Totem Acoustic was founded in 1987, in Montreal, Canada, by a former high school math teacher named Vince Bruzzese. The company's first product, the Model 1 loudspeaker, impressed me so much I bought a pair.

These little boxes steered the music straight into my brain—just like Quads and Snells...Today, those speakers look and sound like vintage pipe-and-slippers standmounts. This is especially true when compared to Totem Acoustic's brand-new Element Fire V2. Totem's new Fire looks Maybach-level glossy, and windswept, and trés moderne, but also smart and down-to-business, as befits its made-in-Canada roots.

Almost 14 years have passed since a review of a Soulution product appeared in the pages of Stereophile. Given the Swiss company's steady ascent in the high-end pantheon, it is high time that we again reached into the German-speaking region of Switzerland north of the Swiss Alps to evaluate another of the reference products from a company equally renowned for its sonic achievements and refined and elegant design aesthetic.

Enter the full-function Soulution 727 preamplifier ($74,975), whose optional MC/MM phono section ($11,975) will be evaluated in a future issue. Because Soulution claims that the 727 "sets benchmarks in terms of noise, phase errors, common mode rejection and distortion," one would hope that there's far more than 62lb of classy casework and an easy-to-handle lightweight remote to account for its price.

The British audio scene from the late 1970s through the mid-1980s was pretty strange. Audio as a hobby was a big deal, with widespread appeal to a much younger crowd than today. Audiophiles were guided by a flurry of what my friends called "hi-fi pornos," audio magazines that filled the racks at the newsagents.

Far more than you see today, there was a strong nationalist bent, with some writers displaying an open bias against anything that wasn't British. Magazines' editorial departments presented readers with a clear, specific doctrine of how a system should be built and what components readers should acquire.

As a schoolboy with no system of my own, I lapped up these suggestions, and when I returned to the US in 1980 to attend university, I was finally able to start building a system that conformed to the system-building rules that had been drilled into me.

Listening to music inspires us to take action. Upon hearing an I.E.—Instant Ear-worm—we must then determine the best way we can go about listening to it again (and again) at our convenience. Prior to the free-for-all streaming era, our I.E. follow-through measures typically meant seeking out a specific playback medium for our favorite music, initially based on budgetary constraints. In those formative, pre-employment preteen years, 45s—and/or, depending on how far back we're talking here, possibly even 78s—fit the literal dollar bill before we could afford to move up the media ladder and begin purchasing LPs en masse. Our then-limited playback options tended to start with those self-contained, close-and-play record players and/or our parents' living-room consoles before we could afford to acquire separate components for more personal, higher-fidelity listening sessions. We were, to be blunt, obsessed.

Across the pond, hungry young listeners were eager to do the exact same thing. Take garage/punk glam-pop vocalist Michael Des Barres (aka MDB), who had duly been shuffled off to Repton School in Derbyshire, England, as a lad in the 1950s and found his initial aural inspiration by listening to his mates' records, since he couldn't yet afford to buy any of his own.