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I can’t tell you how many times I have to correct “Room” back to “Roon.” Both the word-processing applications I use have Spell-Checkers built in, and both always change Roon to Room. Sigh.

The vinyl resurgence of the last several years confounded some manufacturers and was simpatico for others. Those who saw it as a fad seemed to be misinformed and those who saw it as a resurgence for a format that is just as viable today as it was 50 years ago now seem prescient. McIntosh it seems is in the latter camp. Not only do they embrace the LP, they embrace the modern LP collector and music lover who not only wants vinyl playback ability in a sound system, but digital and streaming options too.

The Venetian wasn’t “dead,” so to speak. Before I set out to commit to CES 2019 I wanted to make sure there would still be something to cover. But as the weeks before the giant Las Vegas electronics show drew to a close, it become slowly apparent that my schedule was filling up… over filling perhaps.

NAD has seen the writing on the wall for music and connectivity-first oriented consumers who want high-fidelity in their homes with ease of use, as few cables as possible, one box and a price point that is going to offer high quality with technological longevity… oh, and great industrial design chops so it fits in seamlessly with today’s modern decor in urban dwellings.

Updates. In a world of instantaneous answers at the tip of our fingertips or tongues as we wag either at our various platform-specific digital assistants to tell us want we want to know, waiting for an update on anything can be a tortuous predicament on our first-world list of problems.

Faith. There seems to be a sense of spiritual angst among the audiophile faithful who stream their digital audio via cloud-based music services and its cause seems to be the continuing delay of the French high-resolution music service Qobuz from entering the North American market.

You’ve read the reviews obsessively. You’ve gone to your local bricks and mortar or a hi-fi trade show and sat shoulder-to-shoulder with others to listen to them, or stopped round to a mate’s flat for a pint and heard them. For all those out there in audiophile-land who have been hemming and hawing about whether to lay down some cash on KEF’s award-winning LS50 or LS50 Wireless loudspeakers, the time may have come to get off the fence and commit to buying a pair.