Cloth-eared git

David Davis, at the Libertarian Alliance, appears to be a member of that highly exclusive group sometimes referred to as ‘hi-fi subjectivists’.

Once upon a time everyone was into hi-fi, and very good some of it was, too. Then (just as with cameras) people stopped worrying about quality, and started wanting automation, convenience, and features which covered up the fact that they didn’t really know what they were about.

Nowadays almost all audio equipment is bought as furniture, solely on its appearance (what in the 1970s we called the ‘Bang & Olufsen Effect’). There are a few die-hards, who have special shops (like most persecuted minorities).

I went into one of these once (to buy a stylus). They had some loudspeaker cables, one of which was two and a half inches in diameter and contained a core of foam rubber surrounded by a couple of dozen welding cables. For this they were asking (some years ago, now) £300 per linear mono metre.

It was explained to me that this cable had been deemed the most ‘musical’ by a particular reviewer.

Exactly how one was supposed to connect this stuff to the equipment at either end wasn’t made clear. Neither was the reason why one is justified in using it when the wiring inside the amplifier (which should, to correspond, consist of massive nickel-plated copper busbars an inch thick) is only ordinary wiring, and the wiring which carries the signal from the frame of a loudspeaker to the voice-coil is two pieces of braiding of a most insubstantial kind.

A friend of mine fell into the clutches of these people. He bought a very, very expensive CD player, on which to play the CDs the edges of which he’d painted with a special pen (to stop the light from leaking out). This CD player was mounted on the same little gold pyramid things as he’d used for his record player.

Then he bought a box full of digital-to-analogue converters, because someone in ‘Hi Fi News’ had said that the ones in his expensive CD player weren’t ‘musical’ enough. This box was supposed to be connected to the digital output of the CD player. He asked me how to do this. I told him he needed an optical cable, looked it up in the RS book, and got him a price for it.

He spluttered with indignation, and asked whether there wasn’t a cheaper way of doing it.

“Well, yes,” said I. “You could do it with an ordinary RCA cable, because there are sockets for both. Really, though, if you’re going to spend a couple of grand on the boxes, then fifteen quid for the cable’s hardly excessive.”

“But it’s round the back,” he said.

Now I would not allege that DD is quite in this category. He may really be one of those people gifted with hearing so precise that he can tell the difference between two new copies of the same record, and all that stuff.

All I can say, having dealt with audio gear for much of my professional life, is that once one exceeds broadcast specification then one has probably passed the point of diminishing returns, because the system will exceed in specification any signal that one can reasonably supply to it.

What my friend always said, when I remonstrated with him thus, was “Well, mate, it’s my money, they’re my ears, and it’s my system,” with which of course there is no argument at all.

I always hated valves. They were a bloody nightmare: expensive, slow, unreliable, short-lived and dangerous. I remember fondly the time when six units of massive and expensively hand-built chassis full of hot, glowing bottles sitting among their high-voltage supplies wasting power and waiting to die was replaced by a single unit of sleek black elegance, its front panel just sufficient for two suave meters and the silkscreening of the not immodest words ‘Vertical metal-oxide-semiconductor field-effect transistor’. When it was no longer an offence punishable with instant dismissal to unplug a loudspeaker without written permission. When one could leave the big steel barrow at home and settle for a mere hernia instead.

I also like big bargraph meters with PPM ballistics, rather than ex-equipment types, and to be brutally frank I can think of better uses for five grand, but that’s probably because I’m just another cloth-eared git.