It's an error commonly made in evaluating hi-fi–system performance: the failure to listen differentially. Differential as in compared to something else. "Something else" could be a different recording on the same system or (especially this) the same recording on a different system. The question is, what are you comparing it to? The point is: Do you really know what that recording sounds like?

C.P.E. Bach: Württemberg Sonatas (6), Wq. 49, Keith Jarrett, piano; Mahler: Symphony No.5, Orchestre symphonique de Montréal, Rafael Payare, cond.; Schubert: Symphonies Nos.5 & 7 (Unfinished), Freiburger Barockorchester, Pablo Heras-Casado, cond.; Robert Schumann: Dichterliebe • Kerner Lieder, Florian Boesch, baritone; Malcolm Martineau, piano.

Arne Jansen/Stephan Braun: Going Home; Joe Farnsworth: In What Direction Are You Headed?; Darcy James Argue's Secret Society: Dynamic Maximum Tension; Dave McMurray: Grateful Deadication 2.

Pit Pony: World to Me; Marc Ribot's Ceramic Dog: Connection; Duane Betts: Wild & Precious Life; Galen & Paul: Can We Do Tomorrow Another Day?

Phaenelagh "Nel" Lenard Burnett is an outlier in a most basic sense: She's a woman who works in hi-fi. For the past several decades—essentially all her adult life—she has immersed herself in running her father's audio business.

Her father is John Lenard Burnett of Lenard Audio, a veteran designer, researcher, and educator whose work has crossed over from recording studios, concert halls, and commercial spaces to hi-fi for the home. The Opal 4-way active loudspeaker system is the senior Burnett's signature product and serves as the foundation of Lenard Audio's hardware and strategic designs.

"When I was a baby, Lenard was the largest manufacturer and supplier of concert PA systems and guitar amps and so on in the Australian market," Nel told me. "Some of my very first memories are of me sitting on his workbench. That was one of my happiest places to be when I was a kid, literally sitting on his work."

The standup bass genius and jazz force of nature Charles Mingus made his first album for Atlantic Records, Pithecanthropus Erectus, in 1956. Several of his most memorable musical masterpieces, including The Clown (1957), Blues and Roots (1960), and Oh Yeah (1962), followed as he intermittently returned to the label throughout the 1960s and early '70s. Beginning in 1974 with Mingus Moves, the cigarillo-chomping, famously gruff Mingus recorded most of his final albums for the label as he progressed from composer/player to wheelchair-bound writer and musical director. His final seven studio albums for the label and a single LP of outtakes, all freshly remastered, comprise this welcome 8-LP (or 7-CD) box-set addition to the Mingus oeuvre.