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At least three premieres, a number of rooms with glorious sound, and reunions with old friends both human and electronic distinguished my romp through the hallways of Warsaw's PGE Narodowy on the first day of Audio Video 2025 in Warsaw. Compared to other days I've spent at shows in Chicago, Munich, Florida, and Seattle, it was a pretty fine day.

Walking through any big art museum, even at a brisk pace, it's impossible not to notice how boldly each object wears the unique stamp of its time and place of manufacture. It doesn't matter whether the artist worked in Paris or Polynesia, in the 15th or 20th century. The force of the creator's persona, united with the constraints of the cultural system that supported the making of that type of art, determines the vibe the object emits. That vibe is what I'm hoping to grasp.

On my way to the Revox room in Warsaw's Sobieski Hotel, my mind wandered/wondered: If a voracious reader is a bookworm, is a tape enthusiast a tapeworm?

Although I have very much appreciated how the best floorstanding loudspeakers have performed in my various listening rooms over the decades, I have always been most comfortable with relatively small two-way standmounts. Back in the early 1980s, I got musically moving sound from a pair of Rogers LS3/5a's, which I still own . . .

German aesthetes are fond of saying "Das Auge isst mit": "The eye feasts too." In audio terms, your ears do the listening, but your eyes want their share of pleasure. I thought of that expression after I opened the T+A Symphonia's double factory box.

If you go to Tokyo, there's a good chance you'll develop a new appreciation for shopping malls. The Japanese know malls. They know just what to do with them. Inside a Tokyo mall, you can peruse the usual handbags and shoes in their unending variety. But you can also stare at Fuji apples as large as a baby's head swaddled in tissue paper, flip through the world's most exquisite stationery, stock up on fabric from the 1920s, and taste things that will haunt you well into retirement.

Grado has announced the Signature S750 headphones, the third model in its Signature Line. At the heart of the S750 is an all-new S2 50mm driver paired with a newly developed "B" cushion, a combination designed to fine-tune the listening experience.