When I was in my late teens and early twenties, almost every male human being I knew loved music and had the best stereo system they could afford. Best they could afford sometimes wasn’t much. My first sound system was a decent entry level turntable and a tiny 8 watt amp and a pair of equally tiny bookshelf speakers from Radio Shack. This cost me around $150 in 1976 which inflates to around $675 in 2020. I guess that’s about what the same thing would cost today if the lack of interest in home electronics hadn’t put Radio Shack out of business.
I was stationed at an Air Force training base at the time. One day I was driving around looking for an electronics shop for some little project I was working on. I don’t remember what. I wandered into a little electronics and repair shop in a small town in Mississippi. They had a small area in the back with a selection of professional sound equipment. I was 18 and enthralled. The gentleman that owned the shop saw the look in my eyes and demonstrated some of it for me. He had a Crown preamp and amplifier with a Thorens turntable hooked up to it, driving a pair of top end Yamaha monitors. I still haven’t forgotten that moment. The first cut of Joan Baez’ then new album “Diamonds and Rust”. It sounded like Larry Carlton had magically appeared in the room to play that guitar intro. That system probably cost thousands of 1976 dollars and was unaffordable to me but I turned into an audiophile at that moment.
I never lost my interest in music and over the years my home sound system has gone through many makeovers. I have sound in my workshop, my garage, my back deck, my front porch and a pretty nice sounding monitor system at this desk where I am typing. I’ve always had the “big one” in my main listening room. Right now it’s probably in a configuration that will last until I get too deaf to enjoy it.
My question in the title is one I can’t answer. Everyone I used to know loved sound and music and now almost no one does. People still say they love music but they listen to it on earbuds and tiny Bluetooth speakers. They have cheap sound bars under their televisions that are barely adequate for listening to dialog. Movie scores and soundtracks are just background noise. People find it in their budgets to buy high definition large screen televisions to watch things and don’t seem to care much at all for the quality of the listening experience. I am here to tell you that a high performance sound system is just as important to a music lover as a high performance TV is to a sports fan or TV viewer. Listening to music on a tiny speaker or a pair of buds is analogous to watching a movie on a phone. Sure you can see the action and follow the plot but the skills of the cinematographer are made irrelevant. All the emotion has to come from the plot and the dialog. The visual effects are minimized to the point that they don’t matter. It’s the same thing for music. The ultimate skill of a musician it to communicate emotion with his/her instrument. You simply don’t get much of this when you are listening to something that removes half of it. Sure, the lyric of a well written song may move you but you’re missing half the experience. Yes, a pair of good headphones will get you pretty close but most people don’t have those and bass notes are meant to hit you in the chest, not tickle your ears.
Part of this is the fault of the audiophile community. They ask people to believe in preposterous effects of things like power cords and shelves and have convinced one another that price and sound quality have a direct relationship. It’s mostly baloney. You can get a pretty good sounding stereo sound system for well under $1000 and one that will blow your mind for between $5000 and $10,000. They don’t tend to wear out so this is an investment in decades of enjoyment. People drop $1000 on a new flagship phone every two years. If you love music, why not bring it into your home in real high fidelity? I had a friend tell me a year or so ago that he had a Bluetooth speaker that sounded as good as a room full of audio gear. I invited him to bring it over and set it on my coffee table to compare. He declined saying, “It’s good enough”. Maybe it is. When is the last time you sat down in your favorite chair and just listened to music for an hour? That long, huh? Maybe that’s not because you don’t like music as much as you used to, or that you don’t have time. Maybe it’s because an mp3 file playing on a phone connected over a lossy protocol to a Bluetooth speaker really isn’t good enough. Check out some good sound. You might change your life. Music can do that.
