Ritz,

No, I'm in Santa Barbara. I read a review of a nOrh (note the spelling) speaker in The Absolute Sound a couple of years back, looked them up on the Web, and liked what Barnes seemed to be doing in Thailand and his rather iconoclastic approach to audio. The first Le Amp got good reviews from high end writers in the alternative online press. When he announced Le Amp 2 the idea of a switching power supply intrigued me - no transformer at all. So I decided to try them. There were a couple of problems with the first ones but they exchanged them with no problems and no charge. Apart from a little noise in the first 30 seconds when they're turned on after being off all night, the sound is impeccable. There's an interesting post about them at http://audiocircle.com/circles/viewtopic.php?t=18751&sid=7dd37e98cd3ef1f6ad8ef36932140752 which unfortunately says there have been too many problems with them and they're being discontinued, but the writer describes their sound in pretty much the language I'd use. As I said mine work fine and I'm going to hold on to them. But it looks like I'll need another make of monoblock for my center channel when I go HT. My old-but-still-good-enough Adcom GFA535 will do the surround duty.