LATEST ADDITIONS

Sometimes it's good to step outside your comfort zone. In fact, I relish new and novel experiences. It's a major reason I enjoy attending hi-fi shows and events: for the chance to see and hear new things—new hi-fi equipment, especially equipment that's groundbreaking or unusual.

My wife saw me putting on my new LP of Joni Mitchell's great For the Roses album and said: "Oh, our breakup album!" Never mind the confusing details—we're obviously still (or again) together—that's how intense the bonds are for many people with Joni's music: We people of a certain age set the clock of our lives by her recordings.

Tyler Chester was headed south on the I-5 to San Diego, where he would join indie-rock eminence Andrew Bird's road band for a brief tour. Touring is an activity Los Angeles–based Chester pursues with decreasing frequency, he told me in a recent phone chat. After years as a busy sideman and recording-session musician—he is equally proficient on bass, guitar, and keyboards—Chester finds himself spending less and less time as a player and more as a producer.

When I put together my first hi-fi system in the late 1960s, the amplifier was a Kenwood integrated. Soon I replaced the Kenwood with a Sony integrated, and then, a few years later, I bought a Lecson preamplifier and power amplifier pairing. It's been separates for me ever since.

People tend to believe that things are what they appear to be. This turned out to be the case in 2016, when Panasonic introduced the limited-edition Technics SL-1200GAE turntable. It appeared almost identical to an SL-1200—arguably the best-selling and most loved record player series of all time, discontinued in 2010 after more than 30 years—but it cost a whopping $4000. The similar model designation didn't help stem the griping that Panasonic had made a "fancy" version of their legendary DJ turntable at six times the price of the original.

As a native European, I don't particularly love bubbly people: Too much sugar makes my teeth hurt. I'm sympathetic to my friend Nick, a Brit who reliably bristles when he hears Americans use the word "awesome" for the most mundane things. A slight drop in gas prices? Awesome! How was the meatloaf? Awesome!

It irks him that the words awe and awesome are now nearly divorced. But I like to remind Nick that this hyperpleasant, optimistic American attitude is surely preferable to the alternative.

In last month's Gramophone Dreams, I explained why doing any sort of empirical study of high-quality digital sources was extremely difficult. That any success I might achieve as a reporter would boil down to my ability to employ metaphors to describe a DAC's clarity and dynamic personality. Concocting metaphors for DAC reviews is risky because it assumes readers will be familiar with the sound of my amplifier and speakers and, ideally, with one of the DACs I'm using in the comparison. That's a lot to assume.