I am a sick man. I have skipped Friday night plans to spend hours repositioning the speakers in my living room, by inches and degrees. I have squandered small fortunes on silver and black boxes that most people couldn’t identify, whose purpose they wouldn’t understand. I have disfigured my apartment with hulking foam panels to improve the room acoustics. I have shelled out for a high-resolution music streaming service with an unpronounceable name. I have frittered days and nights trawling the back pages of online forums to find the optimal tonearm mass for a certain phono cartridge, or the suitable crossover frequency for a particular model of subwoofer.
More than anything, I have spent long passages of this earthly life sitting on my ass, listening. I listen to music, but what I hear is sound. Texture, timbre, and tone; clarity and detail; space and depth. And I hear, even more acutely, what thwarts sound. Shrill treble, muddled bass — for me these are worse than peeves. They offend hearing. They diminish the human sensorium. Earbuds repulse me; laptop speakers grate; a tabletop Bluetooth unit is a kind of vandalism.
The word audiophile — etymologically, one who “loves to hear” — has a wine-sipping pretension that I hate, but sometimes an ugly shoe fits. Like similarly suffixed psychopathologies, the term suggests a state of warped dependence, of inbent sublimation. I didn’t set out to be this way, but neither have I ever sought help. My symptoms are apparent, their causes obscure. What, after all, do we love when we love sound?
Audiophilia was born in gimmickry, and has never fully risen above it. Starting in the 1940s, a sudden onrush of consumer audio innovations — wide-range speakers, FM radio, long-playing vinyl records — created an equally sudden demand for whiz-bang demonstrations of “lifelike” sound. Perhaps the first public face of the phenomenon was engineer Emory Cook, an MIT dropout and the founder of Sounds of Our Times, a midcentury record label specializing in field recordings rendered with fool-the-ears realism. For all his technical training, Cook’s was a primal form of audiophilia, almost childlike: The man wanted to know what things sounded like. His quest took him from the peak of Mount Washington to the beaches of Trinidad, where he used an array of bulky equipment to record high winds and downpours, lapping waves and tugboat whistles. The resulting LPs were runaway hits, despite their minimal musical content. Highlights of the Cook catalog include Katydids, Frogs & Forest Birds; Mexican Firecrackers; and The Voice of the Sea. Rail Dynamics alone sold a hundred thousand copies.
Early mainstream coverage depicted the hi-fi enthusiast as half monk, half mad scientist, an “addict” and “knob twirler” (per Life magazine), religiously obsessed with sonic accuracy. (The same article includes a photo of a man who built a speaker horn so long that it extends from his garage, through a wall, into his living room.) A New Yorker profile of Cook from 1956 describes audiophiles as “a remarkably articulate group of zealots,” and Cook as “the grand panjandrum of their cult,” with “an almost mystical reverence for sound.”1
Cook has left us, but the rest of the description still holds. Audiophiles obsess, tinker, tweak, and upgrade, their gear addiction now served by a global subindustry of specialty brands, most of them unknown to the broader public; there are still record labels whose main marketing draw is their audio quality. And more than a little of that midcentury zealotry survives in subsequent sonic novelties that tease and amaze the ears with their “realism”: spatial audio, high-res audio, surround sound. Sound snobs would plotz at the comparison, but when an audiophile tests their stereo with the sawtooth jag of a guitar or the spelunk of a low bass note, what — besides thousands of dollars’ worth of gear — makes them any different from a teenager mainlining the rustles and gurgles of ASMR videos on YouTube? When we submit ourselves to sound for its own sake, something elemental, infantile, awakens.
From a certain height, the problem becomes one of knowledge itself: Do you believe what you hear, or do you hear what you believe?
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Yet unlike most cultic formations, audiophiles know, deep down, that their god is a false one. Recorded songs are finite temporal events, but in the audiophile dream, or delusion, the record holds an infinity of retrievable detail, a renewing depth that can always be heard better, truer — if only we have the right tools. Audiophiles, the High Fidelity magazine cofounder C. G. Burke once wrote, are simply “people [who] wish an oboe to sound unmistakably and completely like an oboe.” That word like is key. All audio playback — mono or stereo, analog or digital — is at base an imitation, a simulacrum. Choose your sound and you choose your illusion. And almost as soon as naturalistic audio entered the American home, the wars of illusion began. Do you want to feel like the band or orchestra or DJ is here in your room, or like you’re there, in the studio or concert hall? Do you judge a system’s sound by its nearness to live performance, or to the recording? And how would you tell?
All subcultures suffer their schisms, and for audiophiles, a defining split is between subjectivism and objectivism in listening — between those who trust their ears and those who trust their measurements. In a 2004 academic article, the ethnomusicologist Marc Perlman framed it as a conflict between “golden ears” and “meter readers.” The golden ear, in Perlman’s lavishly adjectived definition, claims an “intimate, embodied, personal, inalienable, charismatic superiority of aural discrimination,” a master listener’s ability to distinguish and rank audio equipment by the subtlest gradations of sonic quality. His rival, the meter reader, prizes “rationalized,” “impersonal,” “scientific” authority, by way of spiritless, lab-testable criteria that don’t depend on the vagaries of human hearing: signal-to-noise ratio, crossover distortion, dynamic power output.
No love is lost between these camps. To Robert Harley, editor of the flagship golden-ears monthly The Absolute Sound, meter readers are philistines “who reject the listening experience,” for whom “nothing more can be known about an audio component beyond its technical performance.” Upmarket mystics like Harley are in turn a favorite punch line among the echt meter readers of Audio Science Review, an online database whose contributors meticulously test and rank components — 1,986 and counting — based on measurements, no ears required. In their respective languages, both extremes circle an epistemic cul-de-sac. A meter reader’s greatest compliment for a piece of gear is that it “measures well”; the golden ear’s highest praise, tautologically, is that it sounds “musical.” From a certain height, the problem becomes one of knowledge itself: Do you believe what you hear, or do you hear what you believe?
These warring phenomenologies also play out in silicon and copper. Perlman’s binary maps roughly onto the divide between — bear with me here — solid-state audio equipment, which uses semiconductors, like nearly all consumer electronics since the 1970s; and vacuum-tube gear, a throwback design where power is transmitted by electrodes in glass cylinders. Meter readers bade good riddance to tubes decades ago, but golden ears can’t quit them. Psychoacoustic lore holds that the kind of harmonic distortions associated with tubes — subtle overtones that smooth certain frequencies, as if steeping the music in a sepia mist — sound gentler, “warmer,” than the granular accuracy of solid-state equipment. Likewise, while digital media long ago conquered analog in the rest of the world, among audiophiles the contest has never been settled. Objectivists point to the quantifiably superior stability and fidelity of digital codecs, while subjectivists cherish the earthy sonic “presence” of records and reel-to-reel tapes. Today digital sources and solid-state parts almost always measure better; yet untold money and ingenuity go into the design of new turntables and tube amps, and demand is only growing.
Then there are still more esoteric purisms, or primitivisms. In the 1992 debut issue of the now sadly defunct DIY-audio zine Sound Practices — a querulous, staple-bound rejoinder to the glossy hi-fi mags — a speaker tinkerer and gear collector rages against the scourge of stereo. Mono sound, the single-channel format that was standard until the 1960s, is “coherent and whole,” he writes, “so pure, so simple,” while stereo is a “SCAM,” “like having to wear 3D glasses every time you go to see a movie.” In the same spirit, a friend of mine is an unyielding partisan of acoustic recording, a method predating the invention of the microphone, where performers would record by shouting, strumming, and honking into a huge conical horn.
Here I have my own cards to lay out. As someone unhealthily attached to order, accuracy, and repetition, I always incline toward verisimilitude in sound. I want to hear what’s there — a catch in the singer’s breath, the last shiver of a cymbal, a pixelated fade of synths — and nothing that isn’t. If a recording, played back with maximum fidelity to its source, sounds grating or cold, so be it. Who said listening should be easy, any more than music itself should be easy?
This Adornian astringency — would he have hated jazz less if he’d had better speakers? — has made me an unsentimental audio consumer. Despite my deep love for music of the analog era, I default to digital. When I have the cash to shop for an upgrade, I check the specs first and last. The only 20th-century device in my setup is a direct-drive turntable from the 1980s; I did some penniless dabbling in vintage gear back in college, but today my amp, preamp, equalizer, and streamer are all solid-state, and, like my speakers, all made in the past decade.
Maybe it has something to do with my own audiophile initiation, which was similarly unromantic. Audiophiles tend to date their origin stories to a tender age: a childhood encounter with the family stereo, a hypnotic song on the radio. My bloom came late, at the end of high school, with a black plastic Technics receiver and a pair of walnut laminate Realistic bookshelf speakers. Both were from the 1980s, and both scrounged from the damp basement of my family’s house in Texas. They were there; I was bored; I carried the parts upstairs and hooked them up in my bedroom. Crouched on the floor, turning the dial of the Technics, I found the local public radio station, and an alt-country band — Son Volt, or maybe the Old 97’s — wheezed into audibility. Years of must and moths had reduced the sound of the Realistics — a discount brand sold by RadioShack — to a clogged rasp, like a chain-smoker with a head cold. When I pulled off the speakers’ front grilles to see what was wrong, the foam woofer rings crumbled in my hands.
Still, in that half song before the speakers gave out, something was sparked. One night later that summer, while cat sitting at my aunt and uncle’s house, I was rifling through their CDs and found a collection of early Nat Cole Trio instrumentals — the good stuff from the ’40s, with Cole’s coolly nimble piano playing at the front. I slipped the CD into the multidisc changer, sank back onto the sofa, and listened while my aunt’s elderly cat, Steve, napped nearby. Cole’s opening keyboard cascade on “Jumpin’ at Capitol” came tumbling into the room, with Oscar Moore’s madcap guitar giving chase, and Johnny Miller’s bass the solid earth below. I sat up. The Pioneer speakers and Onkyo amplifier were nothing fancy, but I was hearing a discovery — a fuller dimension, a brightening color, a pluck and rush. On the couch, Steve stirred, turned, and went back to sleep. Darkness was falling over the old oak trees in the yard; cicadas chirped in the dew. I played the whole CD, and immediately played it again.
Who are these audiophiles? We are — overwhelmingly, smotheringly — men, skewing older but not geriatric, often but not always white, with at least a little disposable income, sometimes far too much. I haven’t discerned a socio-professional pattern; audiophiles are dentists and bartenders, lawyers and mail carriers. Curiously (or not), the proportion of musicians and audio engineers seems not much higher than in the general population.
Such, anyway, is our outward appearance. As for our inner life, no piece of writing depicts it with more tough love than the great — the only? — audiophile novel of our time, Ge Fei’s The Invisibility Cloak, published in 2012 and translated into English by Canaan Morse in 2016. “The name ‘audiophile’ has never sat well with me,” its protagonist, Cui, confides unconvincingly near the start of the book. “I’m just a craftsman.” A master maker of custom tube amplifiers in Beijing, Cui wearily plies his trade while sinking ever deeper into a middle-age, postdivorce funk. Building tube amps, he muses, is “probably the most insignificant industry in China today”; he guesses that in the whole city there are no “more than twenty of us.” Yet the boutique marginality of what he calls his “racket” puts him in close contact with China’s new class of yuppies and executives, eager to outfit their homes with artisanal sound. The novel follows Cui from one nouveau riche living room to another, where clients are reliably entranced by his setups, “as if listening to heaven’s melodic strains.” “Five or six of these ‘victims’ a year,” he tells us, “is enough to keep my pathetic business hobbling along.” Cui isn’t much for introspection, but in his gripes and regrets, in making a modest living from something he enjoys immodestly, he inhabits a melancholy that any sick man will recognize. As we hold life and sound apart, they only join closer.
Short and episodic, the novel’s narrative patterns match those of the audiophile mind. Liberally scattered amid childhood flashbacks, scenes from a failed marriage, money troubles, and family quarrels — in a word, life — are gearhead reveries on the glories of hi-fi, named by brand and model. Cui admires a set of Amati Anniversario speakers, their cabinets “lacquered and buffed to the tones of a violin and a mirror’s shine”; one type of RCA vacuum tube is nicknamed “The King,” another “The Pillar of Heaven.” A prized pair of vintage Tannoy Autograph speakers seduce him “like gorgeous twin sisters,” with an “intoxicating allure,” an “unbelievable fullness” and “flawless piano timbre.” When Cui’s wife asks for the divorce, his only request is “that she leave me all the audio equipment, including the Autograph speakers.” She agrees.
In purer forms, audiophilia remains a cloutless, glamourless pastime — and this is its claim to redemption.
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I linger on Ge’s novel in part because the field of recent hi-fi writing is otherwise so desolate. In this century the American audiophile press, like most print media, has withered to bare life. Long gone are the postwar années glorieuses of Audio and Stereo Review, High Fidelity and Audiocraft, with their ten-page features, critical essays, how-to guides, and no-fluff component tests, serving professionals and consumers, snobs and novices alike. (I mean, Ralph Ellison wrote for High Fidelity — as did Nat Hentoff, Aaron Copland, and Jacques Barzun.) Today readers have a choice of just two ad-heavy monthlies, each offering a thin digest of industry-friendly gear takes and skimpily reported columns. Stereophile maintains a pretense of objective rigor; product reviews include results of tests by the magazine’s “technical editor,” full of graphs and charts. In The Absolute Sound, meanwhile, quality is more or less measured by price. The most offensively expensive gear sends the magazine’s credulous shills into transports of Hildegardian ecstasy. For $89,000, you can make mystic communion with the “engrossing, enlightening . . . awe-inspiring” 300-watt Goldmund Telos 800 power amplifier, with its “dynamic envelope that seems to have no bounds,” and “transient attacks . . . more powerful than you had imagined possible” — fittingly, the magazine calls its annual product awards the Golden Ears.
However editorially atrophied, these magazines continue to carry authority, at least for the moneyed boomers who dominate the high-end market. For everyone else, there’s the internet. A sun-starved terrarium of forums, blogs, vlogs, and podcasts serves every niche and extremity of the audiophile audience. As repositories of technical nous and venues for arcane bickering — are idler-wheel turntable motors really superior to belt-drive designs? — the forums fill some of the void left by the decline of hi-fi journalism, but it takes a hardy scroller to sift the useful from the inane. And most audiophile vlogs are little more than meandering infomercials for products that brands have sent hosts to “review.” I should know, because I’ve watched so many of them.
Perlman’s dyad needs updating for an American economy more slanted than ever toward Sardanapalian excess. Among audiophiles, the bitterest battles now rage over the unconscionable cost of high-end hi-fi, and the outlandish claims made for the priciest gear. An unusually reflective recent Stereophile editorial lamented audio’s unchecked “premiumization.” How, not just as a matter of value but a question of science, can any consumer amplifier cost $150,000, like the 225-watt, 400-pound Statement 450i iQ? (The Absolute Sound: “resplendent,” “superb,” “extraordinary.”) Speakers readily reach the half-million mark; you can spend a year’s salary on audiophile power conditioners, audiophile equipment racks, audiophile Ethernet cables. At the scammiest fringe, things enter RFK Jr. brainworm territory: crystals, orbs, and amulets alleged to improve acoustics, reduce static buildup, and perhaps open a channel to the divine.
Amid this end-times decadence, it’s easy to forget that the final ideal of sound reproduction was traditionally a humble, even dull one: flat response. From source to speaker, the chain of devices that transmit a signal should do so evenly across the range of audible frequencies and at any volume, without peaks, dips, or other distortions. Flat response itself can’t be heard, since, in a strict sense, there’s nothing to hear — except the music.2 Such a system relays a recording with total transparency, like light through tintless glass. It seems easy, but sound resists taming—especially when transformed, almost alchemically, from a stylus motion or digital file into an electrical impulse and then into a mechanical vibration, all within microseconds.3
Since long before the advent of high fidelity, the historian of recording Greg Milner notes, audio adepts have “believed that the key to perfect sound was to simplify the process.” One fewer link in the chain means “one less chance for the original sound to be corrupted.” (The legendary speaker designer Stewart Hegeman reportedly defined a perfect amplifier as “a straight wire with gain.”) Audiophiles thus devise their most elaborate contraptions in pursuit of simplicity. A fully loaded high-end home system might include a turntable with a freestanding tonearm, a step-up transformer, a phono preamplifier, a stereo preamplifier, two power amplifiers (one for each channel), a streamer, a music server, a digital-to-analog converter, a CD transport, two loudspeakers, two subwoofers, and assorted peripherals, not to mention many feet of RCA, XLR, HDMI, optical, coaxial, Ethernet, and speaker cables. Each of these devices does one thing at a time and no more, the better to pass on a pure, unblemished signal. Of course, such a setup also makes for a complex, multinodal signal path, with more junctures where things can go wrong. A sane person would call it overkill. For the audiophile, it’s another reason to spend even more money.
An audiophile looking to spend money couldn’t do much better than the 2025 New York International Audio Show, a three-day hi-fi industry fair featuring more than a hundred exhibitors, which took place last October, in — where else? — New Jersey. Late in the morning on a bright, brisk Saturday, fresh off a bus from Port Authority, I checked in at a small table in the lobby of a Hilton Hotel in the prosperous Bergen County suburb of Hasbrouck Heights. I collected my press badge, program, and complimentary issue of Stereophile, even though I already had one at home. I was here, driven by a volatile mix of openhearted curiosity and self-hating compulsion, to hear the best and newest in high-end audio. The expo took up seventy rooms in the hotel, across four floors. Already overwhelmed as I leafed through the exhibitor list — would my first stop be Bacch Labs? Bache Audio? Backert Labs? — I abandoned myself to chance and began to wander.
The first room I entered was big and dominated by Nordics. Next to a dark and handsome pair of Triangle Magellan floorstanding speakers ($22,000), a big banner for the amp manufacturer Electrocompaniet showed a rugged cliff face at sunset, with the slogan The sound of Norway. This proved almost too apt: The speakers were completely silent. I saw a technician crouched behind them, fiddling with some cables. Along the opposite wall, the Danes were having better luck. Befitting a bastion of social democracy, a consortium of small firms had teamed up to present two model systems built up with their respective devices. For audiophiles who like their gear glossy and slightly evil looking, with all-black cabinets and red LEDs, this was the booth to beat. The sound, too, was dense and enveloping; the air seemed to thicken with every gust of melody from the sloping, sinuous Børresen M2 speakers. For $199,500, more is the pity that they were playing some of the worst music I’d ever heard, a kind of gastric, Baltic Coldplay, with a reverb-sodden male voice keening over a syrupy ooze of synths. I shuddered and remembered that the nationalist right was on the rise in Denmark.
Hightailing it out of Salon A, I headed upstairs and made a turn into the first room I saw. Crammed among the seated bodies, I noticed a nightstand, a dresser, and a giant TV. As it turned out, most of the demo rooms at the Hilton were not like the expansive Salons downstairs, but literal hotel rooms, awkwardly refitted as listening spaces. Beds had been removed, but other furniture and fixtures remained. Double headboards were still attached to the walls; one exhibitor had draped the TV with bedsheets in a feeble effort to dampen echoes. In one room, I passed a sales rep standing at the bathroom sink, fidgeting with a phono cartridge.
The combination of bulky reflective surfaces, deadening carpets, cramped clearances, and shuffling bodies meant that some of the world’s most beautiful, most expensive audio equipment was in effect fighting with bare walls and MDF armoires for acoustic primacy. Bass tones bled everywhere or else dropped out entirely; the highs squeaked; vocals felt thin and false, as if pasted on. In room after room, I tried to reconcile the covetous rush I felt beholding, say, a cloverleaf-curved TW-Acustic Raven LS turntable ($24,000) or a pair of stern, black-clad SW1X MPA V Atlas monoblock power amps ($32,000 each) with the mediocrity of the sound itself. No space is ever sonically neutral; as the veteran audio reviewer Steve Guttenberg, alias the Audiophiliac, has sagely said, “Speakers play the room.” We were the room, and we were being played.
Nevertheless, as the afternoon passed, I found oases. Amid the corporate polish of the bigger brands, it was a relief to drop into an endearingly unpolished display by Kirmuss Audio, a seemingly one-man business whose patented ionization system claims to set the industry standard for vinyl record restoration. Alongside a floor model of the company’s ultrasonic cleaner, which looked exactly like a laser printer, stood two big banners with dense paragraphs of text in a wacky array of fonts, like megasize Dr. Bronner’s labels, full of technical data, user testimonies, and words of warning: Did you know that all ultrasonics are not the same, and some do not use cavitation? I didn’t. I took a brochure.
From there I happened into one of the show’s most charming rooms, that of Brooklyn-based speaker maker Bache Audio, which was presided over by a pair of bald, taciturn Eastern European men. Where other company reps were quick to talk their book, touting features and upgrades, these guys just stood there, frowning. They also had the sense not to place their speakers by the windows, as others had done. The resulting sound from the narrow, unadorned Sofia-104 speakers (As in Bulgaria? I wondered; $7,950) was pinpoint-fine yet plush, almost pillowy — just right for Johnny Hartman’s satin croon on “Easy Living.”
I came to the show determined to set aside demographic assumptions, but my assumptions were fulfilled. The clientele was probably 90 percent male, almost as white, and several decades my senior. The paunches were generous, the sneakers forgiving. The music mostly matched this profile: jam-guitar noodling, Zappa deep cuts. At least three different rooms played a track from Paul Simon’s Graceland. I heard murmurs of appraisal (“The sound is detailed, but not fatiguing”) and deliberation (“How much is the active model versus the passive?”), but most participants were quiet, even shy — with exceptions. Late in the day, my stamina flagging, I slipped into one of the largest Salons, occupied by the storied if fusty German brand Burmester. A jumpy audio vlogger was urging the Burmester reps to test the equipment with a reggaeton track that he had adapted for bass clarinet and bassoon. “I’m an educator,” he explained, “on YouTube.”
By early evening, after seven hours of listening, I had lost more than steam. I was aesthetically depleted. I had hoped to hear the cutting edge, but instead my hearing felt dulled, numbed. Some of the equipment sounded exquisite, some sounded awful, but all of it seemed like an accumulation of toys, traps for the tech-mesmerized and the parasitically rich. I sat down on a bench in the hotel’s lower level and gazed up through the high windows. Dusk was falling; a vacuum hummed somewhere upstairs. I ached to leave. But there was still half an hour before my bus came, and just one more demo to visit.
Would Adorno have hated jazz less if he’d had better speakers?
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In Terrace C was a demo assembled by Supreme Acoustic Systems, a Las Vegas–based distributor. The broad, rectangular room was ringed with black curtains, against which glowed, in half-light, the ruby-toned macassar bodies and high-sheen black conical drivers of a pair of five-foot-high, teardrop-shaped Odeon Audio Carnegie loudspeakers ($120,000). Between them stood an array of hulking aluminum-cased amplifiers, preamplifiers, and digital sources with the heft to power a small rocket launch, including two 120-watt Air Tight ATM-3211 monoblock tube amps ($99,975 per pair), an Audio Mirror WAVE tube digital-to-analog converter ($22,000), a Taiko Audio Extreme music server ($32,500), and more, interconnected by cables as thick as garden hoses. Reigning over it all was a thick-plinthed, matte-black BennyAudio Odyssey turntable ($45,000), its tonearm extended out over the edge, like a boy king wielding his scepter.
It was the most elaborate, massive, and expensive setup at the show, and, by a bewildering distance, the best sounding. As I took my seat, the Illinois Jacquet’s 1956 sextet rendition of “Harlem Nocturne” wasn’t simply playing but occurring, happening. Jimmy Jones’s piano glowed like the sun’s last gleam, taking the day with it. I fumbled for my phone to record, in however impoverished form, the high breeze of Roy Eldridge’s trumpet, its fleet rise and easing fall. If Little Jazz’s horn was the wind, Jacquet’s tenor was the tides: waxing and withdrawing, meeting the melody in a long, estuarine flow. The sound was total, final, at once ancient and immediate. I and a half dozen others sat there, listening on the moonlit shore.
I could have stayed for days, but had to leave after a few minutes. Later, on the bus ride home, my thoughts swirled. Was this real? An unattainable system, the most lavish at the show, almost fascistic in its size and cost, just happened to sound the best? Was I trading my meter-reader bill of sanity for a golden-ears dunce cap? As I watched the North Jersey suburbs flicker by, I gradually noticed the voice of a young woman in front of me, talking to a friend on the phone. Though she spoke softly, it was hard not to overhear. She was a nurse who worked long hours, dating a guy who worked a lot of late shifts; their schedules never seemed to line up. But that night she was going into the city to meet him. She sounded happy, a little nervous. The bus pulled onto an overpass and the Manhattan skyline came into view, its towers the same silvery blue as the sheet of clouds above. I was leaving the New York Audio Show to go back to New York. The bus drove on and the highway sloped down, until the city was lost amid dark clusters of trees. I closed my eyes. The world felt like a very quiet place.
“Sound is a material and therefore has value, like all materials in the environment,” the musician, writer, and audio engineer Damon Krukowski writes in his thoughtful recent book, Why Sound Matters. “However, no one seems to know what that value is. There is no commodity trading for sound.” Brother, I wish. No, they’re not loading barrels of sound onto megatankers bound for Shandong, but in the days after the audio show, it felt inescapable just how much the commodity form had triumphed over our listening, rendering human hearing itself a “material” of fetishism. (“Do you love the music, or do you love the gear?” goes a favorite intra-audiophile taunt.) The modal audiophile is, as Karl Marx said of Edmund Burke, “a vulgar bourgeois through and through.” There he sits, an atomized listener surrounded by his toys, alone in his room.
Not that he need always listen alone — the commodity loves company. Lately, a sleeker, more sociable version of hi-fi sound has become a potent marketing asset. Nightclubs that might once have touted their size, service, or DJ talent instead boast about their sound systems. Japan’s venerable jazz kissas — noirish boîtes stocked with vintage Blue Note LPs, spun on topflight analog equipment — have fallen to TikTok. “Listening bars” with names like Eavesdrop and Darling, all with custom systems and eerily similar blond-wood furnishings, have proliferated in New York and Los Angeles.
For a while, I lived up the street from such a place, which advertised itself as a combination menswear boutique, wine bar, and hi-fi listening lounge. The space had that powder-coated millennial look, with the requisite natural wood and terrazzo bartop. A pair of tall custom speakers were discreetly recessed into the wall behind the bar, flanked by a built-in Technics deck and mixing board. I never went inside, partly out of grouchy principle — I think places should be only one thing — but also because I could so clearly see myself enjoying it. Sipping my short-stem glass of biodynamic Gamay, caressing a rack of Japanese denim, overhearing date-night patter, while chill beats burble in the background — it all just seemed too pleasant. Too easy.
Yet among leisure-class hobbies, something about hi-fi remains apart, unassimilated. Where it touches other domains of luxury consumption, the results can only be absurd. In a recent TV commercial for Lexus’s new electric SUV, a handsome white man in loafers lounges in a wide, high-windowed living room. The space is almost empty, save for the Lexus itself, somehow parked in the corner, and, alone in the middle of the floor, a gleaming black and silver VPI Titan Direct turntable ($64,000), equipped with a VPI Shyla dual moving coil cartridge ($2,200). The stylus lowers, and the gossamer muted trumpet of Miles Davis’s “Blue in Green” begins playing. In a close-up, twilight kisses the vinyl grooves, which fade into a view of the SUV doing slow, graceful donuts on the beach. In another close-up, the man turns his gaze downward, as if in contemplation. “The greatest measure of an automobile,” a bourbon-rich baritone voice rumbles, “is how it makes you feel.” The loafered man doesn’t seem to feel much. After twenty seconds of listening, he gets up and leaves. I would too if, like him, I had spent five figures on a turntable only to dump it on the floor, and placed my speakers against a wall of sound-reflecting windows, too far apart and approximately fifty feet away from my listening chair, which is also facing the wrong way.
Sure, it’s just an ad, but the man’s pampered boredom is telling, and strangely cheering. In purer forms, audiophilia remains a cloutless, glamourless pastime — and this is its claim to redemption. The irony of high fidelity is that, in its ludicrous intricacy, its crushing expense, its prejudices and superstitions, it achieves something that needs no equipment at all: to surprise us with our own senses, to return us to this world by inventing another one, out of vibrations in air. The Cui types, the knob twirlers, the grizzled pros and tinkering amateurs who build their own speaker cabinets and solder their own circuit boards — they, for me, are the subculture’s soul. The rest of us, Cui’s customers, who only buy shit and listen to it, with at best a modular customization here or there, are merely its body. A fleshly vessel, necessary but spiritually fallen. Yet there are places — rare, precious places — where body and soul meet.
The Hot Club of New York occupies an oblong office suite on the third floor of a gray brick building on West 20th Street, between Fifth and Sixth Avenues. In the building’s basement is the Westside Rifle & Pistol Range, Manhattan’s only legal shooting gallery; on the ground floor is Wonderland, an upscale strip club; two doors down is a Pottery Barn.
Despite its profane downstairs neighbors, the Hot Club is a temple, a place of devotion and communion. Its secular religion is jazz and blues — as the music critic Albert Murray insisted, the two can hardly be divided — of the 78 rpm era, from the turn of the 20th century to the end of the 1950s. Lining the space’s western wall are shelf upon shelf of ten- and twelve-inch shellac discs, some ten thousand of them, in uniform tan sleeves. Here are New Orleans polyphony, Kansas City swing, stride pianists, slide guitarists, big bands, small combos, soloists, sidemen. Here is Bessie Smith, and Mamie, Trixie, and Clara, too. Here are issued singles, album sets, alternate takes, test pressings, radio transcriptions. And though it bests the holdings of any museum or library, this archive is no private sanctum, but public and living: Every Monday night the Hot Club’s proprietor, my friend Matthew Rivera, hosts an open listening session, where he selects 78s from the collection to play on the club’s sound system. Anyone in the audience can ask to hear other records or bring their own to spin.
Sonically, the Hot Club is less a place out of time than beyond it. To one side stands a weathered but sweet-keyed upright piano made, I’m told, in 1873 — before the birth of perhaps the earliest known jazz musician, cornet player Buddy Bolden. And other than an early-’80s Technics turntable, the sound rig at the club is, by current audiophile standards, neolithic. Signal from the turntable is sent to a tube-powered McIntosh preamplifier from 1960, equipped with knobs and switches to mitigate arcane playback problems — equalization curve, groove-wall selection, phase inversion — that subsequent technologies have solved several times over. From there the current travels to a ten-watt RCA amplifier, designed by the company’s resident genius, Harry Olson, in 1954, and likewise tube-powered, with a thick, slate-blue base decorated only by a sticker reading High Fidelity in streamline cursive. And then, by way of a wide-gauge Analysis Plus cable — if you know, you know — the amplified signal reaches its destiny. Angled outward on a small stage in the corner stands a single, stout RCA LC1 loudspeaker. Designed by Olson in 1947, the LC1 is wide, deep, and four feet tall, its hexagonal cabinet a matte, leathery brown, like the binding of a medieval Bible.
In the strictest, objective terms, the ones I set my personal hi-fi watch by, everything in the Hot Club system is wrong. Shellac records are marred by noise, they say, and can’t capture the tonal range of even a vinyl LP. Vacuum tubes discolor the signal with their harmonic artifacts. A hoary speaker like the LC1 can’t match the dynamic range or frequency response of current designs. To the right-thinking meter reader, these components can only sound muddled, careless, oversweet.
But then, Matthew doesn’t call himself an audiophile. While he cares deeply about sound and knows his gear inside out, the novelty-chasing upgrade fever of the hi-fi addict has never afflicted him; you couldn’t give him a high-res streamer. He only wants the records to sound — ineffably, time-defyingly — like themselves.
At the Hot Club, his liberation becomes mine — ours. For the audiophile bent not just on improving sound but mastering it, owning it, the human assembly that forms in the club each Monday night is a healing surrender. Here no one fights over specs; no one tallies the cost of anything; no one listens alone. Grayhairs and teenagers, regulars and tourists, Louis Armstrong biographers and people who couldn’t name a Louis Armstrong record — here we all are, on folding chairs and salvaged couches, listening together.
The LC1 commands the room, defines it. From its fifteen-inch coaxial woofer and tweeter issues a sound somehow fractally precise and inviolably whole. A trumpet high note arrives like a spotlight, a bright beam at dusk. Yet as it pierces the air, it remains in a close musical space with its peers — the piano painting the middle gradients, the drums rounding the depths, the string bass shadowing the corners. Higher and lower frequencies dip, leap, and reunite, never losing touch. Even the surface crackle of a ninety-year-old 78 disc feels right and true, a battered frame protecting the riches within. In engineering ingenuity, this is a speaker worthy of the lightning Parker runs and aching Ellington tone poems that grace it.
“One of the chief values of living with music,” Ralph Ellison wrote, is “its power to give us an orientation in time.” At the Hot Club, I’ve heard points in sonic time that felt realer to me than my own childhood. Sidney Bechet’s hovering, cloudless clarinet on “Blue Horizon”; the slow breath of Ben Webster’s tenor sax on “I Surrender Dear”; the falling leaves of Mary Lou Williams’s piano on “Capricorn”; Lil Hardin Armstrong’s sweet, downcast lilt on “Bluer than Blue”; Louis Armstrong’s last, glorying trumpet call on “That’s My Home.” Hearing these records, in this room, from this ancient amplifier, through this single, monumental speaker, I feel — to let Edmund Burke speak for himself this time — “dissolved, melted away by pleasure.” That’s how “beauty acts,” Burke said: “by relaxing the solids of the whole system.” You’re given up to it, to the rondure of the note, the stream of the tune. It holds you together, then lets you fall apart. For a few minutes, there’s nothing better than to feel that there’s nothing left of you.
Of course, you’re still there. But the bliss of listening is, for me, a transit between solitude and multitude. Hearing the best sound — whatever that might be — I feel surrounded, accompanied. The band isn’t in the room, but neither am I quite with the band. The music surges in and out of intimacy, in and out of scale, in overturning waves. Time doesn’t slow, but it stretches. Moments that felt true to size are magnified. The fingers reach the fretboard. The cymbal glitters over the bass line. The echo empties into the ballroom. We, on both sides of the record, move in a dream tempo, something long past and still to come.
For a half decade in the 1950s, the New Yorker took a semiregular interest in audiophilia, part of a wider media craze for hi-fi. As well as the (two-part!) Cook profile and a 1959 dispatch from the Rigo High Fidelity Music Show at the New York Coliseum, in 1954 the magazine ran a thuddingly rhymed lyric by a professor and poet named — get this — W. W. Watt, titled “I Have Been Faithful to Thee, High Fidelity, in My Fashion.” After its centenary triumphalism last year, let no one forget that America’s greatest middlebrow periodical once published lines like “I’m deaf to jargon electronic; / I’m A-M (Audio-Moronic).” ↩
At the same time, one of audiophilia’s open secrets — or repressed truths — is that, with the refinement of transistor topologies, flat response at the amplification stage is more and more, as they say in Silicon Valley, a “solved problem.” In the best modern amps, even the distortions that drive meter readers crazy remain far below the point of audibility. For $1,200 — not nothing, but small bills in hi-fi money — you could buy a pair of Chinese-made Topping B200 monoblocks whose measured performance is essentially perfect, and sleep well every night. But where’s the fun in that? ↩
To try to translate these sonic evanescences into words, gear reviewers have raided the descriptive storehouse of the senses. As well as knowing the hardware, a greenhorn audiophile must learn the lexicon of listening: Speakers that project expansive spatiality have a “wide soundstage”; the distinct location of sounds within the stereo field is called “imaging”; amps that can sustain a truly noiseless silence even at high volume — a rarer feat than you might think — boast a “black background.” ↩
