The Luxury of Listening | Hi-Fi, Vinyl & Audiophile Culture

[Music] Today, when you start talking about extreme high-five, you could put together a system easily for 2 million pounds. Easily. I don't use streaming at all. I have 15,000 CDs, 12,000 LPs, two with 3,000 tapes, and I love the act of putting a disc in a player or on a turntable. The first music in the home was probably the player piano, so in a way we've regressed and we're trying to recover the intimacy. What you want to get out of that experience is to get as close to the musician and to the performance as possible. I really don't care about high-five. I care about music. Hello and welcome to the Luxury Dispatch, the podcast that reveals the refined and the rare. People, items and stories that make up the luxury industry. I'm Tom Chamberlain, and today we should be stepping into a world where luxury is not measured by what one sees, feels, or tastes, but by what one hears. It is the world of high-five. From valve amplifiers to beautifully engineered turntables, from the tactile pleasure of physical media to the almost obsessive pursuit of perfect sound, high fidelity sits at the fascinating intersection of technology, design, and devotion. For many, it is not merely about equipment, but about the experience of listening itself. The way music fills a room and transforms it. To guide us in that world, I'm joined by Ken Kessler, one of the most respected voices in audio journalism and a lifelong champion of serious listening. Ken, welcome. Hello Tom. It's so nice to see you here. Yes, a change from wristwatches and. Yeah, that's all quite. That's always been our sort of conversation, but I've known in the background that there has been this aspect of you whereby, and I think a lot of people would corroborate this, you are the great authority on this particular topic. But before you be modest and object to this particular thing, what is high-five? What defines high-five? That's a crucial question because when we start talking about high-end audio, which is the area we're looking at here, and the prices are suddenly six or seven figures. What is the difference between a million dollar system or a million pound system and something for 500 pounds that you can get it carries? And it's all down to one thing and one thing only. In order to enter the world of high-end audio, you have to not just love music, you have to worship it. The whole thing, the entire thing, unless you're just a gadget guy, is about getting music in the home that's virtually indistinguishable from reality. Right. Backing up a second, the term "high fidelity" means faithfulness to the music. That's what the fidelity is about. And a beautifully expressive way, a slogan that came out 1950s, I think, a company called Quad, still in business, British firm started in 1936. The owner and founder, Peter Walker, said it's the closest approach to the original sound. And that's what he said, "High-fives." Anything else is coloration or distortion. Now, you think about it. We are surrounded by music everywhere you go. Yeah. You can't escape it. It's like wallpaper in most cases. It's just in the background, like at the dentist's office, whatever. But if you're serious about music to the point where you would actually spend this kind of money, what you want to get out of that experience is to get as close to the musician and to the performance as possible. And that's the only goal of high-five. Anything else, one thing I want to get out of the way right from the get-go is, unlike cars or watches or wine, there is no resale value in high-five. Okay. The only pieces where you can flip them would be vintage high-five equipment that the Japanese and Korean collectors go crazy over. Yeah. Most of that stuff's been accounted for. High-five is not where you get rich quick. It's not like a couple of years ago where people were flipping Rolexes. So the guys that are into luxury dispatch for the kind of element as opposed to the love of the product, but more for the flipping of the product, turn off right now. You're not going to make money flipping high-five equipment. So let's talk about the journey that was in the pursuit of creating that highest of fidelity to the music. And obviously we should go back to before 1877 when Edison invented the, was it the phonograph? Yes, yeah, the cylinders. Yeah. And I mean, certainly in that era, Ray Fawn Williams, for example, my favorite composer, the great sort of English pastoralist, he was asked to redo the English himnal. And the reason he was asked to do it was because, or that's actually no, the reason he took it on, because he was actually deviled to atheist. Okay. He was, he didn't believe and got a tool. But he took on this incredibly important job because he knew that music was an incredibly important thing. And the only place where people could listen readily to music was church. Otherwise, you'd have to go to concerts and pay, and pay. And therefore, and not everyone could afford. And therefore he wanted to make sure that great music was available to people on a weekly basis. And that love of music, as you say, you know, it's all about the music. That love of it has stayed. And I guess it's what is behind engineers and, you know, technologies trying to create all of this. But what was the kind of first moment do you think in the establishment of what we would call "hifi" today? I think with what we call "hifi" delity, it's about removing the sense of "artifice" because prior to what we call "hifi" which is post-World War II. Okay. So the 50s. The 50s was the birth decade. Okay. And it's, it was a perfect storm because it was also when stereo came out. Right. And very briefly to get that out of the way. Because the LP was 1948. El P was 1948, but it was commercially mid-50s. But, monover system stereo, mono is the source, the sound is all in one place. stereo gives you stage width so each instrument is located in space. Okay. That's a, that's reality. Although there are people that would argue when you go to a concert, you can't close your eyes and pinpoint the fifth violinist. Be that as it may, stereo broadened the sound stage. But more importantly, the sound quality became more realistic. Now, when you play an Edison cylinder and I've heard a couple or you play a 78, you categorically can tell who is performing and what you're hearing. It might be Bessie Smith, it might be Caruso, it could be Al Jolson, it could be Robert Johnson. You can categorically hear the music, you can hear it's a guitar. But the sound quality, it's, that's what meant like that. Yeah, I mean, Caruso, I remember people are either with the great tenors of all time, but actually if you listen to a Caruso recording, you don't get that. It's not like, you know, we've got, but, and this is more the recording side rather than the high-fi side. Prior to starting this conversation, Tom, we mentioned AI. Yes. And AI is going to take these vintage recordings and turn them into performances of the quality that you would get now. And I've actually heard it and commercially available. A label in the UK called Roller Coaster, which specializes in early rock and roll, took the very important album from Buddy Holly and The Crickets, which was only recorded in mono, and they managed to extract true stereo out of it. Now older boomers and audio files will remember things called reprocess stereo, which was horrible. They turned the bass up on one side and the treble up on the other side to give you the impression of stereo. That's not what I'm talking about. I am talking about they actually can now isolate each instrument as if it had been recorded on a multi-track tape recorder. If AI becomes the omnipresent skill that we think it's going to be, and there's enough interest in the record labels followed through, that caruso can be extracted so that you would hear the full glory as if he had been recorded on modern equipment. Bessie Smith, Robert Johnson, all of that stuff, I don't know if that's going to happen. I didn't ask roller coaster how much it cost to process this one LP, but they released it on CD, they released it on vinyl, and if you're a Buddy Holly fan, it is absolutely mind-blowing. So this kind of thing almost erases those decades before high-fi. So what you had before high-fi was basically the 78. The cylinder didn't last for long. Which is sitting right next to it. Which is sitting right next to us. And that by the way is a really lovely, except because what that has that modern sound doesn't have is that crackle. Exactly. And which is part of the vinyl revival? Right. Because the crackle sort of gives that sort of sense of transportation. But in from From a high five point of view, it's not ideal because if you're listening to music live, you don't get a crackle. And if high fidelity is all about making you feel like you're right next to the instrumentation and the performers, you need to kind of get rid of that. So when '78s came out, where there are people out there who are like, "This can be improved upon them, we're going to keep trying," or did it feel like a hugely revolutionary moment? Actually, the materials that those '78s were pressed on improved. Could you explain what? Well, it went from a lacquer, a shellac, and brittle materials towards the end. They were the same, similar to the plastics in vinyl, so that they didn't wear out as quickly. The worst thing about '78s were probably the steel needles which destroyed the discs. But what happened? Because they were restricted to the '78. And it was after the recording, which is this is the irony, because a purist will say, you cannot improve on the recording. The recording is what you're supposed to have. So anything after that is artifice. But take, for example, amplification. You made this go louder by opening these doors. By the 1930s, with electronics available, especially valves, the amplifiers improved, and the loudspeakers improved. And they made this instead of a physical needle, you had an electronic or ceramic cartridge. So that by the end of the '78s history, it was sounding pretty damn good. Which was about. Well, the '78s ended for, let's say, the Anglophone world in the '50s. They overlapped with the introduction of the LP. But some '78s were made in other territories that were slower to catch up. For example, they're called '78s because they've. They rotated 78 RPM, revolutions per minute. The vinyl LP came out competing with the seven-inch single. RCA brought out the single at 45 RPM, but that seven-inch single could only play one song per side, which everyone realized was ludicrous except for chart hits. So the LP was developed in '48 by, I believe, his name was Goldmark and I think it was CBS. And that allowed, for example, the yardstick then, which would have been classical music, whole suites to be played without an interruption. Prior to that, on '78s, what you can fit on an LP might have been 1078s and you had to get up 10 times after part of a movement. So the goal, it wasn't jazz, it wasn't rock, it wasn't folk, it wasn't country. It was the classical music that drove the invention of the LP. And this is all runs concurrently, Tom. The first audio files weren't rock and rollers, weren't kids, they weren't teenagers. The first audio files in order to have the money to buy this gear, which was as expensive then as it is now relative to earnings. They used to joke about it and call Macintosh and Quad and those brands, doctors, lawyers, and dentists, high-fi. Because those are the only people who could afford this stuff. High-fi, as we know it, didn't explode until the '60s when the Japanese-Brayon amazing equipment at incredible prices and rock and roll entered the album era. Prior to the Beatles, kids were happy with singles. They would even get little record players and they would just have singles. I just had to do a list of records from 1956 for High-fi News, which is the High-fi magazine I write for. We are putting together systems and listings of recordings for the year, it's the 70th anniversary of the magazine. And I'm looking through the top 50 albums of 1956 and I would be surprised if I found eight that we would call rock and roll. And three of those were Elvis. One was Fats Domino, the rest were soundtracks, classical and jazz. So let's put it this way. High-fi belonged to jazz, classical, and pop in the '50s, rock entered in the '60s. And with it, the number of brands, it just was literally, not literally, metaphorically, it was an explosion. And all of a sudden, what would have been 20 or 30 brands were 200 or 300 brands. Yeah. And how significant was portable High-fi? A portable one. And what did that mean? Portability, people think it started with a walkman. No, it probably started with the transistor radio. Okay. Which, well, the earlier ones were a bit bulkier, but by say 1960 or so, Sony and companies like that would bring on ones the size of a pack of cards. Simply because people wanted music everywhere. To go back to an earlier point you were making, in the 1800s, there were only three ways you heard music. Church? If you could afford a concert or if you were a musician and could make music at home. Yes. That mustn't be forgotten because the first music in the home was probably the player piano where you had a piano that you could use as a real set per piano, but it also had a role in it, which played specific performances. And among them, for example, you could actually have George Gershwin playing his compositions in your piano. And that is actually higher fidelity than the best High-fi money. Because the piano is a stubbing, just a big stop. Exactly. And with those 70/8s, those early 78s, when you had Bessie Smith or Caruso singing into a microphone that cut the record, you don't get any closer than that. So in a way, we've regressed and we're trying to recover the intimacy. Basically, when you listen to an amazing High-fi system, forget the bombast of a huge orchestra or a heavy metal band. If you were to get someone like just Joni Mitchell on an acoustic guitar, so that you're not being distracted by sound effects or other instruments. And you close your eyes and there's a frisson, a moment where you think she's sitting right there playing to you, height, scale, everything. That's what it's all about. And that's what you couldn't get before the war from the 78s. You could get level. The horn's loudspeakers made it so that you could fill a cinema. The earliest sound on movies was through horns that you could literally stand in. The throat was huge. Power from amplifiers was expensive. A five-watt amplifier then would have been considered huge. 15 watts in the 50s would have been considered. Just to sort of show relative change now. What people expect of it does a wattage for a space stand. Well one company just released an amplifier that's 2000 watts. Try it. Okay. Okay. The sweet spot, this is all arbitrary, but the sweet spot is about 75 watts per channel. We'll let you do pretty much anything. Most high end systems started at two or three hundred watts per channel. But there's a thing called sensitivity or efficiency, which is how much power do you need for this speaker to work? And these huge horns needed negligible amounts of power so that you could fill a cinema in lester square with a five-watt amplifier, but a speaker that's gigantic. In fact, there was one shown at the science museum. And I think it was 22 foot long. And I have seen loudspeakers where I could stand in the opening. And naturally there are Korean and Japanese audio enthusiasts who swear that they're the best sounding speakers ever made. But that's a tributary. That's a sidetrack. Were there were there emergency brands at this point that we recognize today? Yes. There's at least a dozen brands still with us that pre-date World War II. Okay. Thorens for turntables. Denon in Japan for cartridges and now amplifiers. They did a lot of work for the Japanese broadcasting. Quad in 1936. Tanoi and Tanoi was known first even though they're now for high-fi. They were known for public address systems. Why it's in the dictionary. Tanoi is a term for a PA system. Fisher, I believe, was 1940s. Macintosh just celebrated 75 years. There are high-fi companies that will be celebrating centenaries. I mean, that's amazing. And certainly what the work they were doing was celebrated as sort of great technological advances. And the same way that when films started in color and they were like it now in glorious technical. Yeah. You know, sound was praise too, wasn't it? Well, just as digital is the buzzword today, being squeezed out by AI. For the last 40 years, it's been digital, digital, digital. Yes. Before that, it would have been stereo or high fidelity. Would have been the selling terms. I do also want to explore what made you. This sort of self-confessed. Audio junky? Yes. Okay. My audio file readers are not going to want to hear this, but I really don't care about high-fi. I care about music. Now that sounds like a cliche. It sounds like a truism. But I was obsessed with music. My earliest memory was Elvis Presley. on TV in 1956. And I was just about to turn four. And the next day my mother bought me a Mickey Mouse guitar, which I still can't play. My dad was a tape enthusiast, because in those days, tape was expensive, but vinyl, two LPs would fit on one tape. And the tape cost as much as one LPs. So if you were impoverished, you would tape your friends LPs. And my father, it turns out, I didn't realize dad was a bootleger. My dad was copying LPs and sending them the tapes to the UK, because the UK was still under rationing. Yes, in the '50s, absolutely. And Hifi was expensive, and tape was expensive, but there were some very cheap tape recorders, because these companies realized that unless you're landed gentry or a professional, or a doctor-adventist, normal people or normal wages, the bus driver, the postman, they can't afford Hifi separates. Yes, sorry to sort of crowbar in the podcast, but it was a luxury. It was a luxury. And then it became a mass commodity. But what we're looking at today is back at the luxury sector. Now don't get me wrong, there's never been a stage in my experience. And I've been in Hifi since 1968, and before that, my exposure to my dad's tape recording habit or project, and also friends whose dad's had Hifi, at no time has there been a point where there wasn't an extremely costly sector? 100% and that is the case for so many things that whenever something is mass, people know that there's going to be a level where you can elevate it and charge people of money. Well, it's interesting because you and I both work in the field of watches. And today's watchbuyers-- I pretend to. People are fakeity making them sort of crazy. But people don't realize, for example, that in the 40s, 50s, 60s, the only people who knew Patek Philippe were-- I don't know what term to use. The upper class is the wealthy-- whatever term you want to use for people that have deep pockets. The average watchbuyer wouldn't have even heard of Vashemrong. Yes, 100%. OK. And with cars, they might-- cars are more visible because of racing. So they knew Ferrari from sport. But you didn't see them. Now you can go into any street in London, and I doubt 10 minutes would go by without seeing a Lamborghini. In the 60s, the only people who knew Lamborghini were playboys, which brings us back to Highfai, you edit a magazine called The Rake, and its precedents were Esquire, GQ, and Playboy. In the 60s, or even in the 50s, if Playboy, Esquire, or GQ was running an article on the bachelor pad, the man about town, they would always have a super high-fi system in that. Of course. I mean, yeah, absolutely. And usually it was with a real-to-real tape deck, because that was more evocative. And a classic example of this bringing it closer to this century, there was a film with Robert Redford and Demi Moore. I think it was called Indicent Proposal. Dissent Proposal. And it was the last time I'd seen a killer high-fi in a movie. But it was there to show that this guy, the Robert Redford, was playing, it was an over-the-top high-fi. Yeah. In an episode of Friends, Joey buys a pair of Martin Logan loudspeakers. Martin Logan loudspeakers are true high-end audio. They're not known to the guys that go into comment and curries and buy Sony, for example. So you get these little moments where a piece of high-fi will turn up in a movie or a TV show to indicate that this guy-- unfortunately, it is male-oriented-- that this individual has money and likes high-fi or likes gadgets, whichever point they're trying to make. And when I got into high-fi in, say, '68, I spent, as a teenager, and it took me two years to pay it off. I spent $700 then. $700 in 1968, I did the calculation, is roughly $6,000 today. Call it $5,200 quit. For a 16-year-old to spend that kind of money-- and I didn't come from money. My dad worked in the post office. My mom was a cashier. I had to pay that off on the never-never. But I was so desperate to have a decent high-fi system because I heard that over at my friends' houses, because their dads had high-fi. And this is something-- this is a little anecdote for you. Most people don't realize that high-fi used to be sold in furniture stores. Well, this was 100% my question was, is high-fi a bona fide part of interior design? Well, this is the funny thing, because there have always been high-fi stores. And I know from my books, pictures of high-fi stores in the '50s, with brands that we still know. OK, and all they sold was high-fi. And if you see a film called That Thing You Do, with Tom Hanks, it's about a rock band, a very, very nice film about an imaginary rock band in the '60s. One of the characters works in an electronics store, and there's the radios and the high-fi next to the washing machines. Two of my friends, their father's own rival furniture stores. And in these furniture stores, they would have the big consoles. Now, most consoles weren't high-fi, because you had the speakers were stuck together, and they weren't separated. They had cheap components, and you were paying for the furniture. But there was a segment that made consoles, turntable, tuner, amplifiers, with separate loudspeakers that were fine furniture as well. Now, at that time, what I spent $700, that was only just over entry level. You could go into what was in Radio Shack. You could probably, I could have probably spent a bit less, and maybe even had something better. But I was a novice. I was in the mercy of the salesman. And I got into it so heavily that when I got to university, I went to work in a high-fi store to help finance the funds. And what would happen was a series of upgrades. And by the time I became a reviewer, I had become obsessed with vintage high-fi. Right. So I actually possessed, and which it's now been dispersed to various people, I actually possessed something of a museum, because I was obsessed with valve high-fi versus transistor solid-state. Explain this. Valves were the active devices in electronics, vacuum tubes to the two of the Americans. But they were hot and large and fragile. Eventually, what was developed was the transistor, which is called solid-state, which completely removed heat, size, and wastage of electricity. The trouble is the sound changed. And there's a valve sound and a solid-state sound. This, again, is one of the ironies or contradictions in high-fi. Because if there was such a thing as a perfect amplifier, two perfect amplifiers, they would sound identical. There would be no difference. So you have side-by-side a phenomenal valve amplifier, and it's technical equivalent in solid-state, and you can hear the difference. This is an experiment which I gladly sat through. One of my mentors is the late Tim DeParevichini. Great name. And he is of that Italian family that goes back centuries. First, Westerner to be hired by a Japanese high-fi company. He was that good. Worked on all the tape decks at Abbey Road, did Paul McCartney's machine, so Dave Gilmore's machine. And I became friends with Tim. And Tim was not biased one way or the other. He worked with Valves, but he could also work with solid-state. And he made two identical amplifiers, save for one being valve and one being solid-state. And we listened to the two of them, and they sounded different. But as Tim and another fellow named Bob Carver, who also made amplifiers, pointed out, any good designer or engineer can tune the high-fi equipment to sound a certain way. Now jumping ahead to other areas we're going to cover, one of the fundamental problems with high-fi and why it's not as well-known as the other topics you cover is because most people don't know what it is. You can say cigar to a non-smoker and they know what it is. You can say wine to a tea toteller, they know what it is. You don't have to explain what a car is. But high-fi has eluded people because it has one problem that no other item in the luxury dispatch milieu suffers. Every single thing that you talk about, Tom, in this series, you make one purchase. When you buy a Porsche, it comes with the tires. When you buy that suit, it comes with the buttons. When you buy a cooker, there's nothing to add to it. High-fi, because of the nature of it, cannot, the best systems do not come from one brand. Now, there are plenty of brands that think they can make a complete system. But they'll have excellent speakers, but a lousy amplifier, or a great amplifier, but a lousy speaker. I cannot name one brand since the days of quad in the 50s and 60s, and then it would have only been with FM radio, where there was a system from one brand that was completely satisfactory. So what happens is you have three elements in any sound system, the source, which can be tape, streaming, CD, cassette, vinyl. That's the source. They have to feed into the amplifier, which controls the signals and provides the power, and then the loudspeaker. Every system, your iPhone has that, a source, an amplification, and your earbuds are the speakers. What's happened, because of, I don't know if it's deliberate, or if the obfuscation is supposed to make things better for the salesperson, they've made it a minefield, which turntable, which works with which speakers, which amplifier will drive, which speaker, which cable, every single component has come under such scrutiny that it's complicated matters to the point where people forget that most components work with each other, not necessarily well, not of the best, but you have to have a really grave mismatch. For example, a tiny, tiny amplifier with a loud speaker that begs for power, and it'll barely drive it, and ultimately it'll destroy the speaker because the amplifier will distort. Reverse to that, huge amplifier speakers that can handle the power, crank it up, and you've blown the loudspeakers. Those things are easily dealt with because they're factual. Those are specifications where it becomes tricky is completely subjective. Now here's where the real spanner in the works, Tom. You're much younger than I am. You're hearing blows mine away. You have a high frequency recovery that I don't have anymore. The reason I'm still valid as a reviewer is because I'm a trained listener. I know how to listen, and if I'm missing some overtones, the core of the music is what's in the midband, voices and everything like that. So the extremes are not that crucial until you start getting into huge systems and you want to reproduce at the same level, the entire Royal Philharmonic The problem with non-audio files buying high-fi is they haven't got confidence in their own hearing. Now what you like and sound might not be what I like and sound, and I'll tell you right off my biases. I don't care about deep, deep bass. I don't listen to hip-hop dance house or much heavy metal, and I am hypersensitive about the high frequencies, especially siblings where you get a sound. Those things bother me. And 90% of the music I listen to is vocal. So the most important thing to me is the human voice. Right. Okay. And therefore there are systems that are more suited to that rather than one of the most important issues. And back in the day, and you're not allowed to do this anymore because everything is supposed to be, every sound system is supposed to play everything, and your high-fi doesn't know what it's playing. If I put out a Miles Davis album, my turntable doesn't know it's playing Miles Davis. No. But what they used to say back in the 60s especially, if you had a certain loudspeaker, let's say you had a BBC-designed loudspeaker. What was the one that you were speaking about? Of the BBC LS35A. Which is the you think that's a micro monitor, the best speaker, especially if you don't want big, big boxes in your house. But the big brother to that speaker is designed for the BBC and it's this big and perfectly satisfactory. But the sound best suits classical and acoustic jazz. Okay. Okay. You then at the same period, you had a brand called JBL, Altec Lansing, Sirwen Vega, theirs suited rock. So the customer would go into the high-fi store with a couple of LPs because you should bring your own music along. You don't want to listen to a piece of high-fi equipment with music you've never heard before. Yep. So let's say you're a Billy Joel fan, you bring in your Billy Joel album, you're an Eagles fan, you bring in your Eagles album. The salesman would see this guy brought in only Miles Davis or Miles and Thelonius Monk and things like that. He's going to steer him towards acoustic research or spend or or those kinds of speakers which suit that kind of music, right? Given the limitations of systems of that day. Okay. You jump to the strata we're looking at of speakers that started 40,000. There is no music that best suits them. They play everything with equanimity. So they they're transparent. So the extra price is actually because you're getting bang for your buck. But that brings us to something very important which has to underline the entire entire spiel. It's called the law of diminishing returns. Okay. The good news is that high-fi today is so cheap, so inexpensive. I could put together a system for a thousand pounds. And before someone goes, "Oh, a grand, come on." That a grand will buy nothing in a four star restaurant for four people. Yep. Okay. I'm talking about something you'll have for the rest of your life that will give you music 24/7 if you so desire. A turntable amp and speakers for a grand. To get better than that, you don't just spend 1100. You have to spend like 1500. By the time you've hit 10,000 pounds, you're at the lower reaches of what you would call extreme high-fi. Okay. This is arbitrary, of course. Keep in mind what I said earlier, my $700 as a teenager 58 years ago is $6,000 now. Okay. And what I would get today for $6,000 is a lot better than what I got then for 700. So in other words, high-fi has benefited from trickle-down to the same extent as computers. Yeah. You buy a Mac for 1200 quid that would have blown NASA's minds. Yeah. That's true. Definitely. My first notebook from Compact was 5 grand and my phone blows it away. So today, when you start talking about extreme high-fi, leaving aside a few areas that actually bother me, you could put together a system easily for 2 million pounds. Easily. 2 million. 2 million. So it's what you're prepared to spend. This has got to be kept in mind because once you get past this critical mass point, you have to spend exponentially more for an audible gain. Yeah. And I'm interested to understand the kind of mindset when people are setting up their houses, for example, if they're reading their rooms or things. Do you think they think about how the sound is going to work before they figure out where, I don't know, the books are going to go or the the furniture's going to go. I mean, the audio files definitely. Normal people know. No. Okay. One of my, I'm not going to embarrass these colleagues of mine, but I have a colleague in the UK who spent over a million on the room. Yeah. Before anything was put into it so that it was sonically perfect and all of the cables were hidden. Now, his speakers are visible. His equipment is visible. So I want to separate this from what's called custom install where everything's hidden. That is not high end audio. Yeah. Another colleague of mine, that's his business. So, say, the high find needs to be tangible. Well, with the exception of a certain companies, loud speakers, certain companies, Alison, for example, where they have to be against the wall. Yeah. Most loud speakers are of their best when they're free standing. See, this is why I sort of wants to have your heads talk about this is because I knew that there is a kind of corder of people who do push the envelope a little bit. It tells what people think is normally expected of. Yeah. The word normal is the first word you dispense with. Now, I have seen systems in Italy, in Germany, in Japan, in the states where the amount spent on the room was almost as much as they spent on the hardware. Yeah. Because they were building from new and they weren't modifying an existing premises. Yeah. See, I was stuck with an existing premises and I'm not in that category financially. There are guys in Japan who, the aforementioned horn loudspeakers to increase the sensitivity in the bass and the sound, the longer the horn, the better. And I think British designers invented folded horns so that you could fit them in a compact space but still have the full length of the horn. It's a folder, folder horn. They wanted it unfolded. The horn is in their listening room, the opening, but the horn throat goes all the way under the house. They're that crazy. There are audio files that have the mains directly linked up to their sound system instead of going through the consumer unit somehow. This is in Japan again. - With regards to the history set of things, you're mentioning Japan, you're mentioning America and so forth. Nick Faulkson, I did an episode in the last season on the quartz graces and how ultimately the kind of competition was very good for sort of pushing technology. Is that similar for Hifi? The fact that the Japanese were, you know, putting the Americans I imagine, especially through their paces, meant that ultimately that fast tracks better Hifi. - They're not one but two analogies that are so similar. Going back to you, we were talking before about me working with you with watches. I do have a dual life. My Hifi life is separate from my watch life. I write in both fields. And there's very little overlap. I've only met a ton of guys in Hifi that are watch enthusiasts, but only one or two people in the watch world that are audio files. But what I explained to both is the parallel. The quartz crisis has its direct equivalent in audio in two ways, but not necessarily to the point of wiping out the industry. The quartz crisis was far more grave. - Yeah. - And the unexpected consequences of it was high end watchmaking like never before. - Yeah. - The first thing to really raffle Hifi was the transistor arriving. - Right, which was-- - Because everyone was making late '50s, early '60s. And overwhelmed the industry by the mid to late '60s. Because the transistor was the enabler of the Japanese to create mass market Hifi. And this is not a derogatory term. I'm talking about amazing stuff for half the price of what the Americans and the British and the Germans and the French and the Italians were doing. Sony, let's put it this way. - Well, that was the Japanese way, but. - The Japanese way. Sony, Pioneer, Kenwood, all of them came in with amazing equipment for very little money, but they also had high end. A lot of it stayed in Japan because they were known in the West for affordable stuff. And you're not suddenly going to spend a fortune on a piece of equipment where they've also got products for $199. That was the problem Volkswagen had coming out with a faton. Everyone thinks that VW was an affordable car. If they bring out something that costs as much as a Rolls Royce, it doesn't work. Over the years, it has. Sony works at both ends of the market, Denon, both ends of the market. And there's no sort of problem with it. So what happened was solid state brought down the prices. They just plummeted and they brought down sizes and made it much more domestically acceptable. The other thing that hit really bad because when cassettes came along, it hurt open real tape. But it wasn't major. It was compact disk. Compact disk, virtually almost wiped out vinyl, which meant buy-by-turn tables. Yeah. OK? Digital changed everything. Now, keeping up with the parallel with watches just as the watch industry survived the quartz crisis coming back with Otera watches, individual watchmakers, creating the most incredible pieces. The high-end brands having success protect Philippe and Vashron, Odomar, are much bigger than they were 50 years ago. Yeah, yeah. It's a fancy ride. Everyone benefited. What happened to save high-fi, CD got better. Started out at the Sony brittle. But the high-end companies took it away from the mass market, manufacturers, and improved the sound quality there. But the vinyl revival-- it didn't do for high-fi what mechanical watch-- what the quartz crisis did for mechanical watches. But it brought back an awareness that digital wasn't the end of the road. No, I had to say. In other words, quartz wasn't the B-all and End All of Watch's. Digital wasn't the B-all and End All of High-Fine. However, last couple of years, streaming has just completely taken over for whole generations that will never own physical media. They don't want CDs. They don't want vinyl. They don't want tapes. That's for grandpa. Yeah. And what they're missing out on is what they're not even aware of, which is the sound quality. OK. Now, I have to qualify that because streaming, like CD before it, has now gone through the hands of the audio file manufacturers. And you can buy a streaming unit. It's still the rest of the system. This is just the streamer for 30 grand. Most people get their streaming on their phone. Why would I? I have 15,000 CDs, 12,000 LPs, two or 3,000 tapes. And I love the act of putting a disc in a player or on a turntable. If I put on the album, something live, all my brothers live at the film "Mor East," wouldn't you want it to feel like you were actually there? Yeah. Look, I did. Yeah, for sure. Now, I play that to you on a junky little record player with self-contained speakers, and then put it on a state-of-the-art sound system. Honestly, it's like going from Iron Brew to Latour. And this is what's not getting across to people, because sound quality is so personal, subjective, and elusive. Even with wine, most people-- I've got a nice wine cellar, but I'm not going to say that I could tell what vintage, which slope of the mountain it was built on. Yeah. It was grown on. But you know what you like. What day of the week was picked? Oh, day of the week. Yeah, it was. What time? My dad's a bit like that. With wine? Yeah, a friend of mine. His father, so my friend's father, we were in the kitchen to go to their house. And he opened up the fridge, and there was a bottle of wine there, and he goes, I'm going to test your dad. And I was like, all right. And it was an '88 Pallini Montescher. And he pulled it and gave it to dad. And my dad took a sniff, took a sip, and he said it's an '88 Pallini Montescher. See, that-- you have to admire. My dad's very impressive in that kind of stuff. You have to admire that. Yeah. You are, of course, a historian, but you aren't the last generation of audio file. But people will turn to you for advice. So why don't-- I think you give that advice right here, right now. Somebody wants to set up. They have your $6,000 budget, or adjust that as you see fit. And they want to go out and buy a really good system that works for their-- I don't know-- we'll pick any genre of music. What would you suggest they spend that money on? OK. They only have to make two decisions. The first is their budget. Yeah, of course. Which they must stick to, because a good salesman will nickel and dime you today. And to be fair, people-- it's exactly the same answer I give people when it comes to tailoring. People say to me, all the time, what tailor do I get to do this? And it's like, the first question is, what's your budget? And stick to it. Yeah. The second is, what do you want for a source? Now, you may already have a library. You might have inherited your dad's vinyl or your dad's CD. So the only other decision you have to make before going in-- I'll give you one. You may have heard our theme tune is the Alex Menden Orchestra. Who he's a great guy. He basically does these sort of 1920s, so that you're Artie Shaw. And reproduces that sound. I love listening to Artie Shaw. I love listening to Alex's music. So let's say I'm wanting to put on the Alex Menden Orchestra. What am I getting? And you like Big Band? I love Big Band. Have you got a vinyl library already? Or a CD library? I reckon if I'm putting myself somebody else shoes, I'm going to say yes. OK. CD players, pound for pound, cost less than vinyl. I'll just throw that out there. Back in the day-- and I'm talking 70s and 80s-- a turntable company, for obvious reasons, said that you should spend 90% on your budget on your turntable and the rest on your rampant speakers. because the turn table is quite expensive. Say, that their argument was your system's only going to sound as good as what you feed into it. Now that's true, but it's a kind of twisted logic because it's also going to have to go through a bat cheap amp and a cheap speaker. So what you're going to hear is not the great turn table, you're going to hear the cheap speaker. The argument behind it was playing into this audiophile thing of upgrading where audiophiles are only happy with their equipment for a year or two and then they have to change one of the parts. Let's qualify your imaginary customer, is they want to buy one system and they're not going to go back into a high-fi store unless something breaks. They're not planning on getting on this carousel of upgrading and upgrading and upgrading for the rest of their lives. Those are the gadget guys. I used the rule of three. A third on the turn table, a third on the amp and a third on the speakers. With a thousand pounds, as little as a thousand pounds and we've justified it before, a thousand pounds will barely buy a good wristwatch and a good wristwatch will not play Joni Mitchell or Twisted Sister. Project is now the world's largest turn table manufacturer. They're based in Vienna, they got factories in I think Czech Republic, whatever. They make turn tables from as little as 200 pounds. Go up to three or four hundred pounds and it comes complete with the arm, the cartridge, the cartridge is used to call the needle. Most integrated amplifier. An integrated amplifier is basically there's two parts to an amplifier. The preamp, which is all the controls and the power amp, which is what drives the speaker. An integrated amp puts it in one box. Okay. Most integrated amplifiers now, like they used to, will accept a turn table, phono. Brief technical aside, everything you shove into a high-fi except for the record deck puts out what's called line level. Whether it's a tape deck, a tuner, a CD player, cassette, doesn't matter. They all go into those sockets, sometimes called auxiliary or whatever. The signal from a turn table is low and not playable, straight out. It has to go through a phono amplifier. Most amplifiers now have those. The three hundred pounds, you can go into a store like Richard Sounds and get an amplifier from a top British or Japanese manufacturer, not junk. And it will then drive a good pair of British loudspeakers for three or four hundred pounds. And you will have a system that I promise you is better than 99% of the systems in the world. That's how small high-fi is now. Is it a solitary pursuit and an enjoyment? It is. You'd think it's solitary, fundamentally, because the best sound systems are set up for a hot seat. And I do a lot of listening alone, not just because of work, but it's my pleasure in the same way my wife likes to read or garden. Yeah. But equally, most audio files hang out with other audio files. And as with every single item in the luxury field, you want your friends to know that you have it. Yeah, yeah, that's true. And this is inescapable. And I can write. Look, with high-fi, the joy beyond the musical pleasure. It's having a friend who's also an audio file come over and you compare cartridges or you talk about your new piece or whatever. And all of the buddies I have that meet in the coffee shop with on Saturdays are all audio files. Yeah. That's not all they're into. They're into cars and watches and whatever. I said, Moe is a perfect example of multi-interest. So it's sort of community passion, but a solitary pursuit. Both. It's both. Yeah. I remain Tom Chamberlain and this has been the luxury dispatch, the podcast that explores how luxury lives not only in objects, but in experiences, passions and the way we choose to surround ourselves with beauty and meaning. My thanks to Ken Kessler for reminding us that sound, perhaps more than anything is the power to shape memory, mood and place. If you've enjoyed today's episode, please do like, subscribe and leave a comment. We read everyone. Tell us what you listen on, the objects you treasured most, or the subjects you would like us to explore next. Thank you for listening and happy dressing.