Audiophilephobia versus Audiophilephilia (slight return)

Henry Rollins confesses "I Am An Audiophile". A piece in Stereophile magazine from 2011

"I have five systems in my home. The one I spend the most time in front of is perhaps amateur hour to hi-fi heavyweights like yourselves, but I like it very much: Wilson Audio Sophia 3s, McIntosh amps and preamp, Rega Planar 3 turntable, and Rega Valve Isis CD player. At the end of 2012 that system will be moving to a different room, and Brian from Brooks Berdan Ltd., in Monrovia, California, will come in with his sturdy crew and we will start all over again."

Rega Planar 3 - we have (well, had, in my case *) the same turntable!

"Sturdy crew"!

And here's Rollins's listening room in his new place in Nashville.

 Are those grey monoliths the speakers?  I wonder if he used the same "sturdy crew" expensively brought in or whether he found someone as good in Tennessee... 

At a blog I learn that Rollins's "main system includes Wilson Alexandria XLF speakers that go for six figures"

And here's me chatting with Rollins about vinyl.  I kinda had to make out I was more of an active vinyl user than I am nowadays. I have a shit ton of vinyl. I have a Technics turntable and a decent set up. It's like three feet away. But the convenience of the internet, YouTube, streaming, wins out 96 percent of the time. That or the gargantuan number of downloaded files stored inside the computer. 

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

In Sheeps Clothing Hi-Fi is unusual for a webzine insofar as it's both a hipster music site and - as the site name indicates  - has a lot of articles about audiophile concerns, like this one about  "Vintage European Turntables That Matter" and another about a 1975 issue of High Fidelity magazine's article about creating a Listening Room, and this one about the "lost language of hi-fi obsessives" (terms like tizz and boom  - crisp treble, punchy bass, I'm guessing) and a primer on finding a good vintage cassette deck. And indeed they have an item about the BBC 1959 program in the previous post.

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

Among my music-fiend friends  I can only think of a couple who have any interest in hi-fi.  Still, as obsessions go, I find this one more sympatico than say people who get into sports cars. It's in service of music, the most elevating of the arts. Soul food.  Why not present it to the ears on the most optimal of plates? 

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

Then there's the whole phenom of the listening bar. I have been to just one, here in LA, for the premiere of a friend's album. I have to say, the sound there was not amaaaaaaaazing -  I didn't feel like it was mind-blowingly superior to other listening situations. But then I was a bit distracted by conversation and also there were the mid-term election results coming in so I kept pretending to go to the bog and nipped out on the street to check on my phone how it was going. 

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

An earlier post on the mysteries of vinyl - how does all THAT get extracted from a narrow bumpy furrow by the scraping of a vitreous shard?!? - and on an encounter with nutty audiophile David Mancuso and his magnificent stereo

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

* The Rega Planar I used to have.  When we moved back to NYC in the fall of '94, after nearly a year in the UK, I put nearly everything in a storage unit in Swiss Cottage. After a few years it seemed stupid to have this good hi-fi just wasting away there, so I lent it to a dear friend, a music lover whose hi-fi was on the blink. Burhan loved it - the whole ritual of changing the speed by lifting the platter. 

Then about eight years years later he died tragically young. 

It seemed unseemly to approach my friend's flat mate under the circumstances, about retrieving my turntable and amp...  So I kept putting it off and eventually shelved the thought for good. I hope somebody out there is getting good use of  that Rega. Fiddling with the fiddly belt, trying to stop the glass platter sliding out of their grip, and cursing under their breath... 

I still have the speakers and the tape deck, though. He didn't need them and eventually, after a couple of decades, I moved all the storage unit's contents - a huge number of records, a lot of books, much misc. - to LA.  The records, almost all unplayed, sit in a room upstairs; the UK hi-fi components languish in the cellar. Can you even use them in the USA?

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

It is ultimately a bit of a world of madness, audiophilia - "stylus rake"!

Oh yeah and there's that whole thing about your power supply - fluctuations in what comes out of the wall supposedly causing noise in your system, which can be expensively rectified with devices that regulate and regularize the current. A whole other subworld of doctrinal dispute opened up....