Smart Mouth, Big Speakers

Many centuries ago, fresh out of high school, I figured that I would need a job.  I saw an ad in the paper for Stereo Salesman ( an ad was a thing in a newspaper that required a rotary phone interface and live human voice recognition). I might not have been a huge smart-ass, but I was cocky and I already like playing music loud on ( unbeknownst to me at the time ) shitty stereos.

" OK, you start tomorrow" was the outcome of the short and terse interview. That's how they did things back then. They also did things like getting me to fetch the dry cleaning , whiskey and cigarettes for the boss. As per the first sentence, keep in mind that I was still a minor at that point, but nobody gave a damn in those days. "What size whiskey bottle did you want kid ?"

There were perks though, because I got to play around with some fairly expensive audio equipment. One of my duties ( as it was to be many years later in other audio shops) was to vacuum the sound rooms. Sound rooms were ( and still are) enclosed soundproof rooms where one demos various audio equipment. I also would light up a cigarette as I vacuumed because all the sound rooms were equipped with those large cylindrical metal ashtrays. That was not frowned upon, just completely ignored ( like I said, times were a little different).

What was slightly frowned upon however, was that I would crank the shit out of the largest speakers in each room as I vacuumed. By cranked, I mean loud even by 70's standards. I got yelled at on a regular basis and learned several Yiddish curse words in the process.

This job was a blast for a kid my age and led to a lifelong obsession with audio and the pursuit of accurate sound. After a few months in I realized that the large Accuphase amplifiers and humongous Kilpschorn speakers from Arkansas, expensive as they were, kinda sucked. I couldn't quantify it at the time, but I craved something else, something better, something that didn't give me a headache after half an hour.

I continued my career in audio and hooked up with some rabid high end guys about ten years older than me. One of them owned a fledgling uber-high end audio shop ( which is still there amazingly enough). A whole other echelon of audio reproduction was revealed to me and I came to realize the level of audio reproduction that was achievable with the right equipment and copious quantities of cash. I bought one the first Bryston 2B  amplifiers to hit the market from that dude. Needless to say that the money generated from these first sales jobs did not go towards a car, but rather, audio equipment. I had my priorities straight.

After all those years, things remain eerily the same. The market is flooded with sub-par stereos, however there seems to be fewer specialty shops around to help people navigate the quagmire of bad equipment and marketing hype. Many factors have contributed to this. The advent of big box stores and their woefully uninformed staff, terrible sounding compressed mp-3 files and the subsequent demise of the record ( CD) store, dumb commercials from crappy products like Bose radios and their outrageous claims that fly in the face of basic physics, rolling 10 million Watt woofer-mobiles, take your pick.

Some things have remained constant though, and people have accepted the mediocre which has led to complacency. A great audio system produces music and a silver box with lots of knobs only makes sound, that much has not changed. One major change that has occurred is the shift to manufacturing that is based in China. While some of the products made there are no better or worse than your average Japanese made bag o' transistors from back in the day, they are far more unreliable. I mean really unreliable, new out of the box.

One other thing that has not changed is what a great music system costs. That has remained more or less on par with inflation and to this day is still a good bang for your buck. To put it simply now, as then, expect to pay about the same as a new car for a high end system capable of reproducing music faithfully. Three or four grand in the Seventies would have done it. Today, twelve to fifteen grand is what it costs to get into that level high-performance audio gear. Don't despair if that is beyond your budget however. There is a robust used market in such places as Audiogon  and Canuck Audio Mart. You can score some smokin' gear, sometimes cheaper than the new crap at your local big box.

Some of you may be outraged, but try to see past the big ugly plastic thing with its myriad of knobs and alpha-numeric displays. what you are paying for is what's on the inside. Quality of parts, innovative circuit topology, gear that eschews plastic completely, high quality connectors and the list goes on. Do not overlook the single biggest expense; the extensive R&D that went in to developing these masterpieces of engineering not to mention the cost of paying those engineering teams for the countless hours that went into creating these in the first place.

It's not as outrageous as it seems. One can easily pay 12 grand for a road bike (not to mention 2 grand for the prerequisite Spandex uniform that goes with it). Pretty sure that very few of these bikes are actually used in the Tour De France, judging by the amount of spandex warriors that I see on my daily bike rides making the two mile commute to their office. Some people don't bat an eye at the price of these extremely impractical two-wheeled monstrosities and are even impressed by the exorbitant price tag. Tell these same people that you dropped nine grand on a USB DAC and they might think that maybe you were dropped on your head at birth. It's all a matter of perception.

Some people refuse to believe that high end audio is an actual possibility. They seem to lump into all the marketing horseshit that surrounds them every day. They will flat out denounce it without having even ever listened to any of the gear and even seem to be threatened by the very premise. They seem to think that a $2000 CD player is a hundred bucks of parts and 1900 bucks of hype.

Recently a marketing director that I worked with and I were discussing our past work experiences. I told him that I was a high end audio guy, and I used to sell stuff like $ 30, 000 CD players. He immediately flipped out claiming that it was '"impossible". " Man, you'll never tell the difference with AC/DC" he more or less yelled. This marketing dude knew how to organize good parties, but he hired some of the most god-awful bands.

Even bad taste can come through on a good system. What he will never realize is that Malcolm Young of AC/DC does not play loud, he likes to place the mikes really close to the amps, and that where he gets that unique tone. That and he plays a Gretsch ( of all things). Marketing dude is just depriving himself from ever hearing that.

It doesn't matter what kind of music that you like the best, a great audio system will extract more of that music and make it that much more enjoyable. You will also listen longer as you will avoid a phenomenon called 'listener fatigue". The system's job is to reproduce exactly what the artist and engineers laid down in the studio, no more no less. That simple result is surprisingly difficult to achieve and mainstream crap boxes just cannot do this, they simply weren't designed for that. You know the old saying about polishing a turd.

Some people claim that their hearing is not good enough to tell the difference. That is simply not true. Unless you have an unfortunate medical condition, everybody can hear it. It might sound a little strange at first as most people have been conditioned with truly appalling sound, but the music is there. Just listen.

In this blog, I will explore many different aspects of audio, anything ranging from the very basics to  specific technical aspects of audio, everything from speaker placement , ugly capacitors and how not to smash your computer with a sledge hammer. My only real purpose is to help people get the best sound possible and get the maximum enjoyment from music. I will endeavor to cover as many topics as possible, so if you have any questions about any particular topic, please feel free to ask. Post your question in the comments section, and I will try to answer. If you are an audiophile who likes to argue about the finer points of equipment tweaks and other esoterica, feel free as well. Some folks might want to dispute my observations or just flat out call me an idiot. Bring that on as well. I just might ignore that. I can't hear you over the music.

Thanks for reading and I hope you will enjoy my future posts.