Thursday, January 19, 2023

Back in So.Cal. 40 Years Later

After the AALS conference in San Diego, I drove up to Los Angeles to spend a week with old friends I had not seen for more than 30 years. Two of them were my professors from Occidental College: Alan Chapman and Hal Lauter, Alan now teaches grad-level music theory courses at USC and hosts the morning program on its classical music station, KUSC, which is where I visited with him. Alan is as youthful as ever; still writing fun tunes and performing on occasion, sometimes with his entire family (btw, his son is a phenomenal mallet player). Hal Lauter taught me philosophy all the way through college, becoming my first intellectual mentor. He's 93 now but in great physical and mental condition.

Izabela was with me for the first few nights in LA. We stayed in Pasadena, in part because I remembered the town better than most other places in the LA basin. During my senior year of college, I had lived just up Lake St. in Altadena. Seeing that old house again brough back a lot of sweet memories. Izabela and I managed to get to the Norton-Simon museum, the Huntington Library, Museum and Gardens, and the campus of Occidental College. I was very happy to see that, despite inevitable changes, the Oxy campus felt as it did when I was a student there more than 40 years ago. 

The morning after we arrived in Pasadena, we had brunch with my college roommate for two years, Jim Kerman and his wife Cathy. I don't have enough adjectives to describe what it was like being "Kermo's" roommate, so I'll just use one, awesome. We actually became friends when I was a freshman and he was a sophomore. A group of us - the "Late-night Munch Bunch" - included, in addition to Jim and me, Shelly Williams, Deirdre Mulligan, and Gail Fiattarone. Gail stayed a close friend of ours throughout college, but Jim and I lost touch with her after graduation. 

After a couple of days, Izabela grabbed a flight to the Bay Area to visit an aunt in Walnut Creek and then flew down to Palm Springs to visit another aunt. After she left, I moved in with my other best friend from college, Peter Marston, who lives on the Western edge of Glendale, near Burbank. Peter is a professor of Communication Studies at Cal State Northridge. Unlike me, he still loves teaching and plans to do it until he drops. Also unlike me, he's never stopped writing, recording and performing music. His status in the LA pop-rock scene is at this point almost legendary. I stayed with him for four nights and it was so great to confirm just how much we were alike, but also how much we enjoyed disagreeing. Peter organized outings to a couple of great used-record stores, which created problems for me when I was packing to head home. We also visited the Grammy Museum at LA Live, had lunch with another college friend (and musician) Nate Haase, and had a memorable dinner at Jim Kerman's house in La Crescenta. 

One day, Peter and I drove down to Coronado Island to spend some time playing music with another old friend, George Sanger. George is famous in the video game world for being one of the pioneers of video game music composition and production. I even recall seeing a Wall St. Journal profile of him several years ago. These days, he seems quite content living on the island in the house he grew up in with his wife Cindy. Having a chance to play some tunes with Peter and George again was pretty magical. The last time we had played together was at the Troubadour in LA in 1980. 

I also had the chance, during the visit, to spend more than an hour catching up with another dear friend from college, Matt Walker, in his office at Disney Animation. Matt's Senior VP for music at Disney Imagineering, which means he's in charge of all music for Disney Animation, Pixar, and the theme parks. Matt was actually the first musician I got to know at Oxy. He and I were both in the orchestra for a production of Godspell our Freshman year. And we kept playing together after the production ended. He's a great pianist in nearly all genres, though he says he doesn't get to play as much as he would like these days.

Importantly, the conversations with my friends were only partly about our shared experiences 40 years ago. We also wanted to brief each other on the highlights (and some lowlights) of our lives since then, and to learn about how life is for us now. Despite the length of time apart from these guys, they were all so easy to talk with, as if we had never been apart at all. As we all grow older, these old friendships seem to have enhanced importance. At least, they do for me.

The final few days of my trip were spent in the Coachella Valley with Izabela. In addition to visiting with her aunt and her uncle (who is unwell), we had a chance to revisit old haunts. Izabela and I met in Palm Springs in late 1988 and we were formally married in Palm Desert in 1990 (after an informal ceremony in a judge's chambers in Palo Alto a few months earlier). My grandparents had been wintering in Palm Springs since I was a teenager, and I would sometimes get to visit them there. Then, my mother and step-father moved to Palm Desert in the early 1980s, and remained there for about 10 years before moving to Scottsdale, AZ. While I was in law school ('84-'87) I would spend my summers and holidays in their house. It was there that I recouped for a month after donating a kidney in 1984. It was my favorite of our family houses. I thought it had been demolished long ago. So, it was a wonderful surprise to find it unchanged on this visit. I have so many memories of the place, mostly good ones. 

All in all, it was a tremendous vacation. I planned to do no work at all during it, and for the first time in my adult life, I kept to that plan (after the AALS conference in San Diego, of course). The good it did me is immeasurable. And it wouldn't have happened if I were still teaching. Classes began in the law school on Jan. 11, and all my time up to then would have been spent on class preparation. Retirement has a lot to recommend it.




  

Thursday, January 5, 2023

Association of American Law School 2022 Annual Meeting

 I'm attending the AALS conference for the first time in at least a dozen years. I've never thought much of it as an academic conference. It's really more about networking, which is not in my skill set. I've come this time to serve as a mentor to younger environmental law scholars. They prepare papers and I provide them presumably valuable feedback. My friend and colleague Rob Fischman started this program several years ago. I also came because it provides another kind of bookend to my career. I used to attend nearly every year when I first started teaching, though the size of the conference and all the social events organized around it were anxiety-inducing. Usually, unless I had a presentation to make or was in another panel I found interesting, I would stay in my hotel room working. Eventually, I found smaller, more focused conferences (most of which were only partly related to law) to be more attractive and comfortable for me. I guess it's just another indication of how much of an errant law professor I've been.





Monday, December 26, 2022

Early Career Mentors

It's difficult to imagine that anyone makes a career in academia without at least one great mentor. I had some good teachers in high school, but none I would label "mentors." But after high school I was fortunate to find three real mentors -- one in college, one in law school at Lewis & Clark, and one at Stanford Law School.  

The first was Herman "Hal" Lauter, a philosophy professor at Occidental College. I first met Hal in The Collegium, an immersive first-year program I was fortunate to get into. Instead of taking various freshman-level courses, students in the Collegium spent the entire year diving deeply into the liberal arts. Hal was the faculty leader of the small group within The Collegium to which I was assigned. From that time through my senior year, Hal was my advisor and friend. [I'm happy to say he's still my friend; I'm planning to visit him in So.Cal. in the new year.]  The depth and breadth of his knowledge and his contagious excitement for learning and discovery were so impressive, I thought he must be some kind of genius. Before I met him, I never had any academic pretensions or predispositions (so far as I can recall). Hal, more than anyone else, taught me how to think and inspired my love of the scholar's life. Not that I thought at the time that I had any chance of living that life. I though one had to be intellectually brilliant to do that, and I showed no signs of that. Several other faculty members at Oxy reinforced my admiration for professors, including Marcia Homiak (who taught me Aristotle), Bill Neblett (who taught me Popper), and Alan Chapman (who taught me music theory and advanced pinball). 

When I moved back to Chicago to pursue a MA in Philosophy at the U of C, I had some great profs, including Leonard Linsky, Bill Wimsatt, Alan Donegan, Donald Davidson and Stephen Toulmin. But I left after a year, having completed my MA and decided not to pursue a PhD. So, I cannot claim any of them as a mentor. 

I found my next mentor at Lewis & Clark Law School, Mike Blumm. It was Mike who first got me interested in environmental and natural resources law. I cannot recall how many courses in those areas I took at L&C, but it was several more than the vast majority of law schools offer even today. Most importantly, Mike taught me how to write well, and not just for a legal scholar. I wrote a lot of papers for him, and he kicked my ass on every one. At the same time, he instilled in me a love for scholarship to such an extent that I published four law journal articles before I completed my J.D. Mike has been a constant source of support and friendship throughout my career. And he's still among the most productive scholars I know. As I'm retiring, he's still going strong at L&C. I also have to give some kudos to Jim Huffman, who in some ways was Frack to Mike's Frick. They were (and still are) close friends, who agree on very little. And it was a great experience for me to hang out with them together, as well as separately. In fact, the example they set made me realize that I could have an academic career, if I played my cards right and got very lucky. The bad news was the L&C is not Harvard or Yale. The one thing going for me was that L&C was among the top schools for environmental law. I was never going to land an academic job as a generalist; but I might eventually get on the radar of schools looking to hire in environmental law specifically.

When I completed my JD at Lewis & Clark, I had a standing offer to work at EPA in Washington, as a lawyer in the Office of Pesticides and Toxic Substances. I wasn't keen to accept the offer. After all, it was the Reagan Administration. So, I was looking around for something else to do, and landed an offer to become an Instructor, teaching Legal Research & Writing (LR&W) at Santa Clara Univ. Law School. I had a long talk with Mike about which job would better position me for a teaching career, The conventional wisdom for someone on the legal academic-track is to spend at least a couple of years in practice. But Mike told me, "I've always thought the best way to prepare for a teaching career was to teach." Made sense to me. So, I moved to Santa Clara, where I taught for two years and published a couple more articles. In my second year, I directed the LR&W program, having written up my own training manual. 

The biggest piece of luck I had came during my second and final year at Santa Clara. Stanford, just down the road, was advertising for LR&W instructors. At one point, in the Spring of '89, I got a call from the head of the search committee notifying me that one of their LR&W instructors had belatedly decided to leave after her first year in the two-year program, and I was next in their ranking of candidates. This stroke of good fortune had three aspects to it: it allowed me to avoid unemployment; it allowed me to pursue graduate legal studies while teaching full-time; and the value of the Stanford name cured one of several weaknesses on my resume. 

It was at Stanford Law School (SLS) that I met my final academic mentor before permanently joining the professoriate, the famous legal history and Law & Society co-founder Lawrence M. Friedman. I first met Lawrence in the SLS faculty lounge at the inaugural meeting of the Graduate Law Students' Association to which Lawrence was the faculty liaison. It was the most memorable meeting of my life because the Loma Prieto earthquake of 1989 interrupted it. As the floor of the faculty lounge began to pitch and roll, I found myself under a table with my fellow grad. student, later colleague, and always friend Leslie Obiora, who kept repeating "I'm going back to Nigeria." Lawrence managed to keep everyone calm - well, as calm as possible in the circumstance.

I started meeting with Lawrence fairly regularly. I'm not sure what he saw in me, but I know what I saw in him - a model scholar, writer, teacher, and mensch. I cannot honestly say I learned as much directly from Lawrence as I did from Mike Blumm or Hal Lauter, but I did learn some important lessons that have stayed with me throughout my career. For example, after learning that Lawrence hardly ever spoke during his own law school education at the U. of Chicago, I decided I would not make students stand and recite in class. I also learned from Lawrence to avoid writing anything that was boring. I learned that not just from the experience of reading his books, but he actually told me that rule. He acknowledged that such a rule might actually impede my ability to publish in many law journals, which tended to view good writing with suspicion. But it certainly had not impeded his academic career. He also told me that he had never even submitted a paper to the Harvard Law Review. Simply put, I learned from Lawrence that all that should really matter for a scholar is the quality of their work, in form as well as function. I'm not a fair judge of the quality of my own work, but I've always tried at least to select research topics and questions not based on what might get me good placements in law journals, but based first and foremost on puzzles in which I am deeply interested. I research the hell out of them, in an effort to minimize the risk of error and maximize the chance of contributing to the stock of useful knowledge. Finally, I've worked hard to write clearly and in a reasonably engaging style. I can pretend to have Lawrence's writing ability, let alone his other qualities as a scholar and teacher, but I could hardly have found a better role model. He's also been extremely supportive throughout my career. Lawrence only retired a few years ago. I'm not in as close touch with him as I used to be, but I still try to touch base at least once a year.   

So, you see, I had wonderful mentors on the way up. There is no question that I would have been in some other line of work these past 30+ years but for Hal, Mike and Lawrence. I was fortunate to receive additional mentoring from others during the course of my academic career, even after I got tenure. I'll write about them in a separate post.

Thursday, December 22, 2022

This Blog Is About to Become a Lot More Active

Now that I've finished my final teaching option, prior to becoming an emeritus professor next year, I plan to begin posting reflections on my highly fortuitous academic career, including posts about mentors, great scholars I've known, the evolution of my research interests, and more. I don't expect any of it will be of great interest, let alone excitement, to anyone. It'll be more in the nature of author-based writing than reader-based writing. Stay tuned, or not (assuming anyone's out there).  

Sunday, October 2, 2022

Ostrom Workshop in Europe

I just returned home from a one-day conference in Berlin organized by the Ostrom Workshop (OW) at Indiana University's European Gateway center. Six OW representatives, including myself, met with more than 20 of our European "Affiliated Faculty" members from eight different European countries, as well as representatives of European organizations, some of which have long-standing formal or informal relations with the Workshop and a few, such as UNESCO and the Land Economy Department at University of Cambridge, with which the Workshop is hoping to develop working relations. The meetings, organized by OW Director Scott Shackelford and Asst. Director Emily Castle, were extremely important because, between 2015 and 2020, many of our European affiliates felt alienated from the Workshop (as did I) largely because of Scott's predecessor as Director who had ignored them in restructuring the Workshop, narrowing its focus, eroding connections with longstanding affiliates, and generally marginalizing the Ostroms and associated Bloomington School theories, methods, and projects. 

My impression was that the meeting was a great success, though it might have been expanded over two or even three days to allow for more extensive conversation. In any case, the OW's European affiliates seemed genuinely grateful that we had come to "reconnect" with them. And the newly represented European organizations appreciated learning more about the OW, the Ostroms' approach to analyzing collective action problems, and the kind of interdisciplinary culture the OW's current management is working hard to reinstill. All participants seemed positively energized to start "working together" (to quote the title of one of Lin Ostrom's last books).

Personally, I knew more of the attendees than anyone else -- so many friends and colleagues with whom I've worked over the past couple of decades, in many cases as professor, mentor, and/or research collaborator. I have ongoing projects with several of them. My only regret is that I did not plan to stay in Europe for another week to spend more time working on those projects with them.

I am much more hopeful now than I was even a week ago about the OW's future prospects, though so much depends on the choice of the next Director after Scott steps down. IU needs to select someone who really understands the OW's values and culture, as well as foundational elements of the "Bloomington School" of Political Economy.

Friday, July 29, 2022

On Reconciliation (Briefly)

Growing older means reconciling oneself to many things: grey (or no) hair; declining athletic prowess; aches and pains that occur for no apparent reason; a daily pill box; and the inevitable. But growing older also provides opportunities for more positive forms of reconciliation, for instance, to one's own foibles and past mistakes. The most rewarding reconciliation might be with old friends who have been out of touch for a long time, not so much to rehearse (let alone relive) the past but to communicate about present conditions and concerns with people who share some of one's history and, therefore, a common frame of reference. Unfortunately, some old friends might not be open to reconciliation, whether for good reason or no reason at all. In that case, one must reconcile oneself to not reconciling, which can be a hard pill to swallow. 

Thursday, June 30, 2022

The Travesty of John Roberts and West Virginia v. EPA - A First Take

 Make no mistake, the Supreme Court's 6-3 ruling today in West Virginia v. EPA is every bit as outrageous as its decision to overrule Roe v. Wade in the Dobbs case. For the first time in its history, the Court has (a) issued an advisory opinion - a legal ruling overturning a non-existent regulation; (b) manifestly misinterpreted the Clean Air Act to conclude that EPA has no authority to create incentives for fuel-switching to reduce air pollution; and (c) adopted for the first time the "major question doctrine, which basically overrules in all but name the Court's 2007 decision in Massachusetts v. EPA, which had confirmed EPA's authority to regulate greenhouse gases under the Clean Air Act.

Immediately, this is a blow to US efforts, such as they are, to combat climate change using existing authorities. That's bad enough, but the implications for all federal efforts to protect public health and safety regulations should concern every American. 

Whenever a new problem arises, the Court can now use the major questions doctrine to require Congress to enact a new statute before an agency (not just EPA) can take action. Even if Congress previously granted the agency broad regulatory authority in a prior statute, the Court's conservative majority can use the "major question doctrine" to strike down regulations, knowing that it will end any chance of regulation because of congressional gridlock. 

But isn't the scope of the "major questions doctrine" limited? According to the concurrence by Justice Gorsuch (signed onto by Justice Alito), it is limited to (1) issues of "great 'political significance;'" (2) when agencies seek to "'regulate a significant portion of the national economy;'" (3) in the absence of "clear congressional authorization." The doctrine also applies when a federal agency regulations "intrude into an area that is the particular domain of state law." Gorsuch hastens to add that this this list might not be exhaustive. Perhaps I am overly jaded, but it seems to me that any regulatory effort a Supreme Court justice finds politically or ideologically objectionable can be said to have "great political significance." And there are not many substantive federal regulations that cannot be said to regulate a significant portion of the national economy, on a common definition of the word "significant." Meanwhile, whether or not any particular congressional authorization is sufficiently clear rather depends on how picky the justices choose to be. In relevant provisions, the Clean Air Act refers to "all pollutants" and "systems" of pollution control, but the majority in West Virginia v. EPA concluded that was not specific enough for EPA to issue regulations incentivizing (not mandating) fuel-switching. What if the Act had included this language: "EPA has discretion to regulate fuel inputs"? Would that have been sufficiently precise? Maybe, maybe not. It still doesn't include the phrase "fuel-switching." The bottom line is that the major questions doctrine, while taking discretion away from executive branch agencies, aggregates to Supreme Court justices a great deal of discretion to overturn regulations they simply do not like. So much for the rule of law.

Justice Roberts disserves special opprobrium for his transparent effort to elide the standing issue in the case by turning it into an issue of mootness. The fact of the matter is that no rule was presently in force, and no state or private petitioner suffered any harm from the Obama-era rule that the Court stayed (in another unprecedented move) back in 2016. Roberts maintained that states were harmed because the D.C. Circuit had repealed the Trump regulation, including that regulation's repeal of the Obama Clean Power Plan. Consequently, the Obama rule was back in effect. Except, it wasn't. At the Biden Administration's request, the DC Circuit did not reactivate it, and Biden announced that it would not resurrect the CPP. Consequently, the only harm to the states from Obama's Clean Power Plan was purely theoretical. There was no harm in fact - zero. Not even Justice Scalia would have had the stomach to find standing in this case. In fact, I have never seen so much deliberate obfuscation as Robert's employs in his majority opinion on the standing issue. 

By the way, just how "major" was the CPP in terms of economic impact? Consider this: despite the fact that the rule never took effect, all of its goals were achieved by the market and more quickly than the regulation would have required. In hindsight at least, the rule seems completely insignificant, except as a matter of law, based on the opinions of six activist Supreme Court justices. 

As a practical matter, the West Virginia decision obliterates the greatest advantages of sub-congressional rule-making, which are flexibility and speed. Congress can, on occasion, act quickly, as we have just seen on the issue of gun control. But that is exceptional. When the next pandemic comes around, how many people will have to die to spur Congress into action, so that agencies can take sensible actions to protect public health?

Monday, May 30, 2022

Where Many of My Publications May Be Found (click on text below the image)


Daniel Cole's Publications







RIP John Clark

 I recently learned that my old friend and co-author, John Clark, died in late January from COVID-related complications that he fought for over a year. 

John was a super-interesting and smart guy. In 1990, he and his dissertation supervisor, Aaron Wildavsky, co-authored a terrific book, "The Moral Collapse of Communism: Poland as a Cautionary Tale." I read that book several months before I met John, who moved from Berkeley to take up a research position at the Hudson Institute, which was then headquartered in Indy. Somehow, he found out that I was working on a book about the failure of environmental protection under communism in Poland, and he called me one day. I failed to recognize his name, so when he told me about his research interests, I recommended he read his own book. We became fast friends (as did our spouses), and started working on projects together, most notably a conference that led to a jointly edited book, "Environmental Protection in Transition: Economic, Legal and Socio-Political Perspectives on Poland" (Ashgate 1998).  

John also introduced me to my dear friend and frequent collaborator, Peter Grossman, shortly after he moved from Wash. U., in St. Louis to Butler U. in Indy. I have very fond memories of the reading group John, Peter and I started, along with a couple other economists then at Ball State Univ., Eric Helland and Alex Tabarrok, both of whom had, like Peter, been students of Doug North. Eric later served as Chief Economist on G.W. Bush's Council of Economic Advisors and Director of Research at the RAND Corp, before joining the faculty at Claremont McKenna College. Alex is well-known as co-founder of the Marginal Revolution blog. He's been on the Econ faculty at George Mason Univ. since 1999 and has served as Director of the Independent Institute.  

It was a wonderfully contentious reading group, with John mostly on the left, Peter and I more or less surrounding the center, and Alex outflanking Eric on the right. They all had great academic pedigrees; I was a mutt. I learned SO much from those guys, especially about economics and political-economy, which I never studied in school. 

Several years later, after the Hudson Institute moved back East from Indy, John started working for other think tanks and policy organizations in Indy. Eventually, we lost touch. I think the last time I talked to John was at a conference I organized at the law school in Indy a couple years before I moved down to Bloomington. 

John was a real intellectual. But he was also a very kind, unassuming, and gentle person. It was a real honor for me to be associated with him.


A Magical New DAC from Musetech

I've been quite content with my Mytek Brooklyn+ Digital-to-Analogue Converter. But I had read so many posts on audiophile websites praising a new DAC by a little-known Chinese company, Musetech (formerly LKS Audio), that I thought I might give it a try. Users referred to it as an "end-game" DAC, i.e., a piece of equipment they never expected to be surpassed in quality. Some even said that they had sold off $15K DACs in favor of Musetech's $3.3K MH-DA005. I'm always a bit suspicious of such glowing reviews, especially in the absence of reviews from well-respected audio journalists. In this case, however, I read so much enthusiasm, from several different quarters, that I decided it was worth the risk. 

Deciding to purchase the Musetech 005 turned out to be a lot easier than actually buying one. Musetech has no official presence in the US, and the few dealers who carry Musetech-LKS products have long been out of stock. I didn't want to order it from China, so I've been biding my time. Last week, a dealer in Northern Indiana, Midwest Audio, published an ad for a new one at usaudiomart.com, a highly reputable marketplace I've used in the past to buy and sell used equipment. The price was right, so I ordered the DAC.

To be honest, I didn't expect vast improvements over my Mytek Brooklyn +, which is a very, very good DAC, which was only a few hundred dollars less expensive than the Musitech. But, as soon as I plugged the Musetech into my system, even before it had a chance to warm up, I could hear big, positive improvements. Specifically, it is more detailed than the Mytek, but also a bit less bright and forward. The Mustech's soundstage is wider and deeper, but without any hint of the kind of distortion one sometimes hears in tube-based and R-2R-ladder DACs. Mustech uses two ESS Sabre 938Pro chips in its system, which one would expect to be better than the Brooklyn+'s pair of ESS Sabre 928 chips. But that's not the whole story. 

Many audiophiles dislike (or at least dis-prefer) Delta-Sigma DACs, like the Mytek and the Musetech, which use are chip-based DACs. They prefer R-2R-ladder DACs, which use a bank of weighted resistors, rather than chips to convert the digital signal to analogue. They claim that R-2R DACs sound more "natural" and "alive" than Sigma-Delta DACs. Those who prefer Delta-Sigma DACs tend to claim that they tend to have less distortion and provide more musical detail than R2R DACs. In truth, both sets of claims are misleading because, while the chips/resistance ladders may be predominantly responsible for the sound reproduction, they are not the only parts in a DAC that affect sound reproduction. As one reviewer on Audio Asylum put it: "Power supplies and quality parts really matter." So does the actual design of the circuit. Unlike most DAC-makers, Musetech actually publishes details about the components they use. Presumably, they do this because they use all top-of-the-line clocks and capacitors. 

So far, I have to concede that the Musetech MH-DA005 is everything that I have read about it. It has great presence and atmosphere. Musical instruments sound real and existence in nicely defined spaces. To use an overused cliche, the sound is "holographic," almost as if the musicians are in the room with you. There is no tinniness or hard edge to the sound; to the contrary, the overall tone is ever-so-slightly darker than absolute neutral (to my ears). I can easily imagine that, in a blind test, even veteran audiophiles would conclude that the design is R-2R, rather than chip-based. But it has none of the distortion or smearing that I have heard in less expensive and/or less well-designed ladder DACs (such as the Holo Spring, Level 2, which I found so disappointing, I returned it after a week). In all honesty, the Musetech MH-DA005 sounds to my ears like a best-of-both-worlds kind of DAC, combining the best qualities of chip-based and resistance ladder-based DACs. 

I don't believe in the special ingredient called "magic dust," which reviewers sometimes allude to in raves about some new product that seems more than the sum of its parts. The Musetech is that, and then some. But the real magic is the design and implementation work done by the company's audio engineers. I can't say whether or not it is as good or better than other, more expensive DACs because I have not heard them (let alone heard them in my system). But now that I have heard the Musetech, I am a lot less skeptical of claims that it is a giant killer. Whether it is an "end-game" DAC remains to be seen, of course. Especially given the rapid pace of substantial technological improvements in digital-to-analogue conversion, no one knows how even the best of today's DACs will stack up against those built in 10-years' time. But for right now, and at least the next few years, it is a DAC to be reckoned with. 



Back in So.Cal. 40 Years Later

After the AALS conference in San Diego, I drove up to Los Angeles to spend a week with old friends I had not seen for more than 30 years. Tw...