It was a "Wow!" audio moment I'll never forget. It happened just after Ladies Who Lunch, our regular Friday afternoon lunch-n-chat for audio poobahs at the Grand Sichuan restaurant in Chelsea. It was dark at 4 o'clock, and the first snow of winter looked enchanting under the 24th Street streetlamps. Audiophiliac Steve Guttenberg and I were accompanying our turntable setter–upper friend Michael Trei to Bob Visintainer's Rhapsody Music and Cinema, where Trei was scheduled to install a Lyra Etna SL cartridge on a TechDAS Air Force III turntable. I tagged along to chatter with Bob and listen with Steve to Alta Audio's tall, open-baffle Titanium Hestia loudspeakers. Rumor had it that this was a happening system.

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The sense of hope I've been feeling may have started with those Sinatra swells, the on-hold music I heard when I called to interview the first audio dealer I talked to for this story. I wanted to know what's been happening with their businesses during the pandemic. Are there reasons for at least cautious optimism?

I was doing my press beat for Stereophile in the hallway of Montreal's 2019 Audiofest when I glimpsed something that stopped me in my tracks. It was a marketing slogan, across the room on importer/exhibitor Goerner Audio's floorstanding banner: "Tubes or semiconductors? Magneto-solid technology amplifies emotions."

I've written before in this space that to me the most wondrous aspect of our avocation (apart from the music) is the way it exists at the intersection of logic and emotion, of science and art. The equipment we use is made by engineers applying scientific principles, yet its goal is to deliver sensual pleasure. Both viewpoints are valid.