“I thought how unpleasant it is to be locked out; and I thought how it is worse, perhaps, to be locked in.” Virginia Woolf
The door metaphor works nicely for what a hifi is supposed to do—open up a world of music for us to ingest and enjoy.
Listening to music brings with it, by necessity, some thing to play it through, whether that be something we already own and use for other stuff like a phone or TV or in the case of people like us, specialized gear whose sole purpose is the reproduction of recorded music. The deeper we dive into the pastime of exploring hifi gear, the more connected we become to other people on the same journey—the people who make it, the people who sell it, and even the people who write or make videos about it. A community if you will of people who share at least the common goal of appreciating music reproduction that’s more intentional than just another app to tap when we’re cooking, cleaning, or conversing. Background music whereas we move music into the foreground.
At least that holds for me and many of the people I know—friends, colleagues, and industry folk—who listen to music as an important part of the day and/or night as an activity unto itself—an endless exploration of our ever-growing boundless and beautiful living music history.
On the other hand, audiophilia can slam shut our ability to enjoy new music by focusing our time, energy, and attention on what the hifi is doing as opposed to what the music is doing. Instead of a doorway to endless wonder, exploring hifi can whittle down our interests to favorite tracks and classic albums that we use to hear how different gear changes the character of sound. ‘Test tracks’ for examining sound qualities which is all well and good for shopping and comparing but once that bit is done, I think it’s best to open back up and let in the new.
The opening image is the cover of “NOT SEEN and/or LESS SEEN of/by MARCEL DUCHAMP / RROSE SELAVY” the exhibition catalog designed by Duchamp for a show of his work at Cordier & Ekstrom Gallery in NYC in 1965. The photo shows a door of Duchamp’s design that sits between two adjacent doorways so that when one doorway is open the other is closed. He was, among other things, a wise guy. And I picked this image because it strikes me as a nice way to illustrate, in a cautionary manner, the delicate balance that exists in hifi life between a focus on music and a focus on gear.
The simple trick, or so it seems to me when it comes to our hifi hobby, is to continue to explore music to a greater degree than the gear we use to play it.