July 2026

The Audiophile Alphabet Problem
Why our music loving hobby will live on forever and ever.
Editorial By Roger Skoff

  Music isn't just music. Even in its simplest form, it consists of sounds and silences strung together in a rhythmic pattern.  And the sounds can be of varying pitch and timbre and of different loudness and duration, or produced by a single source or any size group of performers, singing or playing different combinations of voices and/or instruments.

Even the silences can be different, varying in duration from the briefest hesitation to a complete stop. And that means that the rhythm can change, too, to reflect an infinite number of cultural and/or mathematical origins, or combinations of them, or even combinations of combinations of any of the things just mentioned.

The equipment we listen to our music on varies, too, with every part of it, from the individual system components, to the things they're paired with, to the room they're played in varying to produce numbers of combinations – and different sonic characteristics and interpretations – so great as to truly boggle the mind.

Just as a tiny illustration, consider this: Suppose that there were only one way to record music – LP records – and that the number of bits of equipment to play them on and places to play them in were vastly limited. Instead of the, in some cases, hundreds of brands of products (let alone all their different models), let's suppose that there were only ten choices of every kind of thing that goes into making-up a system: ten phono cartridge choices, ten tonearms to hold them, ten turntables to mount the arms to, ten phono cable to carry the cartridge's signal to the preamp, ten preamps, ten preamp-to-amplifier cables,  ten amplifier choices, ten cable models from the amplifier to the speakers, and only ten models of speakers to choose from in all the world. Oh, and let's also say that there are only ten choices of listening room, too.

If we were to multiply that all out, (10 cartridges x 10 tonearms =100, x 10 turntables =1,000, x 10 phono cables = 10,000, x 10 preamps = 100,000,  x 10 amplifier cables = 1 million, x 10 amplifiers = 10 million, x 10 speaker cables = 100 million, x 10 speakers = 1 Billion x 10 possible listening rooms, each with different listening positions and acoustics = 10 Billion possible listening experiences, just from that COLOSSALLY limited sample.) we'd see immediately why putting together the perfect hi-fi sound system is so hard to do – and why the trying can be so much fun!

Superficially, it's easy, but here's what actually happens: After careful shopping, critical listening,  and much good advice from friends and professional reviewers, we go out and buy the system of our dreams. We get it home, spend hours setting it up (with the speakers positioned just so), burning it in, and getting it ready for our first really critical listening…when we love it! Everything is great; it sounds just the way we want it to; and if all the thing a system should do (Imaging soundstaging, focus, bass, treble, clarity,  a sense of "air" around the performers, lack of distortion, and on and on), were an alphabet of sonic characteristics, we'd say it got every single letter dead-on.

Little by little, a little later, though, (to quote from Ken Nordine's ancient and glorious Word Jazz album [Dot Records DLP-3075, 1957]). We – though still loving our system – start to get the first niggling hints that there might be something "a little off" about characteristic "Q", whatever that might be.

As time goes on, although we still remain generally pleased with our system, that imperfection in the "Q" characteristic becomes more and more noticeable until, finally, no matter what we play, the only thing we hear is the "Q" problem, and the situation becomes unbearable.

That calls for action, so we start hunting for the problem's source and, after however much listening, agonizing, and soul searching – as well as swapping in and out various components in search of the cause -- we finally decide that it's the (preamp) that's at fault.

With that knowledge in hand, we start the search for a new (preamp), always looking and  listening for the one that's got the best "Q". Ultimately, after enough research, conversation, and auditioning enough products that might be just the one we're looking for, we find it, buy it, take it home, put it into our system and…Eureka! Perfection! Perfect Q, perfect everything else, and we're as happy as the proverbial clams.

Until we notice just the slightest little imperfection in the "L", and the whole process starts over again.

Good! If you're a true audiophile hobbyist, that's what keeps the hobby fresh.

Abbie Hoffman, writing not about hi-fi but political activism, in his 1968 book, Revolution for the Hell of it (The Dial Press, New York, Library of Congress Number 68029632), pointed out that revolutionaries must always pick a battle that can never be won, a cause that can never be achieved, or a problem that can never be solved. Otherwise, if they ever won, they would have nothing more to fight about; their movement would collapse, and they'd have to come up with a new one if they wanted to keep on struggling.

Any hobby is just the same; if you ever finish it, you need to find a new one, find some other source of fun, or go without. Fortunately, hi-fi, with its truly infinite range of things to do, to change, or to buy, and a huge volume of music to work with, listen to, critique, and enjoy, is as close to an infinite hobby as we've ever heard of, and that means that the "alphabet problem" is not a problem at all.

Go play with your system, fiddle around with it, play around with loudspeaker positioning, change it around, discuss it with your friends, complain about the latest "letter" that's acting-up and...

Enjoy the music!

 

Roger Skoff