Finally, It’s Christmas Day!
I first heard about this particular bit of kit I’m on about in this Sunday Thoughts piece at the last ever Munich High End show. I’m not going to tell you what it is because I’m currently halfway through reviewing it, and that’s not really what this is about, anyway. If you follow me on socials, you might well know what it is because I’ve been very excitable! What I will tell you folk that aren’t aware of what it is, is that I got chatting to the bloke who designed it in Munich and he went into far more technical detail than my tiny mind could properly comprehend. There were bits of his techy spiel I understood, bits I nodded at when I thought I should whilst not having the faintest idea what he was talking about, and bits where I thought, “oooh, that’s really clever.” More importantly, he talked about what he’d designed (and presumably built) with such a passion and enthusiasm that I came away thinking I absolutely had to hear one properly at some point. Sadly, it wasn’t ready to play out in public right then, and so my wait began. However, after that conversation, I knew I had to have one of these boxes of electronics. I put an order in based on that conversation alone!
I did get to hear it at another show, so I knew it was good. But then shows are shows and, as I think Sinéad O’Connor said, nothing compares to plugging a new bit of kit into your own system, sitting down and putting on a piece of music you know inside out – I’m paraphrasing, of course. Had I not been on the wagon, I reckon the occasion of sitting with this new bit of kit would have involved opening a bottle of something French, red, and probably rather more expensive than was sensible – it would be a kind of celebration! In the end there was coffee. But the important bit was that this would be my system, my room, my music and this thing that I’d first heard about well over a year earlier would be finally sitting on the rack. I would be a happy bunny! I’d played that series of events in my head over and over!
There is something about waiting for things that makes them better when they eventually arrive. I don’t get a great deal of pleasure from things that don’t involve at least some degree of anticipation. But then I really don’t enjoy delays either. There’s a very fine line for me between knowing something I really want is coming and enjoying the anticipation, and going beyond that point into frustration and wondering whether the bleeding thing is ever going to turn up. In this case, from first hearing about the product to actually having one sitting in our system was about a year and a quarter. That’s a long wait. But I got regular updates along the way, and that somehow kept the excitement simmering at just about the right level for me to feel like a kid waiting for Christmas. It was coming. Not yet, but soon. Well, soonish. And then eventually very soon. By the time it actually arrived, I was fit to burst.
I’ve no idea how people who buy genuinely bespoke things cope with this level of stress. Imagine ordering something that takes two years or more to make specifically for you. I’d be unbearable. I actually would burst! Though perhaps if you have the money to buy pretty much whatever you want whenever you want it, some of the excitement disappears. I genuinely don’t know. I’m not in that position, and it’s unlikely to trouble me any time soon short of a lottery win. I’d not be able to walk into a posh car showroom and put an order in for something that might take years to arrive – waiting lists are not my thing at all! Watches are another case in point. I want a Rolex Submariner, but I’m stuffed if I’m going to do the much-talked-about Authorised Dealer dance. Sod that for a game of soldiers. I’d rather not bother than wait! Perhaps this bit of kit was more important than another watch, because I was actually prepared to wait, however agonising that wait would eventually become.
But there is another side to all this waiting, particularly when you’re going to be reviewing the thing you’ve been waiting for. I’d built this product up in my head for more than a year. I’d spoken to its designer. I’d heard the thinking behind it. I’d actually heard it at shows…on the very speakers I’ve got in the system at home. I’d followed its progress and waited ever so patiently for the finished thing to arrive. By the time I finally plugged it into the system, I REALLY wanted it to be brilliant. And that’s not a sensible state of mind from which to start a review.
I sat down to listen and knew immediately that I was too excited to review this thing properly. Whatever I heard was going to have to fight its way through more than a year of anticipation and my own internal hype. Go into a listening session expecting great things, and there’s every chance you’ll hear great things, particularly if you really want to hear great things. But then there’s an opposite danger too. What if it hadn’t lived up to everything I’d built it into? What if it had been a bit shit? What would I have done then? I’d already committed to owning this product! Would something clearly very good have felt disappointing because I’d spent fifteen months expecting something extraordinary? It’s a bit like being a kid at Christmas who has spent months wanting a specific new bike – a Raleigh Grifter, for the record. Christmas morning arrives, and there’s a bike under the tree. If it’s exactly the bike you’ve been dreaming about, then it’s the greatest thing that has ever happened in the history of bicycles and Christmas. If it’s almost the bike you wanted but somehow not quite, then you’re disappointed despite having a perfectly good new bike sitting in front of you – a Raleigh Arena in Green, for the record.
So I didn’t review it. Well, not immediately, anyway. I plumbed it into the system and just let it play. Music has been played through it while I was doing other things. I’ve listened to it, obviously, but I didn’t critically listen… much. I played the DJ setup through it and spent time mixing with it in the chain. Again, I was listening, but deliberately trying not to listen too hard. I needed the novelty to wear off and the excitement to come down a couple (read: freaking loads) of notches before I could trust myself to sit in front of the system with the laptop and start making proper notes. I pored over the technical specs and talked to the designer…again!
And all this got me thinking about something that has absolutely nothing to do with whether this particular product is good, bad or somewhere in between. New HiFi day is brilliant. I see it all the time on the Facebook group I’m on. Grown men (and women) posting HNHD (Happy New HiFi Day) to tell folk they know on the internet about how excited they are.
We spend a lot of time talking about HiFi in very serious terms. We discuss measurements (well, not so much at PiG), materials, engineering, noise floors, jitter, impedance and a million other things. We research products for weeks. We read reviews, talk to dealers, ask people on Facebook groups, watch videos, and compare specifications. If we’re sensible (you should always be sensible, despite me not being sensible in this case), we go and listen before handing over our money. And all of that is part of the fun of this hobby. Because eventually the research stops. The decision has been made. There’s nothing left to compare, and no more reviews need to be read. The money has to be spent.
Now I just had to wait. And wait. And wait a bit longer. I’d got the courier’s dispatch notification. I’d checked the tracking more often than an obsessed nutjob. And then the courier didn’t arrive at the time they said they would…the bastard!. And I’d called the courier all the names under the sun because a simple “bastard” wasn’t enough. A van eventually pulls up outside, and suddenly there’s a big new box in the house. Then comes the unpacking. This is the first proper look at the thing I’d spent weeks staring at in photographs I’d taken at Munich a year or so back. Getting it onto the rack. Finding the right cables. Moving something else because the new thing is three centimetres higher than I thought it was and this needs a bit of room above it to allow for cooling. Turning everything on. Checking I haven’t done something stupid like leaving the amps turned off (again).
And then I finally sat down with that cup of coffee. And for those first few minutes, I was a child at Christmas again. Look, I’m nigh on sixty, increasingly curmudgeonly and from Yorkshire, where curmudgeonlyliness is hard-wired into our psyche, but a new bit of HiFi arriving can still have me behaving like a kid at Christmas. I love that. In fact, I think it’s really, really important. I’ve always said that the day I stop getting excited about music and HiFi is the day I pack it all in and go and find something else to do. There actually was a period in the late nineties when that excitement did disappear. I sold all my records, and for a year or two I didn’t really have a system beyond something that allowed me to just listen to tunes now and again. I’d lost whatever it was that had made me obsess about music and the things we use to reproduce it. Thankfully, it came back, and perhaps that’s why I notice these moments and still get excited now.
The excitement isn’t really about owning another object. It’s everything that leads up to it. The discovery of it coming out. Meeting the person who has created something and hearing why they made it. Reading about it. Hearing it somewhere else. Wondering what it might do in your system. Waiting. Anticipating. And eventually that box arriving at the door.
Most of us can’t buy every bit of HiFi we fancy the moment we see it. We save, research, deliberate and now and then talk ourselves out of things altogether. But perhaps that makes the things we eventually do buy mean a bit more. New HiFi Day is the culmination of all of that. Yes, there might be a ridiculous amount of expectation attached to it. Yes, occasionally the thing we’ve lusted after won’t quite live up to what we imagined it would be. And yes, if you happen to review HiFi for a living, you sometimes have to give yourself a few days to stop grinning like an idiot before you can sensibly write about it. For the record, I’ve barely stopped grinning since the object of desire I’m banging on about got unpacked from its box. Spoiler alert – it’s fecking awesome!
But I wouldn’t want to lose that feeling. After all these years, after all the systems, all the boxes, all the shows, and all the thousands upon thousands of hours listening to music, something new arriving can still make me ridiculously excited. And you know what? I wouldn’t change that for the world!
Stu
