There are things that make me feel so unpleasantly lightheaded that some days I worry my cranium might float away like a helium balloon. Like baby animals generated by AI that I can no longer distinguish from real ones. Skin care for tweens. Headlines about American politics that read like headlines about Turkmenistan. The music of Charli XCX.

And being middle aged. Even the term is a con. At 54, I'm not in the middle of anything, and given the way my back feels in the mornings, the thought of living to 108 fills me with terror. There are things about this stage of life that arrive imperceptibly, and not just the physical frailties. Chief among them is the way one's time on earth begins to feel unsettling and sometimes poignant in its suddenly tangible brevity. Now, when I speak to people in their early 20s, I find myself amazed by their belief that life is brimming with endless possibility and lasts nearly forever. I suppose I might envy them, but I remember being their age and wouldn't relish being that person again.

Fortunately, there's more to middle age than bewilderment at cottagecore and one's worsening nocturia.

In 2010, the funky-eclectic New Orleans band Galactic—known today as much for being the owners of the city's storied Tipitina's club as for their music—cut their song "Heart of Steel" with singer Irma Thomas for their album, Ya-Ka-May. The band noticed that Thomas soon included the same tune in the sets that she played with her band. In 2022, Galactic decided to revisit the Thomas connection and came up with the idea of collaborating with her on an entire album of new music.

On May 29, Adam Wexler's Resolution A/V, in Red Hook, Brooklyn, debuted new products from two heavy hitters in the audio world: Brooklyn's DeVore Fidelity and the renowned Swiss brand Nagra.

SVS is best known for subwoofers, but the company also makes speakers. Demo'd at T.H.E. Show in Costa Mesa were a couple of examples: the SVS Ultra Evolution Pinnacle flagship towers ($2500/each or $5000/pair), which were playing when I visited the room, and a pair of rear-ported Ultra Evolution standmounts ($1200/pair; stands not included), which were set up in a system with the SVS SB-5000 R|Evolution subwoofer ($2000), which debuted at AXPONA.

This photo of the vast Munich venue, taken near closing time on the last day of the 2025 audio show, wraps up Stereophile's coverage.

Despite the impact of the Trump tariffs, Munich attendance figures were again impressive. With 323,000 square feet of exhibition space—that's seven and a half acres!—High End Munich '25 welcomed 10,562 trade visitors from 87 countries; 11,675 consumer attendees from 63 countries; and 581 media representatives from 43 countries. While the Munich event may not be audio's most popular—depending on how you count attendees, the Hong Kong, Warsaw, and AXPONA shows may attract more unique visitors—it is unquestionably the meeting place for consumers and distributors.

The reborn US brand KLH debuted its Model Seven loudspeaker ($5998/pair) at High End Munich, proclaiming it the first of its kind: an acoustic suspension speaker with a 13" woofer.

KLH and acoustic suspension designs go hand in hand. Co-founder Henry Kloss helped introduce the concept in the mid-50s and established KLH in 1957. The key principle is to use the spring effect of air in a sealed cabinet to control the woofer's movement.

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As I type these words, an Innuos Nazaré music server/streamer ($50,000) with 8TB of internal storage is en route to my home in Port Townsend for review. The Portuguese company's new flagship, named after the deepwater canyon off the coast of Nazaré that generates some of the world's largest waves, made its official debut at this year's High End Munich. The unit is expected to begin shipping in September.

The first commandment for a Stereophile reporter is to remain neutral about any product under review. But when a company has a history of making things you like, that isn't always easy to do.

Reviewing the VPI Avenger Direct turntable with its 12" FatBoy tonearm, I concluded, "The Avenger Direct recasts records I thought I knew well, revealing secrets and expressing a purer sense of each one's interior life." Covering the VPI Scout 21 for Stereophile's sister website, AnalogPlanet in October 2024, I wrote, "this $3300 table seriously swung and played it all warm and toasty, displaying a big heart. I would even say it displayed an inherent love of music, reflected in its wide rhythmic gait and warmhearted embrace of the LPs I spun on it. The 21 'table is quite the fine fit in the VPI sound family."

Despite my scarcely contained enthusiasm for these previous VPI products, I promise an unvarnished take on the Forever Model One turntable ($5250), which builds on one of the company's long-ago bestsellers, the HW-19, which was first produced in the early 1980s.

High-end speaker and audio electronics maker MBL—best known for its groundbreaking Radialstrahler loudspeakers—has hit a financial rough patch. The Berlin-based company filed for insolvency on May 27, 2025, and is now actively seeking investors.