Please Consider Taking Some of Our Audio Advice
Robert Brook recently wrote a piece making the case that the cure for audiophile ailments of all kinds — burnout, boredom, etc. — is a high quality stereo system. It is beautifully written and we think well worth your time to read.
Robert walks us through what it has meant to him to have spent so many hours over the years building a high quality stereo system, mostly by describing the musical enjoyment it has brought to him.
What could be better?
We feel the same way. If you build such a system, and play the right records on it, you will experience the music you love in ways more powerful than you could have ever even imagined. Your favorite albums will sound so good that boredom and burnout would be simply inconceivable.
Those of us with top quality systems are confused by the dysfunctional relationship these poor souls have to their stereos and recordings. With a good stereo and good records, it’s hard to see how these psychological states are even possible.
Good Stereos Are Hard to Come By.
The problem audiophiles have is one that sits right at the heart of our hobby.
Good stereos are hard to come by.
So the question always comes down to how one should go about building such a beast. There are two schools of thought.
Is the first priority to have properly-pressed, properly-mastered records of well-recorded music in order to get the ball rolling?
Or is it better to make improvements to the stereo first, so that you can then pursue better sounding records and end up with the best of both worlds, a great stereo playing great records?
My Two Cents
Allow me to weigh in. Please consider the following unusual, even goofy, and possibly logically inconsistent, analogy.
Imagine that the place where you can enjoy music is a town not far from where you live.
Because you love music, you must travel there as that is the only place you can enjoy your favorite music to its fullest.
The Horse and the Cart
The horse that draws the cart that you ride into this town is not the right record, it is the right stereo in the right room.
Without the right stereo, you lack the ability to recognize the right record.
Similarly, you lack the ability to appreciate what makes it more right than any other record.
Without the right stereo, you may in fact be trying to optimize the playback of records that are wrong. I did this for decades with my Mobile Fidelity records in the 70s and 80s. I played Heavy Vinyl pressings in the 90s and early 2000s that sounded right to me at the time but no longer do, mainly because our current system evolved over a very long time to be ruthless at revealing their deficiencies and my ears became better at recognizing them.