Change The Bloody Record!

Spend any time staggering around any audio show and you’ll notice something both odd and strangely familiar. You open one hotel door, fight through the folk stood in the doorway, slip into a seat, and before you’ve even settled in you hear… Keith Don’t Go. Move along a couple of rooms, same thing: Keith Don’t Go. By the end of the afternoon, you feel like Nils Lofgren himself is following you around the corridors with his guitar. For legal reasons, I must stress that I’m not suggesting that Nils is in any way a stalker.

Now, don’t get me wrong, it’s a cracking tune. Loads of sparkle, a bit of drama, plenty of finger-picking to show off the resolution of a good system – and it’s a good story!  The first time you hear it, you nod appreciatively – no, I genuinely do. By the fifth time, you start to smirk. By the seventh, you’re silently pleading for mercy. And then, just when you think you’ve escaped, someone drops Take Effing Five. 

The thing is, there’s a reason these audiophile classics crop up everywhere. Exhibitors spend thousands dragging half their product catalogue into a hotel room. They want to show their kit at its absolute best. Play a recording that’s tried and tested. Something we all know, beautifully engineered, no nasty surprises. No one’s going to accuse Take Five or Keef of being poorly recorded. Familiar tracks give visitors a reference point, a way to judge whether the system is doing its job. It’s a kind of insurance policy on the part of the exhibitors.

But here’s the thing: safe choices are also predictable choices. And predictability is rarely magical. If HiFi is about passion, about discovery, about those hairs standing up on the back of your arm “‘kinell, listen to that!” moments, then feeding us the same short menu of songs at every show feels a bit like going to a Michelin-starred restaurant and being offered beans on toast. 

The obvious solution, you’d think, is to let punters bring their own music. After all, if you’re about to spend a year’s salary on a system, wouldn’t you want to hear it with the music you actually love? For some, that might be Mahler, for others it’s Black Sabbath, Aphex Twin, Crass, or Beyoncé. 

Of course, it’s not quite that simple. Time is short at shows. If everyone queued up with their USB sticks and filthy LPs the whole day would grind to a halt. And then there’s the fear factor: no one wants to see their precious cartridge land in the groove of a record that looks like it’s been used to take the sand off sandpaper. And let’s be honest: no exhibitor wants to be remembered as “the room that blasted fifteen minutes of Crass and cleared the floor.” However, playing Crass has worked for Wim at Kii! 

Still, here’s a thought. If exhibitors don’t want to hand over the reins completely, could they at least broaden the playlist? A little less Keith Don’t Go, a little more of the music that people are actually living with today. That doesn’t mean abandoning the classics, but it does mean leaving some room for the unexpected. Imagine stepping into a room and instead of the usual suspects, you’re hit with a proper drum and bass drop, or Kendrick Lamar yaddering through the speakers, or even some gloriously sugary K-pop or Kylie. Suddenly, the kit isn’t just showing you how lovely it makes a hi-hat sound; it’s making you want to dance.

Live music (the real thing we’re all chasing) is messy, unpredictable, sometimes rough around the edges. And that’s where the magic often lies. Yet at shows, we too often get a sanitised version of music, chosen to flatter the gear rather than challenge or spark an interest. Wouldn’t it be refreshing to hear a lo-fi indie track, an old bootleg, or even something wildly outside the usual audiophile fodder? A great system should make all music enjoyable, not just the handful of records engineered to impress.

So yes, I’ll still smile when I hear Keith Don’t Go (and I  love it when I play it at home that one time). I’ll even tap along to Take Five at a push. But I also live in hope that, somewhere behind those blackout curtains and next to those wardrobe-sized speakers, an exhibitor will hit play on something completely unexpected. Maybe it’ll be Beyoncé. Maybe Aphex Twin. Maybe a track I’ve never even heard of.  

Some exhibitors, though, are clearly moving with the times and embracing the new. It’s not all Keith Don’t Go and Take Five anymore. These days there’s a fair bit of Stronger by Ghost Rider (fast becoming the new Keef), and that tune about someone being scared by birds, which I probably hear just as often, if not more, than the old staples. So yes, some exhibitors are embracing newer music while others stick doggedly to the tried and tested. Perhaps those clinging to the classics are simply playing to their known demographic—and who can really blame them? After all, they know exactly who’s sitting in those chairs.

However, that moment of surprise, the grin, the goosebumps, the sudden “I get it!” – that’s what HiFi should be about. The gear matters, of course it does. But it’s the music that opens the door to this wonderful world of audio, and without that, we’re just listening to the same tune on repeat.

Oh, and classical does nowt for me because I’m an uncultured lout!

Stuart Smith

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