (89 dollars from Best Buy) with a variety of CD sources and a bunch of movies. This is simply a great amp for video. I also find that movies make for a very good test of audio equipment, at least in part because you become much less aware of “listening”. Men's speech didn't have hissing sibilants, dialogue was very understandable, and sound effects held both their position and level of loudness. Interestingly, my cheapo DVD player had plenty of output for the Hlly to sing without a pre-amp though I still recommend a pre-amp (micro-dynamics are better).

A lot of amp lovers like to brag that their amp is completely neutral sounding. That's not the case with the Hlly. It has a basic character of being dark, creamy, and a little bit more solid-sounding than airy (you actually want both the body and the air). Musicians and instruments are definitely there, it's not notes reverberating in air (my sense of the Sonic -Impact). It's vaguely euphonic, but unlike a lot of euphonic amps it's capable of surprising detail and pace. Contributing to the creaminess, it's arguably just a bit smoother or rounded sounding with rhythmic transients than would seem completely natural, but I'm talking about a hundred and eighty dollar amplifier. I've never had anything this inexpensive that sounded this good with real world speakers at performance-level volumes.

That said, I've had one issue with the amp and it's a bit troubling. It's got a very persnickety mute circuit. Hlly insists that it's an over-voltage issue. I probably don't have the cleanest 110 volt lines in my house, but nothing else here turns off spontaneously. On several occasions, I've had to do a bit of a dance getting it to play music again once it mutes. I did discover that it does better when I turn the Hlly volume way down when I turn it back on. I've also considered the possibility that the Tripath overvoltage circuit is actually protecting the amp in a good way. The tolerance is supposed to be 5 percent which in the US wold be 116 volts. I have measured the AC in my lines here and it wasn't 110 always, but it was never quite that high, but who knows. It does continue to raise the specter that Hlly maybe should test its products a bit more thoroughly before taking them to market, the feedback on the earlier verison of the t-90 had to hurt the model and brand some.

Assuming the over-voltage issue doesn't come back to haunt me, I have to give the Hlly t-90 a very strong recommendation at any price. For $180, it's an outstanding bargain though I'd still recommend checking out the Virtue One as well with its better pedigree and reasonably competitive price with the Hlly. In the meantime, Hlly has announced a full digital amp soon and I look forward to finding out more about it.

I've mentioned in the past that the best listening test of any equipment comes with time as in just what do you find yourself listening to with an amp and what do you start avoiding. With my 300B's small ensemble jazz and movies sounded incredible. With my Parasound 1200, I started listening to rock and roll a lot. With my Super T and Sonic T, I got into chamber music and acoustic small group stuff and avoided full orchestra and driving rock. With the Hlly t-90, it's orchestras, rock and roll, any kind of vocals, solo piano, chamber music, and movies. If I'm not leaving out much, there's a reason. It's simply a great real-world amp at a very affordable price. My other guess is that it has much more potential for tweaking than do the Virtue Audio designs.

chancelucky