Mikey is a longtime friend who harbors no love for vintage phonography—yet after playing his first record with the new SPU #1E ($659), he wrote: "I immediately, and much to my surprise, got what the SPU cult is all about."

The Solo3 is the first headphones to have the Apple W1 wireless chip. (Followed shortly thereafter by the Beats Powerbeats3 and the soon to come BeatsX and Apple AirPods.) In this review I'll take a close look at the features and functions of this W1 based wireless headphone, and how it differs from typical contemporary Bluetooth headphones.

If you've never suffered a panic attack, the idea of one—of being, in the absence of any real threat, suddenly overwhelmed by fear—can seem inconceivably strange. Try to imagine fear flooding your mind with such fierce momentum that you struggle to catch your breath, so convincing is the sensation that everything is spinning horribly out of control. Once that happens and the fear has taken over, it doesn't matter if the threat is real or not.

The invite from David Chesky was simple enough: "Hey Robert, John McEuen, David Bromberg and a lot of other people are going to make a record in this abandoned church that a friend of mine owns in Brooklyn, you wanna come by?" Knowing the resourcefulness, not to mention good ears, of David and Norman Chesky, owners of Chesky Records, I soon arrived in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, to find Stereophile contributing editor Herb Reichert munching on cookies and listening through headphones to what was going into the computer. Ahh, that freelancer lifestyle.