The first time I heard a CD player in my own system was in 1983, the first year of the format's introduction in the West. CD players were generally hard to come by, but I had a friend who worked for Sony, and he came over with his new toy: Sony's next-to-top-of-the-line CD player. (I think it was a CDP-501.) We connected it to my system—at the time, Quad ESLs driven by a Luxman tube amplifier, with a Linn turntable—and listened to some Sony demo CDs.

Register to win a copy of Murray Head's Nigel Lived 2-Disc 45 RPM Set from Intervention Records (retail value $38) we are giving away.

According to the company:

"Murray Head's Nigel Lived is a groundbreaking classic and one of the boldest, most daring and inventive albums of all time. Recorded by the great recording engineer Phill Brown, Nigel Lived is from the golden era of all-analog recording, a sonic and musical masterpiece that every music lover and audiophile simply must have."

[This Sweepstakes is now closed.]

How to describe music that is so personal, so deeply reflective and rooted in Buddhist contemplation that only listening to the music itself, without distraction, will suffice? Such is the conundrum that, hopefully, will lead you from this page to Channel Classics' hybrid SACD, Sounds & Clouds: Works by Hosokawa & Vivaldi.

An old hand from Down Under returns to rock . . .

Of all the speakers I have most enjoyed in recent years, two were from British manufacturer KEF: the LS50 Anniversary Model ($1500/pair), which I reviewed in December 2012; and the Blade Two ($25,000/pair), which I reviewed in June 2015. Though these two speakers lie at opposite ends of the price scale, they have in common KEF's unique Uni-Q drive-unit, in which the tweeter is mounted on the front of the midrange unit's pole piece, so that the lower-frequency cone acts as a waveguide for the higher-frequency output.