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Weird how these things happen. Checks and balances make it right.

In the best of Keith Jarrett's long-form Concert recordings—Bremen Lausanne, Köln, and most of all Bregenz München and the monumental Sun Bear—one hears the evolution, over unbroken spans of as long as 45 minutes, of a beginning musical germ. A mere rhythm or broken chord or simple cadence or single note, sometimes a full melody exquisitely arranged, opens what seems an infinite world of musical ideas, channeled or happened on or willed up out of the moment, then explored in depth and at length, all flowing into and out of each other—and into and out of jazz, blues, gospel, folk, Middle Eastern, Baroque, Classical, Romantic, and 20th-century styles (Ives, Bartók, Stravinsky). One gets the impression of a musician who has heard and played every kind of piano music there is and who, on a given evening, serially or simultaneously plays any and all of it. No one else has ever done anything like it.

I hear not the volumes of sound merely, I am moved by the exquisite meanings.—Walt Whitman, "That Music Always Round Me," from Leaves of Grass

These two statements, to me, express the core perspective shared by Stereophile's contributors. When I encountered both of them within a span of 30 days, they spoke so strongly that I felt impelled to hook up the biggest, baddest loudspeakers I could find and broadcast them to the world, without distortion. Failing in that quest, and having not yet attained the status of the Edward R. Murrows and Walter Cronkites of eras past, I share them here.

In my mind, Mr. Speakers had become a world-class enthusiast headphone maker.

And it was with that mind-set, biasing that it might be, that I eagerly awaited the coming Ether C Flow. My feelings are mixed.