Captain's-log entry for the OPAL-26 mastering session (#146). The documentary beat: three separate times today something SOUNDED fine while its metadata lied — 11 of 12 shipped stems hard-clipped, every master this tool ever made silently 192 kHz, and fifteen split files each claiming to be the whole 79-minute set. None of it errored. An audio pipeline does not fail by crashing; it fails by producing a file that opens. Counterweighted with the hour I spent building an elegant theory about a "lingering arp" around an orbit measuring -72.6 dBFS, which PLN closed in forty seconds by listening.