Vinyl Wankers – 3 / Audiophiles

Can you hear me wanking on my stereo?

On this third Vinyl Wankers installment, we’ll have a look at the species of audiophile snobs. These are people who spend a ridiculous amount on high-end audio equipment and original pressings because they cannot enjoy music otherwise, people who likely clean their records with the four-times-distilled sperm of the musk ox AND LET YOU KNOW ABOUT IT.

I would actually love to make this a very short column, starting and ending it with one statement:

Elvis Presley and Iggy Pop are the greatest musicians this planet have ever seen, yet I have a very hard time imagining them obsessing over audiophile questions. I try to picture a young Elvis holding his ears while being rolled up in a fetal position because he is so tortured by the sound of the cheap radio that broadcasts his first musical influences. Or running away from the Mississippi shores because those damned blues-men used no proper microphone or audio system at all. And the sound at that venue! Horrible- just fucking nature and sky.
I try to imagine that The Stooges ‘No Fun’ is a song about the misery of listening to records that are not original mono pressings. Iggy must be Stockholm-syndromed by the city of Detroit when he states that the city’s industrial landscape was his first musical influence, making him drum on tin barrels and other waste that he found on the streets and implemented that sound into his music with The Stooges.

So let’s start with the first objection you could make: „Iggy and Elvis for sure enjoyed their music on expensive audiophile set-ups when they got rich and replaced all their old, cracked, and stolen records with original-master-mofo-audiophile-super-hifi deluxe pressings!“ That’s a good objection hinting at the social envy that might drive me, but I’m actually not sure at all if it is true. Elvis rather focused on Cadillacs when faced with the problem where to stuff his money if not up his butt, and it was a good decision compared to yours. Cars have no souls and no collective conciousness is attached to them, they do not pretend to be more than a nicely designed toy.

Let’s make that clear right from the beginning: you listening to first pressings or other vinyl excessess on a sinfully expensive set-up complete with diamond needles and chinchilla-tail-cables rolled upon virgin’s thighs doesn’t make you a better music fan or connaisseur. It doesn’t get you closer to the artists that you like to digest by approximately 200$ per song, but makes you drift away from them. It mainly means that you are kinda wealthy, like to show off, and focus on every aspect of music but its spirit and power. It means that you actually don’t listen to music, but like to listen to your hi-fi gear.

Your audiophileness often hints at where you are coming from: not from live performances in sweaty clubs or a musical scene you dived into naturally because you just had to in order to get your next musical fixes, on the hunt for subcultural satisfaction, but from an overly nerdy existence that now draws you into the depths of the Steve Hoffman forum. You don’t really understand live music, why bother with it or fresh, exciting live bands when you can listen to your original master recordings of Deep Purple?

I hate the smug look on your face and the undertones of superiority in your words:

„Which system do you use?… Oh. That is not too bad for that cheap price.“ (you prefer to comment on supposedly inferior systems)

or

„Have you heard the crack 2 minutes into track 5? So perfect“ (Oh my God)

or

„Great record… Is this an original? I have the original, it sounds so amazing“, which translates into: ‘My version sounds better than yours. You’re actually not even listening to this record, because only the original sounds good. I feel sorry for you.’

You bully, you. Exactly people like you are the intimidating horror for music-loving, but poor kids like Elvis was one. And not just for them- you damned snob and social climber poison the entire air down the ladder. I bet you use following questions quite often on your kids’ little friends: „What does your father work?“ „Where do you come from?“ „Where do you spend your holidays… oh, you never flew?“ etc. You like to let them feel their status and inferiority, don’t you?

One thing I love about you though: the upset look on your face when you see all the originals that I own, but not because I hunt them down on discogs and are replacing my CD’s with vinyl records, but because I bought them when they came out or just by plain coincedence on flea-markets back when nobody cared for vinyl. It was like that with all of my friends that were obsessed and lived for music, spending their weekends at clubs and making a scene, buying or stealing records all the time. But we dirty, unsophisticated rock’n’roll kids do not deserve these records in your opinion, and just because we don’t listen to them alone sitting on our Eames chairs with 5000$ headphones on, and a sad tumbler in our hands from that you sip like a faggot because it’s filled with ridiculously expensive Japanese whiskey that you’re almost scared to drink.

I totally enjoy the confused look on your face when you ask me if my record is an original and my answer is ‘I don’t know’, because I have to look that up first usually. I never thought about these things, you know. I put the record on and enjoyed the music. I can even enjoy music when I hear it through my cellphone speakers (every morning in the shower),and a song can still paralyze me and make me stop what I’m doing in awe when heard through a 10€ speaker.

Now that leads us to the one point, that is really not unimportant in your and my argument: the sound. While I certainly agree that a record will sound better on a decent stereo with good speakers and headphones than through cellphone speakers, I wanna ask you a general question: are you sure? Are you actually sure that all these first pressings and expensive tube amps and other toys do actually sound better? Sound and music perception is imaginary and subjective, entirely formed in our brains and not measurable. But you’ll buy your 2000€ power chord and will hear the difference, although true sound technicians will tell you it’s simply overprized- you’ll hear a difference because you want to. It’s simple like that.

And: do you actually live in a soundproof music-studio where walls and ceiling are covered with sound-absorbing materials? How do you even measure the quality and purity of sound in your room with shelving unit after shelving unit of vinyl records sitting along the walls, and other things stuffed in that room? I also don’t know how your floor made of thin ice effects the sound.

Oh. Also,whenever I hear audiophile, I associate it with ‘pedophile’ and ‘necrophile’. Good company, mate.

by Saliha Enzenauer

(Read all Vinyl Wankers episodes here)