One of the things I inherited from my dad was his interest in stereos. An engineer, he prided himself on having high-end equipment and a collection of popular music from the early 1960s – Patti Page, Al Hirt, Pete Fountain, Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass, people like that. I remember when my Uncle Harley died, my dad took possession of a speaker system in a massive mahogany cabinet – it must have been three feet across, three feet deep and four feet high – that was shaped to fit in the corner of a room. Dad somehow managed to hang it from the top of the staircase so it was optimally positioned to blast “A Taste of Honey” into the living room to balance another very large speaker on the room’s far side. When I was a teenager I had a good stereo system too. Back then, a stereo consisted of an amplifier and tuner, speakers the size of luggage, and a turntable and cartridge, which featured a needle with a diamond stylus. Very 20 th Century. I also had a big and growing record