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.)

Brahms first scored what was to become his Quintet in F minor, Op.34, for piano, two violins, viola, and cello for two violins, one viola, and two cellos—no piano. The scoring and perhaps the music was inspired by Schubert's similarly piano-less, two-cello Quintet in C major. The original Brahms score has been lost.

Cellist Terry King, a protégé of the great Gregor Piatigorsky and the first American-born teacher to teach a Tchaikovsky Competition Gold Medal winner, long wondered what the original quintet sounded like. He sent me this quote, from Clara Schumann, from just after she read Brahms's original score, playing all the parts on her piano. "What a world of strength and richness there is in the first movement, how the first theme takes hold of one at once," Schumann wrote. "How beautifully it is scored for the instruments! I can see them bowing. Dreamy at times and then the accelerando and [the] wild, passionate ending—it has taken hold of me. And how rapturously the Adagio sings one long melody from start to finish! I play it over and over again and never wish to stop."

King decided that he would recreate the original version of the Brahms quintet.