Nobel Prize-winning economist Herb Simon coined the term “satisficing” to address the underlying tension between the “satisfying” and the “sufficient,” the search for perfection and the settling for what is merely good. “Satisficing” describes a complex interaction between consumer behavior, personal aspiration and rational decision-making. Do I need to find the very best dry-cleaner in town, or can I stop my search with the shop that’s good enough?

I am an admitted, nerdy music buff. I’ve spent much of my life seeking out just the right guitar and the right mix of stereo gear to create high-fidelity sound. I find joy in the exploration, in the happiness of pursuit. But eventually I get lazy. I just want to play the guitar and not worry about whether it’s the best one, or whether it has the best strings, etc. When I curl up on the sofa in my living room with a glass of Château Margaux, I want to listen to Miles Davis or Rodney Crowell and relax into the listening rather than try to identify flaws in the delivery system. I’m occasionally brought back to tinkering. When the lockdown began, I had an old turntable that I replaced with not one, but two new turntables and four different stereo cartridges so that I could optimize my vinyl listening. I’ve settled into a happy, satisficing plateau where it is good enough.

Or is it?

Enter Garrett Hongo, a professor of poetry at the University of Oregon, who has spent the last few decades searching for the perfect hi-fi system. His book “The Perfect Sound: A Memoir in Stereo” is itself a stereo recording, with autobiography in one channel and his search for the best sound in the other—a search that involves learning about different kinds of tubes, impedance, transformers and circuit design. It’s about Hawaii and exploring his family tree. Mr. Hongo’s late father, an electronics technician at Learjet, was partly deaf but loved music and had an extensive record collection. As the author, now 70, tries to reconnect to memories of the man and connect the pieces of his own childhood, he is also connecting and reconnecting dozens of audio cables in different configurations. And, like the recent movies “Licorice Pizza” and “Once Upon a Time in Hollywood,” his memoir is a paean to old Los Angeles—Felix Chevrolet, Hawthorne Boulevard, the mostly Japanese-American suburb of Gardena, the aerospace industry. Along the way Mr. Hongo provides one of the most colorful accounts of ’60s-era adolescent sexual fumbling I’ve ever read. I won’t spoil the ending, but his is an amazing story—deliciously wonky, exquisitely paced, and with a surprise artfully revealed.

Some people like music as background, as sonic wallpaper; some listen with their eyes closed and allow it to transport them. Music comforts, inspires, and can connect to feelings that we can’t otherwise describe or display. “I come from an affectless, unsentimental people,” Mr. Hongo writes, “their emotions battered by three generations of brutal life on the plantations and conditioned to its harsh disappointments . . . When I screamed for joy as a child, I was hushed if not struck. When I wept for the beauty I saw in the landscapes and seascapes that surrounded us, I was mocked by cousins and uncles. . . . But my father’s music”—big-band standards and Hawaiian LPs blaring from a bookshelf Mini-Flex speaker—“overwhelmed this impoverished inheritance like a wave enfolding its barrier reef . . . It overcame what was taboo.”

Soprano Renée Fleming singing the title role in Dvorak’s ‘Rusalka’ on the stage of the Metropolitan Opera.

Photo: Getty Images

Such is the childhood of a poet in the making, a late bloomer by his own admission. Beginning with lessons on how to read Keats from his mentor Robert Hayden at Michigan, he grows, in fits and in starts. The poetic symmetry is that writing great poetry requires the kind of dogged, compulsive exploration and experimentation that selecting tubes and audio components does, a kind of blind, perhaps delusional faith that all this effort will amount to something tangible that will be worth it. For the poet and the hi-fi enthusiast to get anywhere, they must enjoy not only the outcome but the ride.

And the soundtrack for that ride is joyously far-reaching. Mr. Hongo is just as passionate about Bob Wills and His Texas Playboys as he is about Ben Webster, Renée Fleming, the Kingston Trio, Memphis Minnie, King Curtis, Cream, slack-key guitar, doo-wop, R&B and opera. Ms. Fleming is clearly his favorite, and if there is one single voice that has driven his quest, it is hers, as he seeks to reveal its most sublime and subtle nuances.

A neophyte might just buy the very best individual components and hook them up together. But, as Mr. Hongo discovered, that seldom works because each piece needs to interact harmoniously with the others—the configuration matters. And what sounds good for jazz may not sound good for opera.

“Eager to hear arias the way I’d heard Ellington,” he writes, “I tried one CD after another—Renée Fleming aria compilations, then highlights from La Traviata and La Bohème. The music would sail along for a while . . . then a Fleming or a Bergonzi would crank up their voice, declaiming in dramatic Italian some kind of hurt, wrong, or frustrated love.” He listened with frustration to “the great voices thinning and crackling as they rose up the scale” and then collapse into “a shuddering scratchiness.” The offending component? His new CL-15 CD player by California Audio Labs.

Changing everything—new Bowers & Wilkins tower speakers, a Cary SLI-80 integrated amp and a Musical Fidelity CD player—he gets closer. Listening to Act II of “La Bohème” he is awestruck: “Flirty and lighthearted, Fleming sings the aria with an amazing vocal flourish at its climax . . . Her voice was more gorgeous than I’d ever heard it before—smooth and creamy through her midrange, thrilling at its top end.” He intuits there is still improvement in the offing and does more research. Though the then-current configuration easily gives him what he sought from jazz and choral music, the dynamics of opera call for more. He hunts down a pair of vintage Tung-Sol 6550 tubes he had read about to replace the Cary stock KT88s, which brings him closer to his ideal.

He continues to experiment. Listening to Handel’s “Semele” through a pair of deHavilland KE50A monoblock amplifiers, it pays off. “Fleming struck a crazy coloratura note, ornamented and vibrant, lyric and sweetly piercing, testing the upper reach of the amps’ extension. The KE50As nailed it—no spike, no glare, no hole in the voice, and no ornaments of melisma and vibrato disappearing and breaking up Fleming’s supple rendering of the aria’s most dramatic moment.”

And Mr. Hongo brings these powers of vivid description to a dozen other styles, genres and repertoires. Listening to the song “White Room” by Cream while auditioning a new system, he writes, “[Ginger] Baker’s kick drum boomed and stomped like a Clydesdale stuck in its stall, itching to rumble . . . When [Eric] Clapton quivered some chords with his tremolo bar, it felt like he reached out and grasped the interlocking bones of my skull and spine from the inside, shaking me from the marrow out.”

We learn the history of vacuum tubes, a topic you might think is about as interesting as the development of the door stop, but in Mr. Hongo’s telling is gripping. And while lifting the hood on various playback components—pre-amplifiers, amplifiers, turntables, cartridges, speakers—he digs into the history of the recording of those very sounds we seek to play back, including the invention of stereo by Alan Blumlein in 1931. Mono sound comes from one point in space—where the loudspeaker is. Adding a second channel of information and loudspeaker doesn’t cause the sound to reach us from two distinct points but from an entire spatial continuum of left to right, an infinity of points between the speakers and sometimes beyond them. That immersiveness brings us closer to what music sounds like in a well-defined concert hall or nightclub, brings us closer to our evolutionary history of hearing live music with all its spatial complexity.

A peculiarity of the human brain is that when we see things, it feels as though the objects are out there, in the external world, and our perspective is that the “me” in all this is located somewhere in our heads, behind our eyes. But sound is different—it feels like it is coming from inside our heads, alongside that fictitious “me,” making it more intimate even than vision.

Leveraging this, recording engineers in the 1960s began experimenting with putting microphones in unconventional places, such as inside a guitar, or just a few inches above the strings of the piano. The result brings the listener to an otherworldly and often wonderful place. It’s no longer simply that the piano feels like it’s coming from inside your head, but it also feels like your head is inside the piano, with the sounds enveloping you completely, swirling from left to right. Going further, Roy Halee placed a microphone right next to Hal Blaine’s snare drum for the Simon & Garfunkel recording of “Bridge Over Troubled Water,” pumped the snare drum sound through a speaker at the bottom of an elevator shaft, and then placed a mic at the top of the shaft to capture the resulting echo, magnificent and eerie.

Recordings can be made with wildly different aesthetics—the dense, powerful sounds of heavy metal in which all the instruments are tightly packed together, or the more open and transparent sound of a solo instrument or jazz trio, in which we can distinguish each component of a drum set (hi-hat, cymbals, snare, kick, toms) and simultaneously track two or three different guitar parts as they retain their individuality. Digital recording and editing can eliminate tape hiss and allow for more of the instrument and less of the technology to grab our attention. As Paul Simon said in describing the production of his 2016 album “Stranger to Stranger,” he was able for the first time in his career to get rid of the “ear-itants” that distracted him.

Can one sound system render every musical style, from Bach to Beyoncé, from Miles Davis to Drake, from Tuvan throat singers to Triumph with equal aplomb? Can it provide a listening experience that faithfully conveys the emotions the musicians put into it? Probably not, but it can get close. In my own quest, I bought a pair of Tannoy SGM-10 speakers after spending an afternoon sitting on the floor of Richard Carpenter’s listening room, listening to records by the Carpenters and Joni Mitchell. Those were the speakers he bought, Mr. Carpenter said, because those were the speakers in the studio where the records were made, and he wanted to hear the music as its creators intended. I still have Yamaha NS10s from when I produced records in the 1980s, which are not high-fidelity, but so many of my favorite records from that period were mixed on that model. I use Miller & Kreisel S-1s with a 500-watt powered subwoofer to listen to Simon & Garfunkel, the Beatles, Queen and Earl “Fatha” Hines because my friend John D’Arcy designed the frequency response characteristics of those speakers when he worked for M&K, bringing me in now and then to confirm or argue with the choices he made. I use KRK Exposés to record my own music because their frequency range reaches both an octave higher and an octave lower than any other speakers I could find, without compromising clarity.

With all of that, we also have a Bose Wave CD player in the kitchen, and Sonos speakers in the bedrooms and home office. That’s a lot of speakers. I aspire to gain the relative simplicity that Mr. Hongo has achieved with a single system, but, well, I am too lazy to change. Mr. Hongo may have yet to find perfection in his setup—he remains driven, he writes, “by a thirst for a certain quality of sound [that] I remembered hearing at La Scala.” If at some point he stops to satisfice, he will have arrived at a very, very high level.

—Mr. Levitin is a neuroscientist, author and musician. His latest book is “Successful Aging” and his new CD is “sex & math.”