Rogier van Bakel

"That's pretty odious," Andy Summers says to me. "An odious comparison." His blueish eyes darken. Roughly an hour into our 90-minute face-to-face interview, I'd asked if it bothers him that in terms of reach and staying power, his solo oeuvre will never match his work with The Police.

To me, the observation seemed factual and uncontroversial, like saying that the sun rises in the east. The Police sold more than 75 million records and played some of the largest venues in the world. The night before our interview, I'd watched Summers perform a show in a 400-seat theater in rural Waldoboro, Maine.

With subwoofers, he's at his worst. Did you hear that?, he'll exclaim when he worries that a low bass note received too much emphasis. He nags and niggles that perhaps the integration between the main speakers and the subwoofer leaves a crater somewhere in the low-frequency band. He harps, not always believably, that he can hear where the subwoofer is, even though deep bass is supposed to be impossible to localize. Most of all, he barely lasts a song without getting twitchy about the sub's gain setting, imagining that he has to dial in exactly the right amount of deep-bass presence with each track.

The beauty of an integrated amp lies in its synergy. Audio engineers know exactly how the pre and power sections will interact; the two are literally designed to work together. On paper at least, that means optimized impedance matching, and signal integrity that can rival and perhaps surpass separates. How do you know whether a standalone preamp is a great match for a power amp? For most of us, it's through trial and error. It isn't unusual for restless stereo aficionados to own multiple combos over the years, in search of the ideal one. That gets costly.

Then there's the fact that an integrated amp helps declutter a room, appealing to minimalists and people whose living spaces are less than cavernous. Another plus: no need to shell out for audiophile-grade interconnects.

Boris Blank has a cold, and three days after meeting him in his hometown of Zurich, I do too. This seems apt. Metaphorically, he's been infecting me for decades.

For almost 45 years, Yello, the pioneering Swiss band that Blank formed with singer Dieter Meier, has created witty electropop that provokes joy and awe in attentive listeners. You can dance to most of this music, of course—it's often hard not to—but its allure, its spell, goes deeper. For one thing, Yello's music is delightfully visual. Cinema for the ears.

When German writer Johann Wolfgang von Goethe published The Sorrows of Young Werther in 1774, he intended for readers to finish it, but not, you know, to end it. To Goethe's disbelief, his novel sparked a spate of suicides. The title character, whose obsessive love for a married woman was unrequited, ended up shooting himself, and soon the copycatting started. Young men of the era would dress just as the fictional Werther had—yellow trousers, blue jacket—and use a similar pistol. Often, a copy of the book was found at the scene. The number of deaths was unsettling enough that Italy and Denmark banned Goethe's novel. The German city of Leipzig even outlawed Werther-style clothes for a while. The phenomenon is now known as the Werther effect.

I don't know why I was chosen as the lucky recipient, but after stammering half a dozen thank-yous, I suddenly owned about 150 fine wines. A few carried four-figure price tags.

Reliably telling a Pinot Grigio from a Chardonnay isn't part of my skill set. Grape varieties, terroir, vintages? You might as well ask a toddler to become conversant in quantum mechanics. Still, I was intrigued by the bottles and amused by the ridiculousness of the situation. Me, an oenophile? I supposed I could pretend, and I did.

After opening and drinking, with my wife, a 1988 Château Léoville Barton, I wrote an over-the-top review and emailed it to a wine-loving friend for his amusement. "I beheld Hawthorn berries and beef stock along with a suggestion of blonde tobacco. Other than the obvious green walnut, there was a top note of wet Baja beach at dawn, mixing subtly with minke-whale flatulence and a hint of two-day-old scallop innards. Finally, with subsequent sips, I detected the aroma of the well-worn merkin of a Honduran sex worker. All in all, not a bad wine."

Eat your heart out, Robert Parker!

Another example is "Lotte," German singer Stephan Sulke's portrayal of a dying love affair. The devastatingly wistful chanson is burdened by a mawkish orchestral track—the equivalent of glitterbombing an Edward Hopper painting.

Contrast this with Roberta Flack's definitive version of Ewan MacColl's "The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face." Apart from Flack's voice and her emotional delivery, the gently strummed guitar and quiet piano do all the heavy lifting. An unhurried double bass and a couple of minimally bowed string instruments leave swaths of negative space, helping to give her interpretation its hushed, reverent character.

I reflected on all this after spending several months with Balanced Audio Technology's REX 500 solid state power amplifier ($25,000), which has more in common with the Roberta Flack track than with the bombast of "Nothing Rhymed."