Alex Halberstadt

"Art is the only political power," the artist Joseph Beuys once said. If only it were true. Often, when power is wielded against an entire people with enough brutality and efficiency, it reduces the culture to a sickening silence, leaving room only for state-sponsored propaganda. Think of the Soviet Union under Stalin, or Germany during the Third Reich. But in other, rarer cases, repression is met with an efflorescence of great art, like a charred field welling up into a riot of wildflowers.

During the past decade and a half, the trips I've taken have tended to be for magazine stories. I love to travel, but as a New Yorker living on a writer's income, I figure it makes more sense to do it on someone else's dime and stay in nicer places than I could afford otherwise. The downside is that these trips don't feel like vacations, or even particularly restful: My time tends to be taken up with interviews, overly elaborate meals eaten (or tasted) in the company of chefs and winemakers, weeks when I sometimes stay in four hotels, and (gratefully infrequent) run-ins with publicists.

There are things that make me feel so unpleasantly lightheaded that some days I worry my cranium might float away like a helium balloon. Like baby animals generated by AI that I can no longer distinguish from real ones. Skin care for tweens. Headlines about American politics that read like headlines about Turkmenistan. The music of Charli XCX.

And being middle aged. Even the term is a con. At 54, I'm not in the middle of anything, and given the way my back feels in the mornings, the thought of living to 108 fills me with terror. There are things about this stage of life that arrive imperceptibly, and not just the physical frailties. Chief among them is the way one's time on earth begins to feel unsettling and sometimes poignant in its suddenly tangible brevity. Now, when I speak to people in their early 20s, I find myself amazed by their belief that life is brimming with endless possibility and lasts nearly forever. I suppose I might envy them, but I remember being their age and wouldn't relish being that person again.

Fortunately, there's more to middle age than bewilderment at cottagecore and one's worsening nocturia.

Some years ago, I visited the home of a well-known American author who happened to be an audiophile. His cramped, dimly lit listening room contained a tube amp, a DAC, and a pair of inexpensive floorstanding speakers surrounded by what looked like a museum of audio tweaks. I recall a scarecrow-like contraption with swiveling wood-and-metal arms that rearranged magnetic fields, assorted boxes and panels that promoted "quantum proton alignment," mysterious dots covering the walls like a rash, and nearly a dozen things dangling from the speakers' binding posts that were supposed to do something I can't remember. The author had an almost mystical belief in the power of these objects to bend the laws of physics and told me that he'd spent more on them than on the rest of the system, because in his opinion they were more important to the overall sound.

The thing that surprised me most is that despite the tweaks—or maybe because of them—his hi-fi sounded pretty terrific.

"Paul Klipsch was a genius," Roy Delgado told me recently, with the sound of genuine amazement in his voice. "Me, I'm just a tinkerer." I've spoken to Delgado, Klipsch's chief audio engineer, a handful of times over the past few years and find him affable, plainspoken, and almost absurdly humble. His LinkedIn page describes him simply as "engineer at Klipsch." His bio on the Klipsch Museum website lists his interests as "a closer relationship with God [and] the pursuit of the ever-elusive largemouth bass." To be sure, Delgado holds several patents, has an intimidating grasp of loudspeaker design, and is anything but a tinkerer. But it was still weird to see him—dressed in the T-shirt, light jeans, and work boots of an Arkansas fishing enthusiast—at the Nine Orchard Hotel during last year's New York Fashion Week.

We were there for the launch of a loudspeaker, a collaboration between the Little Rock–based Klipsch Group and Ojas, the nom de solder of artist and designer Devon Turnbull.

Arriving in Japan from the United States is like being turned upside down. This condition lasts for much of the first week. When I visited in November, the time difference between Tokyo and New York was 14 hours. "The floating world" is a term for the pleasure-addled urban culture of Edo-period Japan, but it's also an apt description for the twilit and not-entirely-unpleasant weirdness of first arriving in Tokyo. Everything seems slightly unreal.

I'd come to Japan for several reasons, one of which was simply to spend more time in what for me is the most enjoyable place on the planet. Another was to explore the country's distinctive listening spaces, which I've been thinking and occasionally writing about over the past few years. During that time, listening bars and cafés from Boulder to Sydney have been popping up like mushrooms after a rainstorm, and for many of these new venues, Japan's jazz kissas (or kissaten in the Japanese plural) are both the model and spiritual mothership.

"Give me the seduction, give me the pleasure," Ron Sutherland was nearly shouting into the phone. "I want to turn off the analytical mind and just enjoy myself!"

Sutherland speaks in the chipper Midwestern cadences of a comic character actor from the 1940s, sort of like a grown-up Eddie Bracken from The Miracle of Morgan's Creek, and I'd never heard him sound so excited. He was talking about his new phono stage, the Dos Locos, the first product he's designed collaboratively, having enlisted a group of audiophile friends who listened to and critiqued each iteration. "These friends are excellent listeners," Sutherland related, "whereas I'm a gearhead, and don't have the patience or discernment for that kind of listening. Sometimes I'd change something and they'd say, 'You made it worse!'" It sounded like he preferred the group dynamic. "There was something very intimate about this back-and-forth process," he told me. "And compared to working alone, it was a lot more fun!"