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If there's one word that best describes the sound of the Boston-bred alt-rock quartet known as Pixies, it has to be "dynamics." It's a musical milieu Pixies have deftly presented for 37 years and counting, right from the outset of the sinister janglefest known as "Caribou," the opening track on their inaugural September 1987 EP on 4AD, Come On Pilgrim.

From there, short, sanguine, sweet, succinctly titled songs like "Debaser," "Velouria," "Monkey Gone to Heaven," "Gigantic," "Here Comes Your Man," "Gouge Away," and "Where Is My Mind?" have all served to cement the bedrock of Pixies' planet of sound. Chief Pixies songwriter and vocalist/guitarist Black Francis—born Charles Thompson—recently described it in an interview for Stereophile as this: "Let's be quiet. Now, let's be loud. Let's be whispering. Now, let's be explosive." That's a precise four-sentence descriptor not only of their entire prior CV but also of Pixies' latest, and ninth studio album, the forebodingly titled The Night the Zombies Came, which was released by BMG in October 2024.

Matt Thomas's hi-fi business has always been personal. He wants to keep it that way—in his curated, personalized sales approach, in choosing esoteric gear to carry, and in his listening preferences and not wanting to get too big.

A health crisis was the catalyst for Matt Thomas to start Hearken Audio: A back injury caused temporary paralysis. "For lack of a better word, it was an experience," he told me in a recent phone conversation. He's now fully recovered, but the experience changed him. He decided to pursue his passion. He was already an avid audiophile and music lover; he had been for years. After the accident, almost five years ago, he started Hearken Audio, a home-based dealership in Kitchener, Ontario, where he lives with his wife and two teenage daughters.

Two albums with the same title, by the same artist, basically released one week apart on the same planet? Even considering the dubious history of music-biz capers and catastrophes, the Lights on a Satellite kerfuffle is hilariously surreal. By the time it was discovered, covers were already printed and records were already pressed. It's so bizarre that it's tempting to suspect intergalactic powers were involved. Could the ghost of that interstellar traveler, Master Sun Ra, who thought space was the place, have had a hand in this unlikeliest of Saturnian conjunctions?

Fortunately, the two versions of Lights on a Satellite are very different.

Almost 14 years have passed since a review of a Soulution product appeared in the pages of Stereophile. Given the Swiss company's steady ascent in the high-end pantheon, it is high time that we again reached into the German-speaking region of Switzerland north of the Swiss Alps to evaluate another of the reference products from a company equally renowned for its sonic achievements and refined and elegant design aesthetic.

Enter the full-function Soulution 727 preamplifier ($74,975), whose optional MC/MM phono section ($11,975) will be evaluated in a future issue. Because Soulution claims that the 727 "sets benchmarks in terms of noise, phase errors, common mode rejection and distortion," one would hope that there's far more than 62lb of classy casework and an easy-to-handle lightweight remote to account for its price.

The British audio scene from the late 1970s through the mid-1980s was pretty strange. Audio as a hobby was a big deal, with widespread appeal to a much younger crowd than today. Audiophiles were guided by a flurry of what my friends called "hi-fi pornos," audio magazines that filled the racks at the newsagents.

Far more than you see today, there was a strong nationalist bent, with some writers displaying an open bias against anything that wasn't British. Magazines' editorial departments presented readers with a clear, specific doctrine of how a system should be built and what components readers should acquire.

As a schoolboy with no system of my own, I lapped up these suggestions, and when I returned to the US in 1980 to attend university, I was finally able to start building a system that conformed to the system-building rules that had been drilled into me.

Since the original WATT/Puppy concept kicked off in the late 1980s, there has been a 40-year evolution leading to the latest version reviewed here. The loudspeaker's price in 2025 is around $40,000/pair compared to the original's $8000. While inflation alone would have lifted the price to $25,000/pair, the current price takes into account the many technological and design improvements. While remaining physically separable, the upper "WATT" (Wilson Audio Tiny Tot) component, namely the head unit of the latest design, can no longer be run as a small full-range loudspeaker in its own right. This is because the mid/treble crossover, which was originally in the WATT, is now relocated to the lower "Puppy" section. Certainly, that original two-box "full range," strongly sculpted WATT/Puppy stack radically broke the mold in deviating from those rather plain, coffin-shaped tower loudspeakers that were popular in this category.

The late David Wilson originally created the WATT as a shelf-mount studio monitor to help produce his recordings. At the time, this compact two-way promised near–state-of-the-art sound quality, especially transparency, indicative of very low self-noise. This quality also helped to maximize dynamic range and contrast. Later, David used the WATT as the foundation for a three-way floorstanding design by matching it to a low-frequency system (the Puppy), which also stood in as a physical platform for the WATT. This idea became reality in the successful W/P line of bass augmented systems.

The dogma of separates has long reigned supreme among audiophiles: If you're serious about sound quality, you're supposed to need a dedicated preamp and power amp. The logic goes that separates reduce interference and offer maximum control over your sound. But there's an argument to be made that integrated amplifiers are more practical ... and potentially better-sounding.

The beauty of an integrated amp lies in its synergy. Audio engineers know exactly how the pre and power sections will interact; the two are literally designed to work together. On paper at least, that means optimized impedance matching, and signal integrity that can rival and perhaps surpass separates. How do you know whether a standalone preamp is a great match for a power amp? For most of us, it's through trial and error. It isn't unusual for restless stereo aficionados to own multiple combos over the years, in search of the ideal one. That gets costly.

Then there's the fact that an integrated amp helps declutter a room, appealing to minimalists and people whose living spaces are less than cavernous. Another plus: no need to shell out for audiophile-grade interconnects.