Just when I thought my equipment reviewing schedule was locked in for many months, an unavoidable last-minute cancellation sent me scrambling for an alternative.

Jim Austin to the rescue. To his query, "How would you like to review a tube preamp from Canor, of Slovakia?" I answered with an enthusiastic "yes!"

In addition to the exciting prospect of reviewing the first tubed preamplifier to come my way in a long time, hearing the Canor Hyperion P1 preamplifier ($12,500) in my system would enable me to get a handle on the sound of gear I'd only encountered once, at High End Munich 2024. As is often the case at shows, I left without a clear sense of the preamp's contribution to the system's sound, let alone its ultimate potential.

Does anyone use the term "record man" these days? In an earlier era, it would have been used in the same way the term "ad man" was used, as a particularly American job description. People who spend their careers in and around the music business. Some of these record men are known by the public—some of it anyway—whereas others may be familiar only to colleagues.

I met Steve Berkowitz under the best of circumstances: sitting in a basement listening room hearing beautiful recordings made in 1958 that I'd never heard before, by the Miles Davis Quintet. It was the recently issued Miles Davis—Birth of the Blue (Analogue Productions APJ 172). The album was, the credits state, "Supervised by Steve Berkowitz." The name rang a bell, though prior to this meeting, I didn't have a face to go with the name.

Woo Audio's 20th Anniversary WA24 headphone amplifier comes in a distinctive, low-slung chassis that welcomes the eye with gentle angular volumes and bright, frosty-surfaced, copper-toned controls. In the always-crowded Woo–JPS Labs–Stax room at CanJam 2025, Woo's new $12,999 flagship caught everybody's eye, sitting on a table next to its similar-looking stablemate, the $8999 WA23 LUNA, a tube-rectified single-ended amplifier that, unlike the new WA24, uses 2A3 tubes.