Jim Austin, Robert Baird, Thomas Conrad, Sasha Matson

Ethan Philion: Meditations on Mingus, Jakob Bro, Joe Lovano: Once Around the Room: A Tribute to Paul Motian, Brother Jack McDuff: Moon Rappin', Miles Davis: That's What Happened 1982–1985 (The Bootleg Series, Vol.7), Marshall Gilkes: Cyclic Journey and Noah Garabedian: Consider the Stars Beneath Us.

My wife saw me putting on my new LP of Joni Mitchell's great For the Roses album and said: "Oh, our breakup album!" Never mind the confusing details—we're obviously still (or again) together—that's how intense the bonds are for many people with Joni's music: We people of a certain age set the clock of our lives by her recordings.

Those of you old enough to have heard it when it was new will recall when you first experienced the music of Jimi Hendrix. I was 13, in 1967, when I came home after school with a friend bearing an LP of the just-released US Reprise Records pressing of Are You Experienced. My dad had a floorstanding, monophonic record player.

When I need information about recordings, I go to Discogs. At Discogs, Kevin Gray has more than 2500 entries. That's as good an indicator as any of the amount of ground he has covered in his career so far as a creative participant in the recorded-music art known as mastering. Since starting out in the early 1970s, in Los Angeles, he has worked for all the major music labels and many independents, in all music genres.

I have owned the SE version of the Bricasti M1 D/A converter for several years. It's my reference DAC. When, recently, I became aware of the availability of the factory-installed MDx Processor Board upgrade, I packed up the M1SE and sent it off to the Bricasti factory, which is in Shirley, Massachusetts, northwest of Boston. The factory-installed MDx upgrade costs $1000—a lot less than the $10,000 it costs today to buy a new M1SE with the MDx board.

It says something about the power of music that some individuals fading into dementia can still recognize the music they knew earlier in their lives. Not to denigrate new music, or music one hasn't heard before, but our mental jukeboxes award top chart numbers to music that we have lived with over time. Those DJs making their playlists in our brain are the toughest of critics. They don't care what anyone else might think, "Close to You" is staying in the rotation. Music and memory are linked.

Marty Krystall is a musician's musician, highly regarded and known to his peers in the LA music world as a triple-threat wind player equally adept at jazz, classical, and in the studio. He is also an audiophile, a recording engineer, and a record company owner, having created the K2B2 label with bassist and colleague Buell Neidlinger in 1979.