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"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."

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.

It took me less than a New York minute to sign off on Richard's idea. We asked the magazine's audio and music writers each to name two of their favorite albums of all time—albums that were, to them, "to die for."

Although I excelled in the sciences at school and university, music was my first love. I played in bands, first semiprofessionally, then professionally, and I ended up in the mid-1970s as the house bass guitarist at a recording studio in Cornwall, England. Working at that studio with producer Tony Cox and legendary engineer Jerry Boys, I became familiar with the studio environment and how recordings are created.

The exhibit, designed to celebrate "pioneering designs shaping our music experiences," was the creation of two visionaries: Museum Curator Joseph Becker, 40, and New York–based audio salon host/entrepreneur/system and fashion designer Devon Turnbull, aka Ojas, 45.