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Entering the first of four rooms sponsored by Brian Berdan's Audio Element of Pasadena felt like coming home. Not only was I among familiar friends—Wilson Audio Sasha Series 2 loudspeakers ($29,950/pair); mighty VTL Siegfried Reference monoblocks Series II ($65,000/pair), accompanied by VTL's TL-7.5 Reference line preamplifier Series III ($25,000) and TP-6.5 Signature phono stage ($12,000); dCS four-stack, state-of-the-art Vivaldi Digital Playback System ($108,996 total); Transparent Opus MM and Reference cables ($105,500 total); Grand Prix Audio Silverstone 4-shelf Isolation system ($19,175), Monaco-5 shelf Isolation system ($8400), and Formula Platforms ($6900); Audience AdeptResponse aR12TSS power conditioner ($11,545); and, a bit less familiar, Grand Prix Audio Monaco 1.5 turntable ($23,500) with new Tri-Planar SE tonearm ($7500) and luscious Lyra Etna cartridge ($6995)—but I also finally heard a quality of musical presentation that decades upon decades of attending live performance have led me to hunger for.

Friday morning, May 30, was Day One of T.H.E Show Newport Beach. With the opening bell struck, as it were, by a ribbon-cutting ceremony in the lobby of the Hilton that I miss due to a very slow kitchen at the adjacent Atrium hotel, I dash from hotel to hotel to discover, instead of a frayed red Mylar ribbon or a row of hot, class-A amplifiers, a line of audio hot-rodded classic and contemporary cars.

When I began my journey into audiophilia, I was in awe of the Audio Research Corporation's flagship SP preamplifiers. As I sat there in the early 1980s with my modest Apt Holman preamp, all of my friends had ARC SP6Bs. By today's standards, the SP6B was colored, did not portray a realistic soundstage, and lacked sufficient gain to amplify the low-output moving-coil cartridges of the day. But it had an intimacy in the midrange that was intoxicating. (Still considered a classic design by many, the SP6B's price on the used market has remained virtually unchanged for 30 years.) Then, still in the early '80s, ARC raised the bar with the SP-10 ($3700). It had 15 tubes and an outboard power supply, and set a new standard for delicacy, drama, and authority. (John Atkinson still has the SP10 he bought in 1984.)

Paul Bley's Play Blue: Oslo Concert (on the ECM label) is a bracing solo piano album. Think Keith Jarrett, with less Rachmaninoff and more Monk, but the distinctions sway on the margins. Bley too is a romantic improviser, immersed in jazz idiom but classically trained (and he lets it show, though less showily than Jarrett).

Before there were jam bands, before the term even existed in fact, there was a fabulous, funky assemblage called Little Feat.

In response to my review of Music Hall's USB-1 turntable, that company's founder and president for life, Roy Hall, noted my detailed explanation of the product, diverse taste in music, and keen attention to minutiae. He then offered six words of final observation that will, if there is any justice in this world, go down in Stereophile lore: "The kid has gotta get laid."

A year or so ago, in my review of the Pass Labs XP-30 preamplifier, I wrote that the heart of an audio system is the preamplifier, in that it sets the overall quality of the system's sound. But it is the power amplifier that is responsible for determining the character of the system's sound, because it is the amplifier that must directly interface with the loudspeakers. The relationship between amplifier and loudspeaker is complex, and the nature of that relationship literally sets the tone of the sound quality.