One of my favorite things about this pastime is the modesty of its aims. Despite the sometimes-astronomical sums spent on gear, and the small handful of drama queens who populate various corners of this hobby, all we're doing is trying to enjoy recorded music at home. No one here is reversing planetary warming or solving the Riemann hypothesis. The sole purpose of the pursuit we write about in these pages is to please, enlighten, and entertain. I like that about it.

This means that aesthetics matter. During a recent trip to Japan, I found myself marveling at the many vintage audio components used in both public listening spaces and people's homes, and the high prices these meticulously restored devices command. I found many of them lovely, the patina of age only adding to their allure. In the West, where we believe in eternal progress, it's common to ask whether these components' performance is up to contemporary standards. "Sure, it looks cool, but how does it sound?" we might ask, as though the physical beauty of the gear is a distraction or, worse, a ploy. Recall the old audiophile joke about the initials of the design-forward Danish manufacturer Bang & Olufsen standing for "beauty only."

Michael Ochs of Upstream Audio in Deerfield Beach, Florida, brought a sweet rig to FLAX that included the new Clearaudio Unity tonearm, allied with the Clearaudio Reference Jubilee turntable that I reviewed for Stereophile back in June 2022.

Just off covering the debut of new Fyne products at Resolution AV in New York, I sauntered into the Harmonia Distribution room, where the company’s vice president Jesse Luna held court, making great sounds from an engrossing collection of fine equipment.

"But it is the wildest, most incredible music story of all time and I'm at least mildly flattered that I played a miniscule part in it.

I'm even more pleased that it's all behind me."

—Dave Dexter Jr. From his autobiography, Playback

It's almost too easy to make Dave Dexter Jr. the villain in the story of the Beatles' fumbled introduction to America. A devoted denigrator of rock'n'roll who thought it was a passing fad meant for the kiddies, and who also thought John Lennon played "lousy harmonica," he was just one of the many older music fans who were sure that Elvis Presley's hips had been a corrupting influence on America's youth, not to mention on good music.

The head of International A&R at Capitol Records, then owned by the UK's EMI, Dexter was no fan of British acts in general. He also turned down Manfred Mann, The Animals, The Yardbirds, and The Hollies.

Solid audiophile citizen Audio Note UK teamed with Miami dealer Soundlux Audio to produce ultra-sweet sounds. Soundlux Audio’s Eric Gould and coworker/compadre Frederico Unda calmly dealt with my early morning stress-brain syndrome, playing music through a system I know well!

On Thursday January 30th, the frigid landscape of Red Hook, Brooklyn, was the site of several audio-focused debuts. Adam Wexler's Resolution AV, a purveyor of high-end audio, celebrated its grand reopening, showcasing new products from Fyne Audio. Fyne Audio CEO Max Maud and Harmonia Distribution Vice President Jesse Luna were on hand to introduce the new products and answer questions.

Although King Oliver's Creole Jazz Band was indubitably led by Joe Oliver himself, this deluxe box set, marking the centennial of the band's recorded debut, focuses on its second cornetist, Louis Armstrong, who was making his own debut. These landmark jazz recordings, nearly the first by a black band from New Orleans, had a profound impact on the jazz that came afterward. They were recorded acoustically, without the use of electricity, and previous reissues have suffered from terminal murk, to the point that individual horn lines could hardly be discerned. Richard Martin and the Archeophone label have done an outstanding job of restoration, rendering the instrumental parts with remarkable clarity.

A recent high point in my career as a reviewer was writing about the MoFi Electronics SourcePoint 10 standmount loudspeaker for the February 2023 issue of Stereophile. Priced at $2999/pair, the two-way SourcePoint 10 featured an innovative 10" coaxial (HF/LF) drive unit and impressed me with its clean, superbly well-defined low frequencies, natural-sounding midrange, and the ability to play loudly without strain.

The SourcePoint 10 was the first MoFi speaker to be designed by Andrew Jones, whose earlier designs for KEF, Infinity, Pioneer, TAD, and ELAC had all taken up residence in Stereophile's Recommended Components listings over the years. The second of Andrew's designs for MoFi was the SourcePoint 8, which was favorably reviewed by Kalman Rubinson in September 2023. Priced at a competitive $1999/pair, the SourcePoint 8 also used a coaxial drive unit, but as the name suggests, the woofer diameter was 8" rather than 10". KR was also impressed by what he heard, writing that the SourcePoint 8 was a balanced, wide-range speaker that demonstrated how satisfying a small, relatively affordable loudspeaker can be.

Now we have Andrew Jones's third design for MoFi, the floorstanding SourcePoint 888, which costs $4999/pair.

Old friend Jonathan Halpern of Tone Imports and Elliot Goldman of Bending Wave are experts at show setups. While some exhibitors take perfectly good gear and set it up willy nilly, Jonathan and Elliot are old school, big eared/serious listening guys, and the sound of their room at the Florida International Audio Expo 2025 was what I expected: fantastic.