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From May 4 through August 18, 2024, the San Francisco Museum Of Modern Art (SFMOMA) staged the largest multisensory installation cum performance art exhibition in its history. Entitled Art Of Noise, the multi-room show, which occupied 14,000ft² on the museum's seventh floor, drew an estimated 140,000 visitors, boosting museum attendance by over 33% from the same period in 2023. Even accounting for postpandemic attendance declines, that's an impressive figure.

The exhibit, designed to celebrate "pioneering designs shaping our music experiences," was the creation of two visionaries: Museum Curator Joseph Becker, 40, and New York–based audio salon host/entrepreneur/system and fashion designer Devon Turnbull, aka Ojas, 45.

To watch as Rega very slowly expands its turntable offerings upmarket requires the patience of a Thomas Pynchon addict waiting for each new tome from the notoriously slow-working and reclusive author. Starting out 51 years ago with just one turntable model, Rega now offers turntables at seven different price levels, plus a few minor variations in between. During the "lost years" of waning turntable and vinyl sales in the 1990s and early 2000s, Rega boss Roy Gandy candidly admits that the company put little effort into advancing its turntable designs, as sales at the time didn't really justify the investment. Rega had shifted its focus to digital source components, amplifiers, and loudspeakers, and even introduced a tube CD player.

That momentum finally started to reverse about 15 years ago, as the vinyl revival started to kick in and turntable sales began to pick up again. By this point, Rega was a much larger company and was able to leverage its growing reputation to engage with cutting-edge high-tech manufacturing subcontractors. Through these new relationships, they created a test bed turntable called the Naiad that would extend their design philosophies as far as was feasibly possible...

The Naiad's high price was the result of some of the design choices that had already been made, when scaling up for production wasn't even under consideration. Rega knew it wouldn't be too difficult to create a more production-ready version, into which they could distill most of what they had learned from building the Naiad. The result is the Naia, where with just a few simple changes, they have managed to undercut the Naiad's price by more than 70%, down to $12,995.

A quick survey of 1977's rock albums shows a vibrant genre, pushing in many directions at once. British punk went major label, with debut albums from The Clash, The Damned, Wire, and The Sex Pistols (their only studio album). The Ramones released Rocket to Russia. David Bowie explored a new direction with both Low and Heroes. Mainstream blockbusters included Rumours by Fleetwood Mac, News of the World by Queen, Slowhand by Eric Clapton, and Pink Floyd's Animals. Not to mention Meat Loaf 's Bat Out of Hell and the soundtrack to Saturday Night Fever (footnote 1).

Amid all of this, there was a distinct new sound, quickly labeled New Wave. It wasn't rock like Queen, Pink Floyd, or anything coming out of Laurel Canyon. And it wasn't manufactured in the disco-pop factories. But it wasn't punk. It was NYC-centric, but there was also Brit brat (before brat was a thing), Elvis Costello, introducing himself with My Aim Is True. Back in the Big Apple, two seminal new wave debuts dropped in 1977: Television's Marquee Moon, and Talking Heads: 77.

No fewer than eight boxes, powered by six after-market power cables, comprise my current reference front-end. As much as separate boxes can afford superior isolation and provide far more room for visionary engineers to work their magic, the advantages of a single box, which requires a single power cable and far fewer after-market interconnects, are obvious.

Enter Simaudio's Moon 891 network player/preamplifier ($25,000; footnote 2). Also called a "streaming preamplifier,"it includes a DAC that converts PCM and MQA files up to 32/384 (with 24-bit files upconverted to 32-bit) and DSD files up to 256. It also includes what Simaudio company co-owner Costa Koulisakis describes as "a fully configurable" MC/MM phono stage. Both theoretically and practically, it's an ideal solution for someone with space and/or budget constraints.

I was fascinated by Herb Reichert's adventures with the KEF KC62 subwoofer, so I borrowed one. Beautifully engineered, contoured, and finished and chock-full of cutting-edge technology, it would be welcome in any room and easily integrated into any system. However, it struck me as not just small but miniaturized, like the meticulously functional samples made for the traveling salesmen of a century past. Since its two force-canceling 6.5" radiators were the same size as or smaller than the midrange drivers in my main speakers at the time, I had low expectations and returned it without comment. That was in 2021.

I asked for a pair of KEF KC92s in early 2024 in the hope that these two relatively small subs would improve my system. Like the KC62, the gloss white cube with radiused edges and white diaphragms is an aesthetic match to our redesigned room, and the KC92 ($1999.99) is chock-full of the same cutting-edge technology.

Before the bits and bytes, before the streams, the music business and its most talented artists, producers, and engineers conjured up a notion of musical-sonic holiness: the perfect album side.

Remember albums? The idea is quaint in the era of streaming, a time of "summer songs," one-hit wonders, meme songs, song snippets on TikTok, songs tied to viral videos, robot-generated playlists, and whatnot. Those of us older than the World Wide Web itself, we remember albums. They were 12" slices of happiness, sadness, escape, epiphany—all the feelings.

The return of vinyl, which has stayed popular and profitable since its resurgence, has now developed a surprising nuance. Pierre Markotanyos, the owner of the reissue label Return to Analog and Montreal record store Aux 33 Tours (which refers to the speed at which an LP spins), has noticed a distinct change in the makeup of who's buying vinyl these days. "In the late 2000s," Markotanyos reflects, "it was mostly 55-to-70-year-old guys who were coming in, buying records to play on their high-end stereos that they bought at the audio show in Montreal." [Sound familiar, Stereophile readers?] "They were the purists and the true believers."