With more than 2 pipeline stages, errors from middle stages are not bubbled.

[dimfeld]

I'm not sure if there's anything you can reasonably do about this without getting even deeper into the stream internals, but a documentation update would be great so future people don't fall into this trap. I ran into this on Node 5.6.0. Here's a simple workaround:

var output = input.pipe(otherStage).pipe(outputStage);
var d = duplexer(input, output);
// This next line is necessary, or else exceptions from otherStage get lost.
otherStage.on('error', function(e) { d.emit('error', e); });

EDIT: To clarify, what I see is that Node does detect the error, but it quits without any sort of message so it's difficult to find the cause of the process ending unexpectedly.