You know you’re an audiophile when you try listening to your laptop’s built-in speaker for the first time in months and it makes you physically ill.
I picked that little gem up off an audiophile discussion board where members were coming up with completions to the phrase “You know you’re an audiophile when…” Say what you like about the gimlet-eyed quality of many audiophiles, they don’t lack in a sense of humor about themselves. It is an enjoyable hobby and needn’t be treated like a holy crusade, after all.
I’m not about to become physically ill from tinny sound but there are times in which I almost can’t believe the level of insensitivity some people display towards the sonic envelope in which they live. The other day I took myself to lunch at a nice Japanese restaurant on Castro Street; it may go for solid Japanese fare but since it is in the Castro it conforms to the prevailing dictum that it must play that obnoxious bar music over the sound system. That stuff hasn’t changed in forty years as far as I can tell, not has it ever deviated from its steady quarter note = 120 tempo. The stuff just goes on and on and on. Does anybody write new stuff? Why bother?
Anyway. I was one of the few customers in the restaurant (it was early for lunch) and there was, in fact, one chap seated at the table directly next to mine. There is a small black speaker poised above our two tables, with said icky bar music playing. Generally it can be blanked out mentally, if for no other reason than its ubiquity. You get used to hearing it, just like you get used to traffic sounds and stuff like that.
But then this other fellow took out his iPhone and started playing some brittle, loud, raucous pop tune through the phone’s speaker. The speaker on an iPhone is the last word in ugly sound, and it adds to that unattractiveness by being able to play surprisingly loud. So there I was, with Castro bar glop plopping down from above, and this guy’s idiotic pop song—no doubt sung by some jello-boobed nymph with radical hair—at the table to my immediate left. That was simply more than flesh and blood could bear, so I signalled to the waiter that I was migrating to a different table, one far back in the restaurant, so he would know where to deliver my forthcoming pork donburi.
I can’t understand it. He seemed like a perfectly normal human being, the guy at the next table. But was he incapable of even the slightest acoustic discrimination? To be listening to that nauseatingly perky/hysterical pop song in truly egregious audio while just a few feet away a speaker with only marginally better reproduction was spewing out bar drivel? Apparently he was enjoying himself. Well, bully for him. But that’s my idea of sonic hell on earth. One alone is bad enough. But two? Simultaneously? Oy.
I seem to be in the minority here. I walk down the street and an ambulance or fire truck goes swooshing by, sirens wailing. Those sirens are dialed up to alarming high volume levels and can leave me with a splitting headache, not to mention ringing ears, for a good long while after their passing. So I always pop a finger into whatever ear is pointing in the general direction of said sonic nuisance. But I’m usually the only one on the sidewalk to do so. Since increasingly these days I’m usually the oldest guy on the sidewalk, I can say with some certainty that most of the people around me probably have more sensitive hearing than I do. But they don’t seem to be bothered by it.
City buses and subways are another source of sonic malfeasance as various folks crammed together listen to their own devices. There’s a lot of leakage from those cheap iPhone earbuds, and the escaping sound is of a dreadfully tinny, shrill quality. Even worse, sometimes people play video games on their devices using the speakers—it’s horrid sound to begin with, even if heard on a superlative audiophile system, but screeching out of a tiny speaker like that, it’s even worse.
I wonder if it’s just my age talking here. My hearing may be less sensitive than it was, but it’s a lot more discerning and I think also a lot more easily disturbed. Loud or shrill sounds bother me at an organic level. I often enjoy using my cable provider’s on-demand service, but any time I have their menu system up I hit the “mute” button on the sound system so as to avoid the hideous mid-treble blare with which they crank out their announcers. It doesn’t help any that for announcers they almost always use young women with shrilly penetrating voices of the sort that can be heard a block away when they’re having what is for them a normal conversation. The sheer obnoxiousness of their tonal quality is heightened by my beautiful B&W 803D speakers, which faithfully reproduce each and every shattering overtone with crystal-clear definition. Audio like that sounds unpleasantly hot to me, almost as if holding my hand too near a candle. The “mute” button provides more than mere relief under such circumstances; it is a momentary experience of salvation.