BEST RECORD/CD STORE

During the Eighties, Miami was littered with record shops. There were no fewer than six independent and a couple of chain stores along North Miami Beach Boulevard alone. Maybe it was the changeover to the higher wholesale prices of CDs or the explosion of the Internet, but now there's just one real player in North Miami-Dade. Not that Blue Note is a bad record store. It's great by any standard, and what would've been at a half-dozen locations is now conveniently collected at two spots. (Though some audiophiles legitimately complain about the ghettoization of jazz -- which was Blue Note's raison d'être in the golden Eighties -- to a warehouse a mile away from the main store.)