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My music is keeping me alive.

I have terminal cancer, which is like Bergman's chess match with the Grim Reaper: You know you're going to lose, but with skill, determination, and luck, you can delay the inevitable, move by move. Determination is key, because it's all too easy to give up. My music—a collection I've amassed over the last 60 years—inspires me to keep going, to keep listening.

It's a spring day, midweek, and I'm behind the desk of the small-town library where I work part-time. A woman comes in, late 60s, maybe 70. There is a quietness about her, as if time has asked her to shrink a little. She's local, but we've never met. "Laura," she offers. Her handshake is firm.

Laura tells me she's heard through a mutual friend that I have a high-end music system and write for Stereophile. Her husband, Ted, loved the magazine.

"I hope you're decompressing from AXPONA," I recently wrote to a frazzled-looking friend I'd met at this greatest of North American hi-fi shows. Google's spellcheck offered to change decompressing to decomposing. I declined, though it's true that such expos can be grueling—just not grueling enough to stay away.

In these observations about high-end audio shows, fondness is foremost, but a few dark side notes will slip in.

When I was 11, my father brought home the voice of tenor Enrico Caruso (1873–1921) in a three-LP box set whose faux leather cover and sepia-tinted photos I admired over and over. When he put on the Sextet from Lucia di Lammermoor, I exclaimed, "Daddy, I've heard that before!"

"Yeah, you broke it when you were 2," he replied.

'Cause it's hard to say what's real / When you know the way you feel—Flaming Lips, "One More Robot/Sympathy 3000-21," from Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots

In a recent Zoom meeting, some friends got into a dust-up about how "real"-sounding high-performance audio systems can be. The consensus was that there was no chance at all of real, live sound. A label owner waved it off as impossible: "Fuhgeddaboudit," he said. He's from New York, like me.

"Shot?", said Boris. It was more a command than a question. He poured Beluga vodka into my glass. "My father drank three shot every day," Boris said. "Lived to 87." Boris Meltsner is the owner of Amped, a very fine range of class-D amplifiers. I was visiting him at the 2024 Capital AudioFest (CAF) in Rockville, Maryland. Boris hails from "Soviet Union, not Russia," he said in an accent as thick as a potato-filled piroshki. "Was called Soviet Union when I left."

Visiting CAF is a joy for me. I recently sold my company, Music Hall, and I was already missing the camaraderie of my industry colleagues and the fun of playing and listening to music.

There's a famous quote by Lenin, that revolutions cannot stand still; they have to move forward. I'm guessing he wasn't talking about the British punk explosion, but it's applicable. There was a period of time around 1978—when that initial Sex Pistols thrill had subsided—when I thought it was stalling. The new bands started sounding dull, derivative. In all probability, I just had unreasonable demands: that a band should produce iconic albums weekly. I was 17, had just started work, and pretty much thought the world was there for my personal amusement.

Then from the pages of my holy book—New Musical Express—came news from Scotland. Shamefully, back then, my awareness of Scottish music began and ended with Nazareth and the Bay City Rollers. But the NME journos were excitedly talking about two new record labels recently set up north of Hadrian's Wall: Fast Product and Postcard.