The Luxury of Listening | Hi-Fi, Vinyl & Audiophile Culture

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0:43Today, when you start talking about extreme hi-fi, you could put together a system easily for two million pounds. Easily. I don't use streaming at all. I have 15 ,000 CDs, 12 ,000 LPs, 2 or 3 ,000 tapes, and I love the act of putting a disc in a player or on a turntable. The first music in the home was probably the player piano. So in a way, we've regressed, and we're trying to recover the intimacy. What you want to get out of that experience is to get as close to the musician and to the performance as possible. I really don't care about hi-fi, I care about music. Hello and welcome to The Luxury Dispatch, the podcast that reveals the refined and the rare.

1:27People, items and stories that make up the luxury industry. I'm Tom Chamberlain, and today we shall be stepping into a world where luxury is not measured by what one sees, feels or tastes, but by what one hears. It is the world of hi-fi. From valve amplifiers to beautifully engineered turntables, from the tactile pleasure of physical media to the almost obsessive pursuit of perfect sound, High Fidelity sits at the fascinating intersection of technology, design, and devotion. For many, it is not merely about equipment, but about the experience of listening itself, the way music fills a room and transforms it.

2:01To guide us in that world, I'm joined by Ken Kessler, one of the most respected voices in audio journalism and a lifelong champion of serious listening. Ken, welcome. Hello, Tom. It's so nice to see you here. Yes, a change from wristwatches and... Yeah, well, quite. That's always been our sort of conversation, but I've known in the background that there has been this aspect of you whereby, and I think a lot of people would corroborate this, you are the great authority on this particular topic. But before you be modest and object to this particular thing, what is hi-fi? What defines hi-fi? It's a crucial question, because when we start talking about high-end audio, which is the area we're looking at here, and the prices are suddenly six or seven figures, what is the difference between a million-dollar system or a million-pound system and something for 500 pounds that you can get at Curry's?

3:01And it's all down to one thing and one thing only. In order to enter the world of high-end audio, you have to not just love music, you have to worship it. The whole thing, the entire thing, unless you're just a gadget guy, is about getting music in the home that's virtually indistinguishable from reality. Right. Backing up a second, the term high fidelity means faithfulness to the music. That's what the fidelity is about. Yeah. and a beautifully expressive way, a slogan that came out 1950s, I think, a company called Quad, still in business, British firm, started in 1936. The owner and founder, Peter Walker, said, it's the closest approach to the original sound.

3:51And that's what he said hi-fi is. Anything else is coloration or distortion. Now you think about it, we are surrounded by music everywhere you go. Yeah. You can't escape it. It's like wallpaper in most cases. It's just in the background, like at the dentist's office, whatever. But if you're serious about music to the point where you would actually spend this kind of money, what you want to get out of that experience is to get as close to the musician and to the performance as possible. And that's the only goal of hi-fi. Anything else, one thing I want to get out of the way right from the get-go is unlike cars or watches or wine, there is no resale value in hi-fi.

4:39Okay. The only pieces where you can flip them would be vintage hi-fi equipment that the Japanese and Korean collectors go crazy over. Yep. Most of that stuff's been accounted for. hi-fi is not where you get rich quick it's not like a couple of years ago where people were flipping rolexes so the guys that are into uh into luxury dispatch for the kind of element as opposed to the love of the the product but more for the flipping of the product turn off right now you're not going to make money flipping hi-fi equipment so let's talk about the journey that was in the pursuit of creating that highest of fidelity to the music and obviously we should go back to before 1877, when Edison invented the phonograph.

5:26Yes, you had the cylinders. Yeah. And I mean, certainly in that era, Ray Fawn Williams, for example, my favorite composer, the great sort of English pastoralist, he was asked to redo the English hymnal. And the reason he was asked to do it was because, or that's actually, no, the reason he took it on because he was actually a devout atheist okay he was he didn't believe in god at all um but he took on this incredibly important job because he knew that music was an incredibly important thing and the only place where people could listen readily to music was church otherwise you'd have to go to concerts and and pay and pay and therefore and not everyone could afford and therefore he wanted to make sure that great music was available to people on a weekly basis.

6:19And that love of music, as you say, you know, it's all about the music, that love of it has stayed. And I guess is what is behind engineers and, you know, technologies trying to create all of this. But what was the kind of first moment, do you think, in the establishment of what we would call hi-fi today? I think with what we call high fidelity, it's about removing the sense of artifice because prior to what we call hi-fi, which is post-World War II. Okay. So the 50s. The 50s was the birth decade. Okay. And it was a perfect storm because it was also when stereo came out right and very briefly to get that out of the out of the way because the lp was 1948 was lp was 48 but it was commercially uh mid-50s right mono versus stereo mono is the source the sound is all in one place stereo gives you stage width so each instrument is located in space okay that's a that's reality although there are people that would argue when you go to a concert, you can't close your eyes and pinpoint the fifth violinist.

7:38Be that as it may, stereo broadened the soundstage. But more importantly, the sound quality became more realistic. Now, when you play an Edison Cylinder, and I've heard a couple, or you play a 78, you categorically can tell who is performing and what you're hearing. It might be Bessie Smith, it might be Caruso, So it could be Al Jolson. It could be Robert Johnson. You can categorically hear the music. You can hear it's a guitar. But the sound quality, it's meant like this. Yeah, I mean, Caruso, I remember people, you know, were the great tenors of all time. But actually, if you listen to a Caruso recording, you don't get that.

8:16It's not like, you know. But, and this is more the recording side rather than the hi-fi side. Prior to starting this conversation, Tom, we mentioned AI. Yes. And AI is going to take these vintage recordings and turn them into performances of the quality that you would get now. And I've actually heard it and commercially available. A label in the UK called Rollercoaster, which specializes in early rock and roll, took the very important album from Buddy Holly and the Crickets, which was only recorded in mono. and they managed to extract true stereo out of it. Now, older boomers and audiophiles will remember things called reprocess stereo, which was horrible.

9:05They turned the bass up on one side and the treble up on the other side to give you the impression of stereo. That's not what I'm talking about. I am talking about they actually can now isolate each instrument as if it had been recorded on a multi-track tape recorder. if ai becomes the omnipresent skill that we think it's going to be and there's enough interest and the record labels follow through that caruso can be extracted so that you would hear the full glory as if he had been recorded on modern equipment bessie smith robert johnson all of that stuff i don't know if that's going to happen i didn't ask roller coaster how much it cost to process this one LP.

9:50But they released it on CD, they released it on vinyl, and if you're a Buddy Holly fan, it is absolutely mind-blowing. So this kind of thing almost erases those decades before Hi-Fi. So, what you had before Hi-Fi was basically the 78. The cylinder didn't last for long. Which is sitting right next to you. Which is sitting right next to us. And that, by the way, is a really lovely example because what that has, that modern sound doesn't have is that crackle. Exactly. And which is part of the vinyl revival. Right. Because the crackle sort of gives that sort of sense of transportation. But from a hi-fi point of view, it's not ideal.

10:34Because if you're listening to music live, you don't get a crackle. And if high fidelity is all about making you feel like you're right next to the instrumentation and the performers, you need to kind of get rid of that. So when 78s came out, were there people out there who were like, this could be improved upon and we're going to keep trying? Or did it feel like a hugely revolutionary moment? Eventually, the materials that the 78s were pressed on improved. Can you explain what those materials were? It went from a lacquer, a shellac, and brittle materials towards the end. They were similar to the plastics in vinyl, so they didn't wear out as quickly.

11:12The worst thing about 78s were probably the steel needles, which destroyed the discs. But what happened, because they were restricted to the 78, and it was after the recording, which is, this is the irony, because a purist will say, you cannot improve on the recording. The recording is what you're supposed to have. So anything after that is artifice. But take, for example, amplification. You made this go louder by opening these doors. By the 1930s, with electronics available, especially valves, the amplifiers improved and the loudspeakers improved. And they made this, instead of a physical needle, you had an electronic or ceramic cartridge.

12:03So that by the end of the 78s history, it was sounding pretty damn good. Which was about... Well, the 78s ended for the, let's say, the Anglophone world in the 50s. They overlapped with the introduction of the LP. Right. But some 78s were made in other territories that were slower to catch up. And to explain, they're called 78s because they... They rotated 78 revolutions per minute. Yeah. The vinyl LP came out competing with the 7-inch single. rca brought out the single at 45 rpm but that seven inch single could only play one song per side which everyone realized was ludicrous except for charred hits so the lp was developed in 48 by i believe his name was goldmark and i think it was cbs and that allowed for example the yardstick then which would have been classical music whole suites to be played without an interruption prior to that on 78s, what you can fit on an LP might have been 10 78s, and you had to get up 10 times after part of a movement.

13:10And so the goal, it wasn't jazz, it wasn't rock, it wasn't folk, it wasn't country. It was the classical music that drove the invention of the LP. And this is all runs concurrently, Tom. The first audiophiles weren't rock and rollers, weren't kids, they weren't teenagers. The first audiophiles, in order to have the money to buy this gear, which was as expensive then as it is now relative to earnings. They used to joke about it and call Macintosh and Quad and those brands doctors, lawyers, and dentists Hi-Fi because those are the only people who could afford this stuff. Hi-Fi as we know it didn't explode until the 60s when the Japanese brought in amazing equipment at incredible prices and rock and roll entered the album era.

13:58Prior to the Beatles, kids were happy with singles. They would even get little record players and they would just have singles. I just had to do a list of records from 1956 for Hi-Fi News, which is the hi-fi magazine I write for. We are putting together systems and listings of recordings for the year. It's the 70th anniversary of the magazine. And I'm looking through the top 50 albums of 1956, and I would be surprised if I found eight that we would call rock and roll. And four of those, or three of those were Elvis. One was Fats Domino. The rest were soundtracks, classical, and jazz. Yeah. So let's put it this way.

14:45Hi-fi belonged to jazz classical and pop in the 50s. rock entered in the 60s and with it the number of brands it just it was and it literally not literally metaphorically it was an explosion and all of a sudden what would have been 20 or 30 brands were two or 300 brands yeah and how significant was portable hi-fi well portable it was portability people think it started with the walkman no it probably started with the transistor radio okay which uh well the earlier ones were a bit bulkier but by say 1960 or so sony and companies like that would bring out ones the size of a pack of cards simply because people wanted music everywhere yeah to go back to an earlier point you were making in the 1800s there were only two ways three ways you heard music church if you could afford a concert or if you were a musician and could make music at home yes that mustn't be forgotten because the first so the first music in the home was probably the player piano where you had a piano that you could use as a real separate piano but it also had a role in it which played specific performances.

16:12And among them, for example, you could actually have George Gershwin playing his compositions in your piano. And that is actually higher fidelity than the best hi-fi money we'll buy. Yeah, because the pianist is still being stuck. Exactly. And with those 78s, those early 78s, when you had Bessie Smith or Caruso singing into a microphone that cut the record, you don't get any closer than that. So in a way, we've regressed and we're trying to recover the intimacy. Basically, when you listen to an amazing hi-fi system, forget the bombast of a huge orchestra or a heavy metal band. If you were to get someone like just Joni Mitchell on an acoustic guitar so that you're not being distracted by sound effects or other instruments, and you close your eyes and there's a frisson, a moment where you think She's sitting right there playing to you.

17:12Height, scale, everything. That's what it's all about. And that's what you couldn't get before the war from the 78s. You could get level. The horns, horn loudspeakers made it so that you could fill a cinema. The earliest sound on movies was through horns that you could literally stand in. Yeah. The throat was huge. Power from amplifiers was expensive. A 5-watt amplifier then would have been considered huge. 15 watts in the 50s would have been considered... Just to sort of show sort of relative change now, what would people expect in terms of wattage? Well, one company just released an amplifier that's 2 ,000 watts.

17:56Okay, yeah, okay. Okay. The sweet spot, this is all arbitrary, but the sweet spot is about 75 watts per channel. We'll let you do pretty much anything. Most high-end systems start at 200 or 300 watts per channel. But there's a thing called sensitivity or efficiency, which is how much power do you need for this speaker to work? And these huge horns needed negligible amounts of power so that you could fill a cinema in Leicester Square with a five-watt amplifier, but a speaker that's gigantic. In fact, there was one shown at the Science Museum, and I think it was 22 foot long. And I have seen loudspeakers where I could stand in the opening.

18:42And naturally, there are Korean and Japanese audio enthusiasts who swear that they're the best sounding speakers ever made. But that's a tributary. That's a sidetrack. Were there emergence of brands at this point that we recognize today? Yes. There's at least a dozen brands still with us that predate World War II. Okay? Okay, Thorin's for turntables, Denon in Japan for cartridges and now amplifiers. They did a lot of work for the Japanese broadcasting. Quad in 1936, Tannoy, and Tannoy was known first, even though they're now for hi-fi, they were known for public address systems, why it's in the dictionary, Tannoy is a term for a PA system.

19:27Fisher, I believe, was 1940s. Macintosh just celebrated 75 years. There are hi-fi companies that will be celebrating centenaries. I mean, that's amazing. And certainly the work they were doing was celebrated as great technological advances in the same way that when films started in color and they were now in glorious technicolor, sound was praised too, wasn't it? Well, just as digital is the buzzword today, being squeezed out by AI, for the last 40 years it's been digital digital digital yes before that it would have been stereo or high fidelity would have been the selling terms i do also want to explore what made you the sort of self-confessed audio junkie yes okay my audiophile readers are not going to want to hear this but i really don't care about hi-fi i care about music now that sounds like a cliche It sounds like a truism.

20:25But I was obsessed with music. My earliest memory was Elvis Presley on TV in 1956. And I was just about to turn four. And the next day, my mother bought me a Mickey Mouse guitar, which I still can't play. My dad was a tape enthusiast because in those days, tape was expensive. But vinyl, two LPs would fit on one tape. and the tape cost as much as one LP. So if you were impoverished, you would tape your friend's LPs. And my father, it turns out, I didn't realize dad was a bootlegger. My dad was copying LPs and sending them the tapes to the UK. Brilliant. Because the UK was still under rationing.

21:13Yes, in the 50s, absolutely. And hi-fi was expensive and tape was expensive, but there were some very cheap tape recorders because these companies realized that unless you're landed gentry or a professional, a doctor, a dentist, normal people on normal wages, the bus driver, the postman, they can't afford hi-fi separates. Yeah, sorry to sort of crowbar in the podcast, but it was a luxury. It was a luxury. And then it became a mass commodity. But what we're looking at today is back at the luxury sector. Now, don't get me wrong. There's never been a stage in my experience, and I've been in hi-fi since 1968.

22:00And before that, my exposure to my dad's tape recording habit or project, and also friends whose dads had hi-fi. At no time has there been a point where there wasn't an extremely costly sector. 100%. And that is the case for so many things that whenever something is mass, people know that there's going to be a level where you can sort of elevate it and charge people a lot more money. Well, it's interesting because you and I both work in the field of watches and today's watch buyers... I pretend to. I'm fake it till you make it. I'm sort of... Well, but people don't realize, for example, that in the 40s, 50s, 60s, the only people who knew Patek Philippe were, I don't know what term to use, the upper classes, the wealthy, whatever you whatever term you want to use for people that have deep pockets.

22:54Yes. The average watch buyer wouldn't have even heard of Vacheron. Yes, 100%. Okay, and with cars, cars are more visible because of racing. So they knew Ferrari from sport, but you didn't see them. Now you can go into any street in London, and I doubt 10 minutes would go by without seeing a Lamborghini. In the 60s, the only people who knew Lamborghini were Playboys. which brings us back to hi-fi. You edit a magazine called The Rake and its precedents were Esquire, GQ, and Playboy. In the 60s or even in the 50s, if Playboy, Esquire, or GQ was running an article on The Bachelor pad, The Man About Town, they would always have a super hi-fi system in that.

23:47Of course, I mean, yeah, absolutely. and usually it was with a reel-to-reel tape deck because that was more evocative and a classic example of this bringing it closer to this century there was a film with robert redford and demi moore i think it was called indecent proposal yeah and it was the last fabulous yeah and it was the last time i'd seen a killer high a killer hi-fi in a movie but it was there to show that this guy that Robert Redford was playing, it was an over-the-top hi-fi. Yeah. In an episode of Friends, Joey buys a pair of Martin Logan loudspeakers. Martin Logan loudspeakers are true high-end audio.

24:28They're not known to the guys that go into Comet and Curry's and buy Sony, for example. So you get these little moments where a piece of hi-fi will turn up in a movie or a TV show to indicate that this guy, unfortunately it is male-oriented, that this individual has money and likes hi-fi or likes gadgets, whichever point they're trying to make. And when I got into hi-fi in say 68, I spent as a teenager, and it took me two years to pay it off. I spent$700 then. $700 in 1968, I did the calculation, is roughly 6 ,000 bucks today. Call it 5 ,200 quid. For a 16-year-old to spend that kind of money, and I didn't come from money.

25:25My dad worked in the post office. My mom was a cashier. I had to pay that off on the never-never but I was so desperate to have a decent hi-fi system because I heard them over at my friends' houses because their dads had hi-fi and this is something this is a little anecdote for you most people don't realize that hi-fi used to be sold in furniture stores well this was a hundred percent my question was is that is hi-fi a bona fide part of interior design? Well, this is the funny thing because there have always been hi-fi stores. And I know from my books, pictures of hi-fi stores in the fifties with brands that we still know.

26:09Okay. And all they sold was hi-fi. And if you see a film called that thing you do with a Tom Hanks, it's about a rock band in the very, very nice film about an imaginary rock band in the sixties. One of the characters works in an electronics store and there's the radios and the hi-fi next to the washing machines. Two of my friends, they owned rival, their fathers owned rival furniture stores. And in these furniture stores, they would have the big consoles. Now, most consoles weren't hi-fi because you had the speakers were stuck together and they weren't separated. They had cheap components and you were paying for the furniture.

26:49But there was a segment that made consoles, turntable, tuner, amplifiers, with separate loudspeakers that were fine furniture as well. Now, at that time, what I spent,$700, that was only just over entry level. You could go into what was then Radio Shack. I could have probably spent a bit less and maybe even had something better. But I was a novice. I was at the mercy of the salesman. And I got into it so heavily that when I got to university, I went to work in a hi-fi store to help finance the funds. And what happened was a series of upgrades. And by the time I became a reviewer, I had become obsessed with vintage hi-fi.

27:42So I actually possessed, and which it's now been dispersed to various people, I actually possessed something of a museum because I was obsessed with valve hi-fi versus transistor solid state. Explain those. Valves were the active devices in electronics, vacuum tubes to the two of the Americans, but they were hot and large and fragile. Eventually, what was developed was the transistor, which is called solid state, which completely removed heat, size, and wastage of electricity. The trouble is, the sound changed. Okay. And there's a valve sound and a solid state sound. This, again, is one of the ironies or contradictions in hi-fi, because if there was such a thing as a perfect amplifier, two perfect amplifiers, they would sound identical.

28:38There would be no difference. Yeah. So you have side by side a phenomenal valve amplifier and its technical equivalent in solid state, and you can hear the difference. There was an experiment which I gladly sat through. One of my mentors is the late Tim DePerovicini. Great name. And he is of that Italian family that goes back centuries. First Westerner to be hired by a Japanese hi-fi company. He was that good. Worked on all the tape decks at Abbey Road, did Paul McCartney's machine, Dave Gilmore's machine. And I became friends with Tim. And Tim was not biased one way or the other. He worked with valves, but he could also work with solid state.

29:27And he made two identical amplifiers, save for one being valve and one being solid state. Okay. And we listened to the two of them, and they sounded different. But as Tim and another fellow named Bob Carver, who also made amplifiers, pointed out, any good designer or engineer can tune the hi-fi equipment to sound a certain way. Now, jumping ahead to other areas we're going to cover, one of the fundamental problems with hi-fi and why it's not as well known as the other topics you cover is because most people don't know what it is you you can say cigar to a non-smoker and they know what it is you can say wine to a teetotaler they know what it is you don't have to explain what a car is but hi-fi has eluded people because it has one problem that no other item in the luxury dispatch milieu suffers.

30:29Every single thing that you talk about, Tom, in this series, you make one purchase. When you buy a Porsche, it comes with the tires. When you buy that suit, it comes with the buttons. When you buy a cooker, there's nothing to add to it. Hi-Fi, because of the nature of it, the best systems do not come from one brand. Now, there are plenty of brands that think they can make a complete system. Right. But they'll have excellent speakers, but a lousy amplifier. Or a great amplifier, but a lousy speaker. I cannot name one brand since the days of Quad in the 50s and 60s, and then it would have only been with FM radio, where there was a system from one brand that was completely satisfactory.

31:17So what happens is you have three elements in any sound system. The source, which can be tape, streaming, CD, cassette, vinyl. That's the source. They have to feed into the amplifier, which controls the signals and provides the power, and then the loudspeaker. Every system, your iPhone has that. A source, an amplification, and your earbuds of the speakers. What's happened because of, I don't know if it's deliberate or if the obfuscation is supposed to make things better for the salesperson. They've made it a minefield. Which turntable works with which speakers? Which amplifier will drive which speaker?

32:08Which cable? every single component has come under such scrutiny that it's complicated matters to the point where people forget that most components work with each other. Not necessarily well, not of the best, but you have to have a really grave mismatch. For example, a tiny, tiny amplifier with a loudspeaker that begs for power. And it'll barely drive it, and ultimately it'll destroy the speaker because the amplifier will distort. The reverse of that, huge amplifier, speakers that can't handle the power, crank it up and you've blown the loudspeakers. Those things are easily dealt with because they're factual.