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The finest soup I ever tasted was served in Kamakura City, Japan, in 1992. After climbing a mountain to a shrine that held a lock of Buddha's hair, I descended to Kamakura and walked to its Great Bronze Buddha. By the time I had taken my fill of the image's 730-year-old wonders and the countless picture-taking tourists at its base—a mild precursor to "the world is a backdrop for my ego" snappers of the smartphone age—I noticed that my stomach was growling.

Exhausted, I walked back into town and descended stairs into a conveniently located corner restaurant. I had to eat fast because my train back was departing soon. Looking for something quick, I ordered miso soup and eel over rice. Imagine my surprise when I found myself gazing into the most wondrous bowl of soup I'd ever seen. Floating on top of its clear, brown broth were various vegetables and herbs, each perfectly positioned in relationship to the other, as in a handcrafted textile. I felt as though I'd been granted private access to a great work of art.

What does this have to do with the Electrocompaniet AW 800 M Reference power amplifier ($22,500/each) that is the subject of this review? You'll have to read on to find out.

With a system like this, Thoreau would never have gone into the woods to begin with.

Last weekend, I visited an old friend who lives near Walden Pond of Henry Thoreau fame. I hadn't visited him since before the pandemic. He had just finished adding a wing to his house that included a dedicated hi-fi listening room the size and shape of a small church. Below a cathedral ceiling, the sweet spot featured seating for no fewer than 30 guests. Besides serving as his main listening room—he has another one that's smaller—it serves as a large residential parlor with a baby grand piano for use in chamber music performances, which feature prominently in his and his wife's social calendar.

It was a high-SPL thrill to experience his towering, field-coiled RCA theater horns powered by RCA 845 amplifiers.

In 1984, Metal Blade Records of Van Nuys, California, released the fifth edition of its Metal Massacre series, which had already unleashed such bands as RATT, Metallica, Slayer, and Lizzy Borden onto an unwitting music-buying public. On the second track, among future stalwarts Overkill, Fates Warning, and Metal Church as well as no-hit wonders Lethyl Synn and Jesters of Destiny, was an oddly named band from Jonquière, Quebec: Voïvod, spelled Voi Vod on the album cover. Voïvod's four members were Blacky, Away, Piggy, and Snake.

Hi-fi is at a crossroads. One road takes us toward modernized versions of the gear we grew up with, stuff that has been around since the 1950s. The other road faces the future. While sometimes accommodating physical media, including vinyl records, that's not where that road leads. On that road, streaming is the norm, and equipment may be hooked up with traditional signal cables or with no cables at all, just GHz-range electromagnetic radiation, the digital kind. In the more extreme cases, the music may remain digital all the way to the amplifiers, which themselves are likely to be class-D.

I keep a foot on both paths, hoping they don't diverge so much that they split me in two. I've got a substantial collection of physical discs, black and silver, and I play them often. But I love the convenience of my network-attached storage (NAS) appliance, Qobuz, even lossy Spotify, especially when I want my world filled with music for hours with no thought or action on my part.

Writing a regular column can be a funny thing; the repetition it requires brings up questions that grow increasingly urgent. Chief among them: What are we doing here, and what is this for? For all the handwringing about story-telling and prose style, what we're up to in the equipment-review section of this magazine is writing about metal boxes filled with wire, capacitors, circuit boards, and other bits of hardware. Life is difficult and goes by in a flash, love and satisfaction are fleeting at best—so why should we care? Well, because some of these boxes manage to connect us to beauty and meaning in a way that can enhance and gradually change our lives. (And yes, both have to be in the mix: Beauty without meaning is anodyne and lacks whupass.)

Can an audio brand maintain a "house sound" if the original creator of that sound is no longer among the living? If the brand in question is Ayre Acoustics, the answer is a resounding Yes.

When Ayre founder Charley Hansen passed in late 2017, Ariel Brown, who is now Ayre's vice president and chief technology officer, was ready, waiting in the wings. Brown has worked for Ayre since he was a sophomore in college. As John Atkinson wrote in his February 2019 review of Ayre's EX-8 Integrated Hub, "Brown says that for better or worse, he was indoctrinated in Hansen's way of thinking and design. 'I only know the Charley way! Charley never wanted to introduce a product unless we had something new to offer with that product. 'New–Better–Different' was his philosophy; every product had to be a step up from before.'"

I have found that turntable designers typically fall into one of two camps. First are what I call the obsessive machinists. These are the people with impressive manufacturing chops and a sharp eye for fine detail and precision. For them, making a better turntable usually involves taking what we already know and simply doing it better.

Whether it's a thicker chassis, more powerful motor, more precise bearing, more effective isolation system, or something else, the emphasis is always on stepping things up a notch or two, rather than reinventing the wheel. This obsession can result in some impressive 'tables—some of the most impressive in the world, with awesome attention to detail. But are they the best sounding?

The other camp is what I call the deep thinkers. They approach the task of playing a record from a theoretical perspective and leverage their knowledge of physics to come up with fresh and innovative designs. The results may look unconventional, or even odd at first glance, but when such lateral thinking clicks, it can really push the boundaries of what's possible.