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Dear Newbie: Welcome to the wonderful world of hi-fi! If you're besotted with a desire for audio gear that can make your recorded music sound better than you've ever heard it, you've come to the right place.

And at just the right time: Not only is there an unprecedented amount of sanely priced, excellent-sounding audio gear on the market; there's this thing happening between us right here and now—the fact that you're reading a letter I wrote especially for you.

I attend at least a couple of dozen classical-music performances each year. I also read reviews of recordings and live performances, and have even dabbled in writing them. Why, then, do I find classical music reviews so frequently annoying?

It's the vocabulary. In these reviews I often see words that I rarely see used elsewhere: scintillating, irresistible, delightful. One venerable reviewer for Gramophone magazine has used the word "beguiling" 100 times in some 900 reviews. When I read such words, I envision the poor music critic writhing in his (occasionally her) listening chair, approaching an involuntary state of aesthetic ecstasy. It isn't a pretty image.

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.

My local audio dealer told me that neither of the two stereo mags would be reporting from the Costa Mesa audio show, which I attended in June, which is formally called T.H.E. (Total HiFi Experience) Show SoCal, so I thought I would step in and give it a quick-and-dirty review from the perspective of regular Joe Audiophile rather than that of the polished, professional reporters Stereophile usually sends.

There are faster ways to start an online fight, but not many. Say "$10,000 DAC" and watch audio-forum commenters descend like pigeons on a dropped hot dog, flapping and furious. They'll tell you the designers are crooks, the buyers are dupes, and anyone not DIY-ing with AliExpress kits is a poseur. Building high-end hi-fi equipment costs serious coin, but you wouldn't know it from the Anger, Smugness, and Rigidity found on certain objectivist audio forums

There's a scene in the 2002 movie The Pianist in which Adrien Brody's character, the Polish-Jewish pianist Władysław Szpilman, is hiding in the ruins of a Warsaw villa. The Nazi officer who discovers him asks what he did before the war. "I was a pianist," Szpilman stammers. The German points to a battered grand piano and orders him to play something.

In the April 2024 issue of this magazine, a piece by Editor Jim Austin appeared in the "As We See It" space. It was titled "On assessing sonic illusions," and it has haunted me for more than a year. Jim's thesis was that a music recording is a "synthetic, whole-cloth creation ... a complete fabrication."