Brilliant Corners

Over the years, I've listened to many headphones, beginning with the Grado SR60s I bought with my first paycheck. Since then, I've been lucky enough to sample many exotic cans, but I always return to the admittedly controversial realization that I happen to prefer ... earphones.

If you go to Tokyo, there's a good chance you'll develop a new appreciation for shopping malls. The Japanese know malls. They know just what to do with them. Inside a Tokyo mall, you can peruse the usual handbags and shoes in their unending variety. But you can also stare at Fuji apples as large as a baby's head swaddled in tissue paper, flip through the world's most exquisite stationery, stock up on fabric from the 1920s, and taste things that will haunt you well into retirement.

"None of the amps I build are better than the others," Justin Weber of Ampsandsound told me not long after we met. "They are just different." I may have smirked inwardly. According to his company's website, Weber makes no fewer than 23 amplifier models, ranging from the $2700 Kenzie OG to the $38,000 Arch Monos. Are they really all equally good?, I wondered.

"You should come to CAF," Ken Micallef said. He has been saying this for what seems like decades. "It's cool, smaller and more manageable than AXPONA. You'll like it."

It's difficult to put a positive spin on moving. A recent survey ranked it as life's most stressful event, ahead of divorce, losing a job, or becoming a parent. Forty-two percent of respondents said it brought them to tears. Thirteen percent said it was worse than a week in jail.

Aidas Svazas is an artisan residing in Lithuania's second largest city, Kaunas. Svazas started out as a cartridge repairman, and our first encounter took place when, on a friend's recommendation, I sent him a Fairchild 225-A, a mono cartridge from the 1950s, to be restored.

I find myself appreciating more and more the way perfectionist audio—a peculiar mix of art, craft, and engineering—tends to attract idealists. Temperamentally, hi-fi people tend to be unlike people involved in the manufacture of ring-joint gaskets or digital kitchen timers—activities that, without a doubt, have their own scales of excellence.