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Two albums with the same title, by the same artist, basically released one week apart on the same planet? Even considering the dubious history of music-biz capers and catastrophes, the Lights on a Satellite kerfuffle is hilariously surreal. By the time it was discovered, covers were already printed and records were already pressed. It's so bizarre that it's tempting to suspect intergalactic powers were involved. Could the ghost of that interstellar traveler, Master Sun Ra, who thought space was the place, have had a hand in this unlikeliest of Saturnian conjunctions?

Fortunately, the two versions of Lights on a Satellite are very different.

Totem Acoustic was founded in 1987, in Montreal, Canada, by a former high school math teacher named Vince Bruzzese. The company's first product, the Model 1 loudspeaker, impressed me so much I bought a pair.

These little boxes steered the music straight into my brain—just like Quads and Snells...Today, those speakers look and sound like vintage pipe-and-slippers standmounts. This is especially true when compared to Totem Acoustic's brand-new Element Fire V2. Totem's new Fire looks Maybach-level glossy, and windswept, and trés moderne, but also smart and down-to-business, as befits its made-in-Canada roots.

Almost 14 years have passed since a review of a Soulution product appeared in the pages of Stereophile. Given the Swiss company's steady ascent in the high-end pantheon, it is high time that we again reached into the German-speaking region of Switzerland north of the Swiss Alps to evaluate another of the reference products from a company equally renowned for its sonic achievements and refined and elegant design aesthetic.

Enter the full-function Soulution 727 preamplifier ($74,975), whose optional MC/MM phono section ($11,975) will be evaluated in a future issue. Because Soulution claims that the 727 "sets benchmarks in terms of noise, phase errors, common mode rejection and distortion," one would hope that there's far more than 62lb of classy casework and an easy-to-handle lightweight remote to account for its price.

Listening to music inspires us to take action. Upon hearing an I.E.—Instant Ear-worm—we must then determine the best way we can go about listening to it again (and again) at our convenience. Prior to the free-for-all streaming era, our I.E. follow-through measures typically meant seeking out a specific playback medium for our favorite music, initially based on budgetary constraints. In those formative, pre-employment preteen years, 45s—and/or, depending on how far back we're talking here, possibly even 78s—fit the literal dollar bill before we could afford to move up the media ladder and begin purchasing LPs en masse. Our then-limited playback options tended to start with those self-contained, close-and-play record players and/or our parents' living-room consoles before we could afford to acquire separate components for more personal, higher-fidelity listening sessions. We were, to be blunt, obsessed.

Across the pond, hungry young listeners were eager to do the exact same thing. Take garage/punk glam-pop vocalist Michael Des Barres (aka MDB), who had duly been shuffled off to Repton School in Derbyshire, England, as a lad in the 1950s and found his initial aural inspiration by listening to his mates' records, since he couldn't yet afford to buy any of his own.

Since the original WATT/Puppy concept kicked off in the late 1980s, there has been a 40-year evolution leading to the latest version reviewed here. The loudspeaker's price in 2025 is around $40,000/pair compared to the original's $8000. While inflation alone would have lifted the price to $25,000/pair, the current price takes into account the many technological and design improvements. While remaining physically separable, the upper "WATT" (Wilson Audio Tiny Tot) component, namely the head unit of the latest design, can no longer be run as a small full-range loudspeaker in its own right. This is because the mid/treble crossover, which was originally in the WATT, is now relocated to the lower "Puppy" section. Certainly, that original two-box "full range," strongly sculpted WATT/Puppy stack radically broke the mold in deviating from those rather plain, coffin-shaped tower loudspeakers that were popular in this category.

The late David Wilson originally created the WATT as a shelf-mount studio monitor to help produce his recordings. At the time, this compact two-way promised near–state-of-the-art sound quality, especially transparency, indicative of very low self-noise. This quality also helped to maximize dynamic range and contrast. Later, David used the WATT as the foundation for a three-way floorstanding design by matching it to a low-frequency system (the Puppy), which also stood in as a physical platform for the WATT. This idea became reality in the successful W/P line of bass augmented systems.

Perhaps the most intriguing aspect of the MoFi Electronics MasterDeck turntable ($5995), as the brainchild of Allen Perkins in his role as MoFi's Chief Analog Designer, lies in the question of how his background as a jazz drummer has shaped his approach to turn table design. How does the rhythmic sensibility of a percussionist translate into the meticulous engineering of a turntable?

"It's a little complicated," Perkins wrote over email. "Being a drummer, I am sensitive to timing in music, so it makes me sensitive to problems. However, it does not provide any direction for solutions. It could be seen as an annoying awareness as a listener, like perfect pitch. In my case, it is an advantage because I love to solve problems, in general, so I persevere and have a built-in sense to assess what I've done."

The day I visited Stereophile Senior Contributing Editor Kalman Rubinson, I arrived back home with a headful of new understandings, but before I could ponder those things, I made a cup of tea and sat down to read a few New York Times obituaries.

While Kal and I sat chatting on his couch, he told me that reading obituaries was not only fascinating but had actually helped him find out what happened to a few people he had lost touch with. I told him I hadn't read Times obits in years but when I did, I did it to enjoy the quality of writing. We agreed that the Times's obituaries (as well as their Sports, Food, and Arts & Leisure pages) are good places to find inspired bits of pure journalism.

After some raving about our favorite journalists, we began telling when-we-were-kid stories about how we used to stare through the grille cloths on table radios, where inside by the speaker we would see the announcer's face, and sometimes whole orchestras—in miniature—on a dark stage where the speaker cone morphed into a concert shell.