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It must have been a dream. Suddenly, I found myself living in a world where young people were rediscovering vinyl, jazzing up their iPods with audiophile earbuds, and even experimenting with tube amps. LP sections in record stores came back from the dead, steadily enlarging and proliferating. The once ridiculously overpriced CD suddenly became a bargain in wallet-box anthologies and affordable reissues. High-performance, high-value speakers became available over the Internet. I never wanted to wake up—until I realized I hadn’t really been asleep in the first place. All of this stuff is actually happening. We’re living in a new golden age of audiophilia, vibrant with lovingly excavated ideas and manic energy. An increasing number of people care about good sound again.

Hopefully you've all been training your ears with Harman's nifty freeware "How to Listen" app, because the audio giant now launched a campaign that gets back to their core values - great sound, simply put - and brings on some highly visible (and highly international) spokespeople to spread the word.

In his monumental six-part work The Oxford History of Western Music, Richard Taruskin begins the volume devoted to the 19th century with Beethoven’s only opera, Fidelio, which debuted in Vienna in 1805 before its final revised version was staged there in 1814. Here we have an opus of searing intensity that signaled the arrival of Romanticism in music.

One of the most famous (and probably most bootlegged) unfinished albums in rock history is about to see the light of day in an offical release, authorized by the band, including Brian Wilson (who had in 2004 released - with Van Dyke Parks - his