In Geoff Edgers’ Washington Post article about audiophiles, somebody asks “why would you want to go into a room and just play a record by yourself?”
I would answer the question with a question of my own:
Why would you go to a museum and just look at a painting by yourself?
You don’t need anybody around you to help you understand a painting. You just look at the painting and you experience looking at a painting.
When I listen to a record, I want the experience of listening to the record. I don’t need anybody else around. I don’t need anybody talking to me. I want it to take me from the beginning to the end. And at the end I should feel like I still want more.
For me, that’s what a good record and a good stereo is all about. That’s the reason some of us describe ourselves as audiophiles.
The shortest definition of an audiophile is a “lover of sound.” I love good sound and I’ve spent more than forty years building a stereo system that has what I think is very good sound. (What others think of it has never been of much concern, and I don’t know why it would be.)
It’s in a darkened room with no windows [1] because music sounds better in a darkened room with no windows and the door closed. (In our old studio, the stereo sounded better with the door at the end of the hallway open. This one sounds better with the door behind the left speaker closed. There is no rule to follow here. Whatever sounds the best, sounds the best.)
There is one chair and it is located in the only sweet spot in the room. (Yes, there can only be one sweet spot.)
I go in there to put myself in the living presence of the musicians who performed on whatever record I choose to play.
Music is loud and so I play the stereo at levels as close to those of live music as I can manage.
The system creates a soundfield that stretches from wall to wall and floor to ceiling. With the speakers pulled so far out into the room, they have often been known to disappear, leaving only three-dimensional imaging of great depth and precision (especially in the case of orchestral music).
By listening this way, I am able to completely immerse myself in the music I play, with no distractions of any kind.
This way of listening is more intense and powerful and transportive than any other I have known (outside of the live event of course).
That’s what I am trying to achieve with my system and the best records I can find to play on it: an experience that is so intense and powerful that I find myself completely transported out of the real world I exist in, and into the imaginary world created by the producers, engineers and musicians responsible for making the record.
If you want this kind of experience, you need more than good music. You need a good recording of that music, and, if you’re an analog sort of person with high standards, you need an exceptionally good pressing of that recording.
At the highest levels of sound quality, for us audiophiles it can’t just be about the music. You really do need all three: good music, well recorded, then mastered, pressed and cleaned properly.
Depending on your tastes and standards, good music can easily be found most everywhere. Good music with good sound, at least on vinyl, is much more rare, and good sounding music reproduced well is, in my experience, very rare indeed.
Some people are upset and put off by what they consider to be our “extreme” approach to records and audio. It bothers them that we constantly say that doing records and audio is harder than it looks. To them it seems so easy.
Naturally, we believe there is ample evidence to support our views on the subject. I refer those who disagree with us to the many hundreds of commentaries on this blog.
And, if I may paraphrase Jesus, upset folks will always be with us.
[1] In the picture below you can see how bright the back of the soundroom is. Until I watched the video again recently, I had completely forgotten that we had installed a solatube skylight in the ceiling at the far end of the room.
Why did we do that? Because there is no electricity being used in this room that is not going to the stereo. There is a light by the turntable that runs off batteries. When we tried plugging that light into the electrical circuits, even the ones separated from the ones the system uses, the sound became degraded — flatter, harsher, less transparent, less open, etc.
We needed more light in the room to do our work, so we put a solatube well behind the listener, which allowed us to leave the area around the speakers mostly dark. This worked like a charm.
We spents months testing the electricity going to everything in the space we rent, including the testing of the isolation transformers we use (about six as I recall) for our computers and record cleaning machines.
All of the experiments we carried out were done without the listener knowing what had been changed. Notes were taken and combinations of changed evaluated.
I did this kind of thing over the course of years in the house I owned in Thousand Oaks, where we had the studio set up in the master bedroom, so I knew exactly how to go about it. If you ever manage to do this kind of work for your own stereo — assuming you take it to the level we took it to — the one thing you are guaranteed to take away from the experience is how shocking the before and after difference can be.
We don’t talk about it much because it’s just too complicated and so few audiophiles will choose to make use of our experience. I doubt if even one out of a hundred of our customers would. Robert Brook and a handful of others at most would be my guess.
But good electricity is key to good sound, and, if I may be so bold, it’s the most obvious source of problems in home audio systems.
Further Reading
Hot Stamper Pressings of Mercury Classical Records Available Now
