My journey to hi-fi

Step 1. When I was in my mid-20s, an older editor at the Dutch current-affairs magazine I worked for told me he wanted to write a piece about audiophiles: He had been bitten by the audio bug himself. Because I often wrote about rock and pop music, he asked if I had a quality hi-fi system, and if so, would I be willing to be interviewed for his article

I should have demurred. I owned a modest system: a Nakamichi cassette deck, a Technics turntable, a Mission Cyrus One amplifier, and Dutch-made BNS 482 speakers. But I thought it sounded fantastic together. In a fit of misplaced pride, I agreed to be quizzed for publication.

Thus, one evening, my colleague ascended three narrow flights to my Amsterdam apartment. Still puffing, he entered the living room. I watched him draw a sharp breath.

To his credit, he was too polite to point and laugh, but years later I understood what had flustered him. I’d placed the 482s where I had space, with zero thought to soundstage or imaging. One tower stood just right of the television 12′ in front of me. Its twin was nestled in the cranny between my Lundia LP rack and the kitchen door—some 4′ behind my prime spot on the sofa. I could maintain that this was an early experiment in surround sound, but the fact is that I had no clue what I was doing. Whether I and my pitiable rig made it into the article, I don’t remember.

Step 2. About a dozen years later, after I’d moved to the US and begun writing for Wired, the editors at Rolling Stone asked me to do a feature article on high-end hi-fi. I’d been loosely following the audio press for a couple of years and found it all immensely interesting, but also a little wacko. $30,000 tube amps? $50,000 speakers? Mpingo disks to tame wayward frequencies? Painting the edges of CDs with a special green marker to improve the soundstage? I set out to write a moderately snarky article.

But a strange thing happened. While reporting the story, as I met more and more audiophiles, I found I liked them, or most of them. Endearingly, they were in love with music. No different from me, really, except maybe for a bit of extra obsessiveness and unflappability about spending sums of money that made my wallet hurt just thinking about them.

One source, an audio writer, told me something I’d never considered and have never forgotten: “Almost nobody scoffs at people who buy expensive art. For me, a million-dollar painting…that’s just one picture that you can look at only so often. But a high-end sound system reproduces all the sonic art you can throw at it.” When I wrote the article, I toned down the snarkiness, because that made complete sense.

Step 3. Not long after, I visited the Long Island home of a mild-mannered audio enthusiast named Ernest. Ernest was a bit OCD when it came to sound. He’d hardwired his components together—cut and crimped all his cables from output connections to input connections, obviating the need for connector plugs that might degrade the sound. He played only records, so he’d snipped the wires off his pricey preamp’s selector switches except the ones for the phono input. In an even bolder move, Ernest had taken an honest-to-god saw to his $20,000 Alón Phalanx speakers and mounted the parts that housed the tweeters and midrange drivers on home-made, acoustically decoupled stands.

I’d been ready to write him off as a not-all-there eccentric, but when he fired up his system, I was instantly cured of my supercilious skepticism. Electricity seemed to course across my skin. My eyes misted. This was the best sound I’d ever heard, and I had auditioned a six-figure system at Sound by Singer, the Manhattan high-end store. Ernest’s equipment seemed almost to disappear, reproducing Muddy Waters and Elvis Presley without strain or effort. More than that, it sounded like they were there, in front of us. My host wasn’t on a quest for prettified sound. He was looking for something much grander: the soul of the music. And he found it. I couldn’t imagine getting tired, ever, of listening to great records on gear that good.

I never did learn to take the Mpingo snake-oilers seriously, but when the check from Rolling Stone arrived, I happily spent it on fancy speakers and an amp.

Coda. Writing about sound and technology for Wired, Music Maker, the New York Times, Rolling Stone, and Enjoy the Music, as I’ve done for many years, has been a blast. So was interviewing some of rock’s outsized talents: Elvis Costello, XTC’s Andy Partridge, Pete Townshend, Tom Waits, Frank Zappa, others. I’ve come to realize that for me the two fields—music and audio—are not separable. Breathing life into great music requires the judicious use of exceptional equipment. The destination—perfect music reproduction—so often seems almost within reach, like a mirage, just a few steps away. It’s a good thing the journey is so very enjoyable.

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