The solace of your stereo room (article swipe)
johmbolaya
4,472 Posts
I grew up knowing how to listen to music in a certain way, observing how my dad did it, not knowing how he listened to music growing up. I didn't get a chance to ask him about that kind of stuff, but as I read this article, it made a lot of sense. It also made some kind of sense to how audiophiles will pile up the goods for their sense of "peace", although those goods are far beyond my reach.Anyway, for those who are interested, from the New York Times:http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/09/magazine/09wwln-medium-t.html?_r=1&ref=magazine==begin swipe==December 9, 2007The MediumStereo SanctuariesBy VIRGINIA HEFFERNAN[/b]What exactly do men do in their tricked-out electronic hideaways? You know, when they???re ???working.??????What do you do in there???? I asked my husband, a writer, about the office he rents near our apartment. ???Write,??? he said. ???Watch ???24,??? read Baseball Digest, listen to Stevie Wonder.???O.K., but that???s him. Illuminated by high-def kaleidoscopes, flanked by exotic speakers and enfolded in what seem like yottabytes of audiovisual data, other tech-sequestered men must use their superempowered alone time for something more momentous. Nuclear fusion, maybe, tundra analysis or tornado prevention.Men have always had personal retreats ??? antiseptic or wood-paneled ??? filled with concert mementos, career trophies and esoteric collectibles. And women have always been mystified by them. After all, they lack the red-currant candles and yoga paraphernalia associated with true Me Time. The classic male hideout is a musty captain???s quarters, all brass and wood polish, featuring billiards, tobacco, brandy, books and maps. Another perplexingly mundane pastime of the unwired study is solitaire ??? Bill Clinton???s tray-table indulgence and the chief diversion of John Pierpont Morgan, the robber baron who ignored the rare volumes and priceless prints in his exquisite Manhattan private library in favor of hand after hand of solo card games.But for more than half a century, men have also had stereos. Fifty years ago in this magazine, Meyer Berger described the emerging clique of high-fidelity boys. Berger???s description of that crowd applies equally well to the 2007 technophiles currently consolidating digital fiefs by installing Sony Bravias ??? on which ???watching grass grow is fundamentally exciting,??? as Sony???s chairman, Howard Stringer, recently said.Hi-fi ???takes in the thin purse and the fat,??? Berger wrote in 1953, ???the humble listener who likes his music best at parlor pitch and the hot-eyed and intemperate fanatic whose chief pursuit is not music but extremes in sound ??? the lowest booming bass; the highest biting note, tremblingly caught before it takes off for infinity.???Men???s current quest for sonic and visual infinity may be almost as avid as it was after the Second World War. In those days, returning veterans were freshly excited about radar and sonar, having completed crash courses in sound engineering.Keir Keightley, a professor of media studies at the University of Western Ontario, writes astutely about male lust for precision technology. He cites Berger and others as having stoked postwar longings for do-it-yourself hobbies, on the one hand, and escape from family, on the other.In a 1996 essay with the excellent title ??? ???Turn It Down!??? She Shrieked: Gender, Domestic Space and High Fidelity, 1948-1959,??? Keightley discusses the suburban floor plans of the 1950s. To promote togetherness, the open-plan designs of subdivisions, as well as the new ???family rooms??? that made television a group affair, denied men privacy and thrust them into full-time custodial roles. Deprived of the libraries or smoking rooms their fathers had enjoyed, midcentury men found themselves exposed, uncozy and longing for space to fantasize.As Ricky Gervais says, if you offer a man a choice between an open-plan office with lots of air and light and social interaction and a dank, stifling, windowless room with a lock, he???ll always take the closet. On a grander note, Herman Melville in ???Moby-Dick??? describes the near-suicidal depression of the sailor desperately seeking privacy while standing watch at the masthead. Ishmael muses, ???You cannot put a shelf or chest of drawers in your body, and no more can you make a convenient closet of your watch-coat.???But those were the old days. By offering immersion and later ???surround sound,??? stereos ingeniously allow men to create virtual rooms inside their own bodies, in their heads, in the organs of hearing. Think of the groovy 20th-century dad in his Eames lounge chair, his head???s circumference doubled by giant earphones. He blissfully shut out the racket and demands of domestic life.Keightley even discovered a 1954 issue of High Fidelity magazine in which a satirist imagined a palliative for a henpecked husband: a custom-made enclosure in which he essentially sits inside a speaker, soundproofed to shut out the kids and the carping wife.In spite of the emphasis of contemporary technology on connectivity (over isolation), true audiovisual fanatics, while they usually include high-speed Internet in their systems, continue to focus on technology???s solitary pleasures. During the workday, they may be e-mailing and surfing the Web, but when they???re in the zone, they use the Internet largely for Netflix and audio-video message boards. Why would these connoisseurs settle for low-res Web video or bother with audio on a computer that lacks even basic woofers?These early adapters lead the staggering-and-stunning brigade: people who regularly use these words to describe home entertainment. Good high-def is almost always stunning; the sublime extremes of multichannel audio are staggering. The whole outrageously priced system, when elegantly arranged and firing on all cylinders, is known by another work: sick.???Ten years ago, audio/video systems couldn???t compete with the worst movie theater,??? reads the utopian rhetoric on the Web site of Sound by Singer, a high-end home-entertainment mecca in Manhattan. ???Today they can be better than any.???Such stores now kit-out apartments and houses with hyperluxe audio and video, including the Odin Supreme Reference cable system, a series of interconnects and cables that makes ???every note sound more real in and of itself and in the context of all the other notes . . . not only in timing and speed but also in regards to harmonic structure, pace and temporal texture.??? Sub these cables for almost any other set, and Sound by Singer promises you???ll hear ???the sonic equivalent of the parting of the waters, drawing water out of a rock or manna from heaven.???Take a look at the Audio Video Interiors Web site for the latest in sky???s-the-limit digital living. Rooms upholstered in suede and leather and saturated in hues that range from beige to beiger (some have red accents) house plasma screens, so-called ???reference??? speakers, invisible under-floor wiring and custom-made built-ins. These spaces can cost half a million dollars.Joseph Middleton, a casting director in Los Angeles, guessed that he had spent ???a little less??? than 500 grand on his own tech paradise, which he built poolside in a heavily curtained structure accessible by French doors. But he couldn???t be sure, since his assistant had overseen the project.???We went for the best in each department,??? Middleton told me. ???A 90-inch Da-Lite screen, B & W speakers, a Toshiba projector,??? he said. ???A Bosch dishwasher, Viking wine cooler, Miele espresso maker, Addams Family pinball, electric dartboard, ice maker.???But
as much as the equipment affords Middleton the pleasure of ???feeling movies more??? and ???being in the center of things,??? it also confounds him. Unlike the postwar tech junkies, he???s not a hobbyist who reads Stereophile magazine and likes to do his own repairs and tweaks; he???s just a guy who likes to be transported by high-fidelity sights and sounds. Every now and then, Middleton finds he has to call a friend to conjure subtitles for foreign films or otherwise guide him through his tech maze.???It can be hard with the number of components that I have,??? he sighs. ???We???re not only talking about the DVD players ??? all the games: PlayStation, GameCube, X-Box, Wii. And then you???re talking about all the things that go on ??? the PlayStation dance thing, the cars, the wheels. I feel like I need a chart.???All these extensions and remote controls are evidently not something a man can handle alone. For other guys designing private spaces, wives and girlfriends are called in to consult on d??cor. Audio Video Interiors even features the latest in hi-fi oases: a his-and-her retreat, featuring ???her style, his performance.???Men and women together? In shared rooms? Sounds like a dangerous trend. ===end swipe===
as much as the equipment affords Middleton the pleasure of ???feeling movies more??? and ???being in the center of things,??? it also confounds him. Unlike the postwar tech junkies, he???s not a hobbyist who reads Stereophile magazine and likes to do his own repairs and tweaks; he???s just a guy who likes to be transported by high-fidelity sights and sounds. Every now and then, Middleton finds he has to call a friend to conjure subtitles for foreign films or otherwise guide him through his tech maze.???It can be hard with the number of components that I have,??? he sighs. ???We???re not only talking about the DVD players ??? all the games: PlayStation, GameCube, X-Box, Wii. And then you???re talking about all the things that go on ??? the PlayStation dance thing, the cars, the wheels. I feel like I need a chart.???All these extensions and remote controls are evidently not something a man can handle alone. For other guys designing private spaces, wives and girlfriends are called in to consult on d??cor. Audio Video Interiors even features the latest in hi-fi oases: a his-and-her retreat, featuring ???her style, his performance.???Men and women together? In shared rooms? Sounds like a dangerous trend. ===end swipe===
Comments
This guy sounds like an asshole.
I would take