This morning, I revisited Stereophile's office sample of Beats Studio headphones ($299.95).

At one point, my naive ears loved these headphones.

Are you curious to hear J. Gordon Holt's lecture on "Why Hi-Fi Experts Disagree"? Maybe you are yearning for Sam Tellig, the "Audio Anarchist" as identified in the liner notes, to whisper sweet nothings into your ear with his radio-friendly baritone while checking a 1kHz reference tone at –20dB. Or how would you like a dog named Ralph to howl at you while configuring your left and right speakers? All this and more can be found on Stereophile's Test CD 1, now available in the Stereophile eCommerce Store.

Even though my own band has recorded and released a handful of CDs and EPs, the act of making music remains mysterious and awesome. I love it. I’ll never get tired of watching musicians create.

Here, we get a behind-the-scenes look into the making of Dawn McCarthy and Bonnie “Prince” Billy’s upcoming album, What the Brothers Sang, inspired by the music of the Everly Brothers.

As I wrote in my review of the Bricasti M1 D/A processor in February 2012, it seemed a good idea in the late 1980s: upgrade the performance of your CD player by feeding its digital output to an outboard digital/analog processor. British manufacturer Arcam, one of the first companies to see the opportunities in this strategy, introduced their Black Box in 1988. When I reviewed the Black Box in February 1989, I found that its low-level linearity was among the best I had measured at that time for a product featuring the 16-bit Philips TDA1541 DAC chip set. However, that linearity still wasn't very good in absolute terms. Back then, it required heroic and expensive engineering to obtain D/A performance that did justice to the 16-bit CD. These days, however, the semiconductor foundries produce a plethora of relatively inexpensive D/A processor chips that both handle 16-bit data with ease and wrest full resolution from 24-bit data.

I couldn't have known it at the time, but Swans' "Lunacy" (see last month's column) would be the very last song I'd ever enjoy in my cozy listening room. Last times—whether with things, people, places, or, I suppose, especially with ideas—can be difficult to accept, tending to overshadow all other times, their lingering memories leading to remorse and games of "what if."