Geoffrey Morrison

I am not a woman. This may come as a shock, given my sleek and slickly stylish dome and ratty Scottish-highland-wannabe beard. 

However, I am lucky enough to know many intelligent and erudite people who happen to be women. 

My question to them, as folks of the female persuasion, was if the simplistic marketing tactic of "It's pink, women will buy it!" annoyed them as much as it annoyed me. 

Turns out it did, sort of.

Paradigm isn't a big company, only 250 people or so. It doesn't have the immense marketing budget to assault the airwaves like Bose, or the R&D budget to make every manner of gadget like Sony.

These are good things, because instead this Canadian company goes about making some solid products, loved by reviewers, and beloved by customers.

Invited to check out their factory just outside Toronto, I dusted off my American Flag jacket, trucker hat, "W" belt buckle, and headed north of the border.

I gave in. Battlefield 3 had reduced my HTPC to a smoldering, weeping mess that begged me to put it out of its misery.

Gentlemen, we can rebuild him. We have the technology.

And to that end, I started with, well the anthropomorphic spin kinda fails here. It's a new video card, that's what I'm getting at.

It's an interesting thing, this. A tweaky audiophile program that strips away all the junk your computer could be doing while playing back your digital audio files.

The idea is to give each file as good an environment for playback as possible, minimizing jitter and maximizing sound quality.

Well, OK. That could be cool.