Confessions of an Audiophile

Usually when I’m making coffee in the morning I’ll turn on CNN for a few minutes. It’s encouraging when the first thing I see is a commercial, because I know there is no cataclysmic event unfolding in the world. When CNN covers such events, they run no commercials.

This morning was different. I flipped on the set and a 1932 Hal Roach short was coming on TCM. There were Zazu Pitts and Thelma Todd. And there I was, pouring hot water in the French Press, and laughing. What a joy.

When the short ended I walked in the living room and put on a CD of an oboe concerto by Gordon Jacob. I looked on the box to see when it was written. 1934. I turned and looked at a photo of my mother with her family, taken sometime in the 1930s.

It was in the 1930s that the business of electronic recording began to flourish. So many great recordings were made in that period, by people like Billie Holliday, The Boswell Sisters, Count Basie and Duke Ellington--and by many, many lesser-known artists. I’ve developed a special fondness for so much of this music.

Only recently have I realized that I’m an audiophile. I listen to a lot of music at home--it’s on most of the time, and I care about how it sounds. It’s also important to me to get the music out of the recordings that the creators put there. And there’s a lot of music on early recordings. I used to shun them because of limited dynamic range or frequency range, not to mention surface noise. But I’ve found, with a good playback system, the music clearly overcomes any inadequacy. It is joy, and it sounds real.

While I’m an audiophile, I am not a fanatic, which in unfortunately common among all varieties of -philes (oenophiles come to mind). It is easy to become a bit obsessive and self-righteous, which you’ll notice right away visiting any online -phile discussion group.

For me, it’s just about the music. And I so enjoy knowing that, for the last 80 years electronically (and before that mechanically) all these wonderful people have committed their talents and themselves to cylinders, discs and tape. It’s all here for us to hear.