So I hooked up with the Ted Nugent tour for a couple of dates in Texas and wound up, per plan, with a few days to spend in Dallas with my sister-in-law, whom I never see, and her two-yearold daughter, my niece, whom I had never met. (Brother was somewhere in the Central American jungles helping Uncle carve totem poles.)

Anyway, the idea being that I'd get my girlfriend, who just so fortuitously happened to be a C&W fan, a Christmas present supreme: a pair of flashy and authentic-to-the-sole cowgirl boots, something like she'd never turn up in New York in a hundred years. In four days of searching I learned that it's the cowboys, however, who are the real girls out West. What I mean is that Sis and I went from Fort Worth to Mesquite and never in my time have I seen such a dazzling array of footwear for men: Lizard-skin, ostrichskin, camel-skin, snake-skin, whatever-varmint-you-want-skin. Varieties and mixes of colors that defied the rainbow. Not to mention leather cutouts and overlays, fancy stitching, rhinestone studding—and the Bicentennial Boot on sale. Red, white and blue, of course, all cutout and laid over, with 1776 on the right shoe and 1976 on the left. Remember: it's never too late to be patriotic or thrifty.

But the clincher always seemed to be when I asked to see the ladies" boots and a store full of men and women sales-folk looked up as if I'd just rode in from Mars. Ladies" boots??? Eventually, the light would go on over one of those benighted souls, and he or she would trot out back—way out back— and return six weeks later with a dumpy old pair of dark brown boots that displayed all the personality of a loaf of turd bread. "In ladies", this is really all we have," they would say, "but for you..."

Finally—like I say, it took four whole days—we found a place down a back alley in Dallas that somehow had a pair of ladies" Tony Lamas ("hand made" on Tony Lama's street in El Paso; T.L."s, in case you didn't know, city slicker, are the knee plooz ultries among cow person boots); that seemed to have a little style, some flash, and most certainly would surpass anything available in New York. The tops were dark brown with some semi-fancy white stitching and the shoe part was bone-colored with a lizard wing-tip at the front. While they weren't Bicentennial, they would more than do in this ladies" boot wasteland. Sis, whose foot size reasonably approximated that of the recipient, pronounced them a fit and the cash hit the barrel head. (It's true, I picked up an accent down there.)

Back in New York on Christmas Day, I sprung the shoes on the lucky cowgirl, who was more impressed than I had imagined. With the barest hint of tears in her eyes, she removed the boots gingerly from their box, clutching them to her swollen bosoms. Then she motioned me over to our little tree for my gift, a small package that opened to reveal a solid gold watch chain. Whooping, (in my new Texas accent), I wheeled on her for an embrace when suddenly I looked down and realized that she had cut off her feet to get the money...

Just kidding. But what actually happened was worse.

The girl stood, the left boot before her on the floor, and with consummate grace arched her precious little left foot into it. But it wouldn't go. She retrieved the foot and tried again. No dice. Then she jammed the foot down and jumped around the house. All in vain: the left boot did not fit.

The only decent pair of cowgirl boots in all the Southwest did not fit.

The next day, crestfallen, I rushed to the post office and packed the boots off to their place of purchase, enclosing a request for the next size up. That was Christmas of "76. Little did I know, it would be a whole year before I would ever see those cowgirl boots (in the next size up) again.

Which would be the end to a long and almost pointless story of cosmic annoyance were it not for the fact that I have a friend named Mark the Shark.

Now, the Shark, as you might have guessed from his handle, is more your urban New York City-type than your great Southwest cowboy. Not that he's a little guy—far from it, seeing as how he was once a heavyweight Golden Gloves contender—just that with his swarthy Robert DeNiro good looks, he seems more in place in Taxi Driver than in Stagecoach.

Well, every year the Shark has a post-holiday party to which we are always invited. It had been two weeks since I mailed off the boots and, against better judgement, I half expected that a bigger pair was already winging its way back to me and my would-be cowgirl, perhaps in time for the Shark's big bash. No luck. Somewhat disappointed in our everyday shoes, but certain that a good drunk in good company cures deck can be programmed in a similar way to the Accutrac turntable to play the cassette in any order. You can also program the deck to remember a given number on the counter and find it repeatedly. In conjunction with standard memory features the deck will play a given section of the tape repeatedly. The 3388 employs a digital clock which does a great deal more than just tell time. You can program it to start and stop record or play at a particular time and you can count the seconds the tape has been going and the clock will show the time remaining on the tape.

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I won't get into the specifications of the deck, but suffice it to say that Sharp has built a Dolby and a whole lot more into a unit with a suggested list of under $300.

Another microprocessor controlled unit is Sherwood's Micro/CPU FM Tuner. The tuner scans like many other synthesized tuners, but has a memory capable of storing four stations that can be called back not with a card, but with the touch of a button. Tuning is done either via a conventional knob or by pressing buttons marked "Left" or "Right" autoscan (perhaps "Up" and "Down" would have been better), which will take you either up the frequency band or down from where you are. If you want the station in memory, just touch a store button and you've got it there. If you want to change that memory storage, change the station and press the button again. That part works similarly to a pushbutton car radio. Not only will this tuner give you a digital readout of the station's frequency, but you can program it to readout the call letters as well. The price for this marvel is a mere two grand, but you can bet it will have imitators in a short time.

These three items have used microprocessors and digital circuits to control functions with which we are normally familiar. We are about to see digital electronics used in audio equipment to actually perform functions differently from what we're used to.

Possibly the first example of this to hit the market is Sony's new PCM tape deck. PCM stands for Pulse Code Modulation. The unit is used in conjunction with Sony's Betamax TV system. Basically, it records "blips" the way a computer does and only records when there's a signal. Thus, reducing signal-to-noise level (the bane of tape recordists) to nothing. It's got a wide dynamic range of 85 dB and wow-andflutter are non-existent.

PCM units from Sony and other manufacturers have been show at Audio Engineering Society shows recently and should be appearing on the market soon.

There is it, the state of audio today. Conventional technology is widely available and the price is good and the quality high. New technology is about to dome on the scene at higher prices for the innovations. The next year or so should see a whole host of new products both digitally controlled and truly digital units. They may well end up changing what we think of when we think of audio equipment. In the meantime, good equipment is here and more widely accessible than ever before and giving more people a taste of another and more pleasurable way to live. !§