Memories of Growing Up with an Audiophile

There’s a passage in Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain where its anti-hero, Hans Castorp hears a gramophone for the first time. He experiences it as a form of spectral visitation, the performances seemed so real. Knowing that Mann was referring to actual recordings, I was curious to hear what Castorp would’ve heard in the days before WWI. Amazingly, these recordings are all available on YouTube. Here’s Enrico Caruso and Nellie Melba singing from Puccini’s La Boheme in 1907. In the novel, Castorp, taken by the gramophone, arranges things so that he alone controls its use.

My father was an audiophile. These were people alive for the advent of stereo recording in the early-1950s, the move from 78 rpm to 33 1/3 rpm records, the explosion of both recording techniques as well as the equipment to reproduce the records. It was also when record companies were willing to experiment to meet the huge demand for “hi-fidelity” recordings. My father put a lot of time, thought and money into the creation of “the system,” the name he gave to the components he’d assembled. Choosing the components was an art, not a simple purchase.

My mother skeptically referred to the phenomenon as “men dressed in tweed jackets with suede elbow patches, drinking scotch and smoking pipes while discussing the merits of amplifiers.” She may have said this because his system took up two rooms in the house. One room held the “rack,” a six-foot-tall metal shelving unit, with the amplifiers on top, on the next shelf the pre-amplifier and the tuner (the radio), on the middle shelf came the “turntable” and on the lower shelves were other technical devices and test equipment. In the room with the rack was also his immense record collection. In the other room were the loudspeakers. My father began in the 1950s with the best cone-type speakers one could buy until he finally bought double pairs of KLH-9s in the 1970s.

My mother’s acerbic comment can be explained because my father took things a bit far. No one was allowed to touch the system or the records, their status approached the sacred. He had special covers made so dust wouldn’t invade the speakers, the turntable or other equipment. Playing the system had a ritual. First came Removing the Covers on the equipment, then the Selection of the Disc, next The Positioning of the Speakers. This was when the listener was called into service, like the responsorial sections in the Mass. My ears were summoned to hear some minute variation in speaker placement or some other tweaking of “the system”. Most of the time I couldn’t tell one position from another and would sit there feeling perplexed, searching desperately to hear what it was he described.

Audiophiles had a specialized vocabulary, the “tone arm” (which you put over the record), the “cartridge” (which held the needle), the “dust bug,” a product used to clean the record as it played and many other terms. He’d never touch the surface of the disc, rather holding by the sides so that no oils would get on the disc and cause dust to stick with the resulting pops, ticks or scratches.

Though my father was particularly interested in the recordings of the conductor Arturo Toscanini, he had interest in any interesting recording. Because of this, I heard a tremendous variety of material. I might hear, on any given day, a piece of modern music such as Xenakis’ Pithoprakta and then a “spectacular sound” recording of light percussion music where, as the thrilling climax, one heard two tap dancers dancing into audio infinity between the two speakers.

Then he might put on sound effect records, such as steam trains in thunderstorms, sounds of the tropical rain forest, African tribal chants, Indian ragas, classical Chinese opera, New Orleans singers such as Lizzie Miles, modern music, classical music from every period, jazz from W.C. Handy until 1970, you name it.

There were certain labels, like Mercury Living Presence, that had, in his opinion, particularly good sound. He pointed out that these were recorded with two high-quality microphones placed to the left and the right of the orchestra. These he contrasted to what he called “multiple mono” recordings where every solo instrument and section of the orchestra was individually microphoned. This would result in a flute solo having the same volume as the accompanying orchestra. It was like a chef considering someone who puts too much salt on their food.

Audiophiles still exist but are mostly replaced by the more profane Lovers of Home Cinema Systems. This too has its own lingo, equipment (surround sound, amplifiers which can reproduce different sized performance spaces, and many others). This is a form of decadence. Audiophiles, in their own way, were seekers after truth. They knew that no system could ever reproduce reality: the interest lay in trying to narrow the gap between the two as much as possible.