Jonathan Ward, a historian of recorded sound, has some surprising news. Thousands of early 78rpm recordings were made not to preserve music but as disposable materials for selling gramophones. With manufacturers hoping to expand their sales globally, demo records featured regional music aimed at appealing to regional.

Axiomatically, audiophile audio is about quality of reproduced sound. Experientially though—for me at least—it's about visions in the mind's eye. The older I get, the more attentively I listen to recordings, the more importance I assign to the myriad moving pictures I see between my speakers.

In February 2017, for the first time in almost 20 years, I visited Rega Research's factory in Southend-on-Sea, UK. I found a company that had added to its just-built factory a second building of the same size, had added an upper level within that space, and already was running out of space. Corridors and walkways were being used for assembly and storage.

Have you ever walked through fresh snow in the woods with all your senses heightened? When I did, shortly before the New Year, it was as if I was seeing nature for the first time, through a fresh lens. Never had white-coated surfaces appeared so white. Nor had shapes seemed so magical. It felt as if I had happened upon a pristine landscape unexplored by human or beast.

John Coltrane spent his final years with Impulse! Records, from 1961 until his death, in 1967, at the age of 40. Those years were his most adventurous, as he sorted through every sound he could create in his spiritual quest, as he put it, to "get the one essential." His range of recordings in those years spanned from "Greensleeves" to A Love Supreme, from ballads with pop singer Johnny Hartman to multiphonic fireworks with alto saxophonist Eric Dolphy.