Friday, May 3, 2013

Smart in a Stupid Way

The Audiophile's newest configuration of components has been problematic from my perspective. More often than not he opens the daily box that arrives from somewhere in the universe, usually Canada, goes to The Listening Room, fiddles around for a while, and reports one or more of the following: It ate a resistor. It ate a capacitor. It ate a vacuum tube.

Granted my memory is highly selective and increasingly unreliable, but in my whole life, I'm fairly certain none of the music players I've purchased have performed this badly. Until I was introduced to the magical kingdom of high-fidelity audio, I operated under the assumption that a successful purchase had been made if you bought a device, plugged it into a normal wall socket, pressed an obvious start button, and music happened.

Clearly this is why I'm a knuckle dragger when it comes to understanding why anyone would ever find this hobby enjoyable. Perhaps if I take a few graduate-level courses in marketing or some other field of study to which all the smart people gravitate, I too will begin to grasp the beauty of owning a collection of components that are highly volatile, regularly incompatible, and always hungry.

And that, my friends, is audio winning.