Stephen Mejias

Look: I mean, listen: I mean, look: I'm the sort of guy who is comfortable with the idea that there's more than just music to this whole hi-fi thing. It's not all about the music. That's bullshit. It's also about friendship and peace and art and beauty. It's about belonging. You can get into hi-fi even if you don't listen to music. What? Yes! It's about getting drunk and high and lost. It's about girls and boys. It's also about the gear. But you can get into hi-fi even if you don't like gear. What? Yes! It's about more than just what the gear does. It's also about how the gear looks when it does what it does. Hi-fi is a full-on sensory attack, a blissed-out mind-fuck, an ocean, a sky, a lion in the tall, yellow grass. We feel with our heads and our hearts, with our ears and our eyes and every little bit of our little human selves.

Back in February 2008, senior contributing editor John Marks decided to hold a">http://www.stereophile.com/thefifthelement/208fifth/index.html">a competition.

Here in the office, I am (like most jerks in the corporate world) constantly juggling several tasks at once. Sometimes these tasks seem to have absolutely nothing to do with one another, and nothing to do with the making of a magazine. So it goes. To keep everything from crashing down at my nervous, trembling feet, I scribble little reminders on yellow Post-it notes and stick them to everything around me: Post-it notes on my computer screen, Post-it notes on my telephone, Post-it notes on my calendar, Post-it notes on my stapler, etc.