Uh, oh: it’s happening. I’m turning into one of those middle-aged audiophile guys. It’s always guys, you know. Mostly middle-aged because exalted audio is expensive, although apart from the fringe extremists, it isn’t limited to only the insanely rich. Audiophiles are a surprisingly homogenous bunch on the whole.
We’re the guys who pay the property taxes and the income taxes and the college tuitions, the ones in the middle-to-senior management positions, the professors and CEOs and CIOs and CTOs, the dads and granddads, the newspaper readers and backyard gardeners, the advisors and loan givers. We eat breakfast, we go home at night, we take pills for blood pressure and cholesterol and have mouths full of crowns and bridgework. We drive late-model Japanese or German sedans, we wear slacks and dress shirts, and we have good credit ratings.
We need something to get the juices flowing, dammit. But it may not be fattening or exhausting; neither may it pose a risk to our coronary arteries or retirement packages. That leaves out a lot.
High-end audio is tailor-made for us. We can go shallow or we can go deep. We can be artistic about it all or blatantly crass. We can acquire fetishes like fuses, cones, stones, lifts and risers. We can upgrade our gear as regularly as car lovers upgrade their rides. We can drive everybody crazy showing off our latest acquisition. We can get together with other like-minded types and swap opinions on digital and vinyl and SACD and jitter and power cables.
We can also sit there and lose ourselves completely in the heady joy of stellar audio…the depth, the range, the colors, the richness. A lot of folks have absolutely no idea just how intoxicating sound can be.
To be sure, we lose perspective. Price tags can become surrealistic and the technology itself can become oddly retro—witness the late resurgence of interest in vacuum tubes, of all things, and how those tubes are positioned on the outside of brutally expensive gear that looks like it originated in an episode of Captain Video, complete with toggle switches and bakelite knobs.
I have remained immune so far to the siren call of nostalgia; neither vinyl LPs nor vacuum tubes interest me in the slightest. I’m all for digital and solid-state. But I do love my sonic comforts.
My living room stereo system is a fine instrument, no doubt about it, but the Arcam amplifier was admittedly a bit underpowered for the B&W speakers. So I upgraded to a highly-regarded amplifier from NAD, the M3. This amp cost three times as much as the Arcam, to be sure, but it remains inexpensive for audiophile-grade stuff. The M3 has provided a dramatic improvement, downright stellar in fact, and I’m just as pleased as punch with it.
But my mind is ticking towards another upgrade…this time more lavish. I’m contemplating B&W 802D speakers to replace my delightful B&W 805s models…going from one level of excellence to another, to be sure, but the upgrade entails a decidedly non-trivial financial outlay, as well as adding speakers weighing 175 pounds each to my living room. B&W 802s are serious audiophile beasts, maybe not Wilson Audio Sophias (which can cost more than the house they’re in), but definitely hardcore.
The notion has been planted, though. At this point the only question worth considering is “how long will I hold out?”
Probably not long…