Stephen Mejias

From the Mouth of the Sun's "Sitting In a Roofless Room," from the new album Woven Tide, released by Experimedia.

I’ve discussed my (apparently controversial) attraction to cassettes. Besides being affordable, fun, pretty, and filled with interesting sounds and art, cassettes provide a direct and meaningful connection between artist and audience: The person releasing cassettes in 2012 is likely doing so out of passion, with a spirit for adventure, perhaps even a with a distaste for modern technologies and conveniences; the person purchasing cassettes in 2012 probably has similar motivations and interests.

I like cassettes.

The beast is now in the careful, capable hands of our copy editor, Richard Lehnert. I sent it to him last night, only six days after I began creating this latest collection of “Recommended Components” blurbs&#151the last six months of equipment reports, follow-ups, and column coverage distilled into 150-word gems. Six months squished into six days: less time than it took to create the universe.

Then, the company gave an impressive demo of their HDP-3 standalone processor mated to a pair of Gallo Reference loudspeakers and Parasound amplification, showing room interaction and examining how the sound of the system could be optimized in the frequency, phase, and, most important to DEQX, time domains.

This year, the company gave a similarly impressive demonstration of their new HDP-4 processor ($4995), which should be available in about two months.