Another week’s gone by, and here we are again. These newsletters have started to acquire a deeper meaning for me for the last few months. For those of you old enough to remember (IYKYK and all that), it’s like this is my weekly hard disk “defragmenting” process.

It’s what allows me to reflect, reorder, and restore my fragmented thoughts every week through a discipline that is enforced on me. A sort of voluntary-mandatory process at the intersection of silent reflection and public thoughts.

And because of the structure of this newsletter (you know, the personal and whimsical opening, followed by the more structured reasoning), I’m forced to reflect on multiple things each week—personal and professional.

Are you nudging me or am I nudging you? Who can tell.

But let me ask you something: what is the group or music album you dream of sinking into, in high-fidelity?

Once again, perhaps this is an age thing. I was born in the 1970s, so growing up as a kid, I did not have access to either variety or quality (audio). The word “stereo” entered my lexicon in the early 1980s, with a Japanese Technics music “system”. It had a discrete cassette receiver, pre-amp, and metallic bookshelf speakers. One of my uncles who worked in the merchant navy would bring back cassette tapes every now and then. I got introduced to artists like Dire Straits, Donna Summer, Depeche Mode, and Stars on 45 through those tapes.

Somewhere towards the late 1980s we moved to CDs, and a stacked Sony hi-fi system paired with larger speakers. I have fond memories of listening to a Queen CD album over and over again through that setup.

College was filled with mostly terrible PC speakers and mp3s of varying bitrates and suspect provenance. Sure, there were also lossless formats like FLAC, audiophile grade sound cards, and (shudder) “5.1” audio setups.

To cut a long story short for now, it would take me a couple of decades to get to my first “proper” high-fidelity setup. It was nothing fancy. A CD player hooked up to a Marantz stereo amplifier and a pair of bi-wired Acoustic Energy floorstanding speakers.