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A poet’s audio obsession, from his earliest vinyl to his quest for the ideal vacuum tubes, as he strives to make both sound and sense of his life. Buy it at Penguin Random House.

Some fifteen years ago, the CD changer in my stereo micro-system suddenly broke down, and I wrote a friend of mine, Peter Morrison, a former surfer turned English professor in Southern California whom I knew to be an audiophile, asking for advice about getting a new changer to replace it.  I’d just come back from Italy, where I heard

The Perfect Sound: A Memoir in Stereo tells the story of three journeys—my own audio quest for the past 15 years, my love of all kinds of music since I was a kid in Hawaiʻi back in the 1950s, and the story of amplification itself from early acoustic instruments and classical amphitheaters to modern electronics and speakers. It’s