A DJ, a 60th Birthday Party, a Future TV Star, and a Bit of Audiophile Chat
Lin and I were at my cousin Roger’s (pictured) 60th birthday bash in Sheffield last night, and a couple of things happened that I thought were worth mentioning. Neither was earth-shattering, and I don’t think either will bring about world peace or persuade people to stop posting angry comments on Facebook (though you never know on that particular platform). Still, both got me thinking about HiFi, music and the strange little world we audiophiles inhabit.
The first involved a bit of a weird coincidence. On Saturday afternoon, we’d been told by our friend Dean that there was an event called 7×7 taking place at one of the older and more traditional pubs that Sheffield boasts. To clarify, Dean is a well-known audiophile on the British HiFi scene, but he is also a well-known DJ in the city. The 7×7 event has apparently been running for the last twenty years or so, and the concept is brilliantly simple. Seven DJs turn up, and each plays seven of their favourite seven-inch singles. That’s it. There are no three-hour sets, no elaborate visuals, no fireworks, and presumably no one throwing cakes into the audience. It’s just people who love music sharing a handful of records that mean something to them. I think it’s a brilliant idea and one that could easily be replicated around the world. In fact, had Dean not got a little premature and arrived a week early, it would have been a wonderful way to spend a Saturday afternoon. For anyone interested, it’s actually happening next week, on the 23rd, at the Blake Hotel in Sheffield.
Despite the lack of DJs and seven-inch singles, Dean turned up anyway, and we had a really nice chat. We usually only see him while we’re working at HiFi shows in the UK, so it was lovely to sit in a proper pub and while away an hour or so without having to shout over an enormous and expensive system or discuss whether the room had an annoying bass node.
Anyway, while we were chatting, a curly-haired chap and his equally curly-haired hound came and sat in the taproom. I turned to Linette and said, “I’m sure that’s Carl from Wilson Benesch.” Carl is a chap we first met on the U-Bahn during both his and our first ever visit to the Munich High End show. We’ve seen him at loads of shows since, but it seemed so unlikely that he would happen to be sitting in the same Sheffield pub that we allowed the thought to slip away. He sat at a table partly obscured from ours and quietly enjoyed his pint. As he was leaving and walking through the doorway into the next room, I casually, though fairly loudly, said, “Hi, Carl.” He turned around, and it was indeed the man himself. We had a bit of a natter before he left, and that was that. What a wonderful and completely unexpected coincidence.
Eventually, Lin and I headed off to the main event, which was Roger’s 60th birthday party at the University Arms in Sheffield. Roger and his partner, Andy, had booked out the whole pub, put on an open bar and provided the inspired combination of chip butties and mushy peas by way of nourishment. There were also numerous pints of beer consumed, though not by me. The University Arms has a great selection of hand-pulled beers, but being on the wagon, I stuck to Green Mountain, a lovely alcohol-free beer brewed specifically to contain no booze, and Guinness 0.0. I had a cracking night, remembered all of it, and woke up this morning without feeling as though someone had climbed into my skull and redecorated it using a lump hammer. There is definitely something to be said for this sobriety lark.
The last time we’d seen many of the people in the room was exactly ten years ago at Roger’s 50th birthday bash, and a great time was had by all. Linette has spent part of this morning trying to scrub a “Roger’s 60th” temporary tattoo from her upper arm, but that is another story entirely. Donna, if you are reading this, you are a star and deserve your own television show. I shall leave that there and move swiftly on. As well as people we’d met before, there were a few guests we’d never encountered, and the usual “What do you do?” and “Where are you from?” conversations ensued. One chap, whose name I’m afraid I have completely forgotten because I’m useless without the lanyards and name badges you get at HiFi shows, told me that he builds data centres for AI. When he found out what Lin and I do, he said that he’d had a pretty “high-end system” back in the day, but had lost it when his family circumstances changed. His system had consisted of a Rega Planar 3 turntable, a Marantz amplifier, Mordaunt-Short loudspeakers and a Nakamichi something or other. I don’t think he said it was a Dragon.
What interested me was his description of that system as high-end. Within the audiophile world, I suspect many people would consider it mid-tier, while others might even call it entry-level. And yet, back in the 1980s, I would have committed minor atrocities to have owned that particular collection of equipment. That difference in perspective is important. To this chap, who was very much a music lover rather than an obsessive audiophile, that system represented serious HiFi. It was something special, something he remembered with a degree of glee and something clearly better than the ordinary music centres most people owned at the time.
He listened to bands including Iron Maiden and Magnum, and his system allowed him to connect more deeply with the music he loved. That was its sole purpose. He probably didn’t spend his evenings worrying about the noise floor of the phono stage in his amp, the metallurgy of his loudspeaker terminals or whether changing the feet beneath his amplifier might produce a slightly more holographic representation of the drummer’s left elbow action. We audiophiles can kind of lose sight of that reality. Most people don’t want a system because they aspire to owning ever more expensive boxes. They want something that allows them to enjoy their music. They want to hear the guitar properly, feel the kick drum, turn up the volume and experience some of the excitement they felt when they first heard the record. Some of them may well get the bug and go on to develop full-blown audiophilia. It is an incurable, debilitating and occasionally liberating disease that afflicts a good number of us, and I’ve been managing the symptoms (to a greater or lesser degree) for more than forty years. Others, however, will buy a decent system, enjoy it for years and never feel the slightest urge to replace the power supply or start comparing Ethernet switches.
Neither approach is more legitimate than the other. The problem comes when the HiFi world behaves as though a perfectly good system is merely the first rung on an endless ladder and that anyone who isn’t constantly climbing that ladder isn’t taking music seriously enough.
The other thing that struck me during this conversation was that there are still plenty of “normal” people who are perfectly willing to talk about music and HiFi. I use the word normal with my tongue firmly in my cheek because it suggests that those of us involved in HiFi are somehow abnormal. Having spent decades around audiophiles, I’m not entirely convinced that suggestion is wrong. Perhaps the problem isn’t that people outside the hobby have no interest in better sound. Perhaps we simply don’t always talk to them in a way that feels relevant to their lives. We talk about products before we talk about music, and we use measurements, technical terminology and flowery descriptions that can make a straightforward activity sound like a combination of advanced physics and medieval alchemy. At HiFi PiG, we’ve always tried to use straightforward language in our articles and reviews. We have deliberately eschewed overtly technical terminology in favour of language that is easier to digest. We want people to understand what a product does, how it sounds and whether it might suit them without requiring an engineering qualification and a glossary.
Could we go further? I think we probably could. We could talk more about complete systems at realistic prices, explain basic terminology without assuming prior knowledge and show people that a good HiFi system doesn’t need to dominate the room or cost more than their car. More importantly, we could stop presenting affordable HiFi purely as a temporary staging post on the way to something “proper”. Perhaps the best way to engage people is simply to begin with the music. Ask them what they listen to, how they listen and what they feel might be missing. If someone says that their Planar 3, Marantz amplifier and Mordaunt-Short speakers constituted a high-end system, there is no need to correct them – for the record, I didn’t. In their world, and in terms of the pleasure that system gave them, it absolutely was high-end…and who are we to argue?.
That same thinking could apply to dealers, manufacturers and HiFi shows. Let people listen without immediately giving them a lecture – lectures always did my head in when I was a student, and my opinion hasn’t changed much over the years. Demonstrate systems with music they recognise as well as the usual audiophile recordings. Explain what they are hearing in plain English, and don’t make them feel foolish if they don’t know what a DAC is or why anyone would need a separate phono stage.
We also need to be honest about price. A £1,000 system is a significant purchase for most households, and describing it as “budget” can sound faintly ridiculous outside our bubble. A £5,000 system is extraordinarily expensive to most people, even if it happens to be sharing a show corridor with one costing half a million pounds.
Is it worth trying to engage people beyond the already infected audiophile population? I think it absolutely is. Not because everyone needs to become an audiophile, and not because the industry should regard the entire population as potential customers waiting to be infected, but because music is important and hearing it reproduced well can genuinely add something to people’s lives.
More people buying sensibly priced systems supports manufacturers, dealers, record shops, music venues, artists and the wider business surrounding music. It also brings fresh ideas and different perspectives into a hobby that can occasionally appear to be a group of middle-aged (alright, mostly beyond the middle bit) men discussing the same twenty records in increasingly expensive rooms.
The enthusiasm is definitely there. The chap at Roger’s party proved that, as did the fact that a simple conversation about what Lin and I do quickly became a warm discussion about a system he’d owned years ago and the music he played on it. His interest hadn’t disappeared; life had simply moved on, and HiFi had stopped being part of it.
Perhaps our job isn’t to drag people into the audiophile world. Perhaps it is to make the door visible, hold it open and show them that there is something enjoyable on the other side. If they choose to come in and eventually find themselves comparing cables at two in the morning, that is their own lookout.
Anyway, I ought to get ready before Lin returns from breakfast and we head off to meet Roger and Andy for a lovely Sunday lunch at Church: Temple of Fun, an establishment owned by Oliver Sykes, the frontman of Bring Me The Horizon. I have never actually heard of him or the band, which has made me realise that I may be completely out of touch with today’s wider music scene.
That, however, is a subject for another Sunday Thoughts.
Stu
