September 2025

Star Trek And Enjoy the Music.com Are In Another Universe
Roger writes to 360 completely different degrees of immersive high-end audio.
Article By Roger Skoff

  This month, Enjoy the Music.com celebrates their very special 30th Anniversary in bring joy to both music lovers and audiophiles. For decades, we helps our loyal readers realize their sound system's dream and true potential! The number 360 is Highly Composite: It has 24 divisors, more than any smaller positive integer. That makes it extremely useful in measurement and in geometry, where, for example, a circle is described as having an immersive 360 degrees, a convention dating back to Babylonian astronomy, which used base-60 (sexagesimal) math.

Ancient calendars often used 360-day years, with 5 extra days added later to remain astronomically accurate. The sound we hear reaches us in a full 360-degrees. The number's divisibility was what made it practical for early astronomy. 360 also has rotational Symmetry: In trigonometry and polar coordinates, 360° represents a full rotation—returning to the starting point. In short, 360 is a kind of mathematical diplomat—bridging geometry, arithmetic, astronomy, and cultural systems with elegant ease.

Perhaps most importantly, this is the 30th Anniversary issue of Enjoy The Music.com. Today, you're celebrating with us the many decades of our audiophile publication and all of the remarkable knowledge, show reports, reviews, and insights this website has brought into the world of audio and music lovers globally. On looking back at it, the number couldn't be more fitting.

Someone I was talking with recently commented on the two Science Fiction universes affecting and enjoyed by so many people, Star Trek and Star Wars. As we know, Star Wars is political and quasi-mystical, taking positions on many things and using those as the bases for its story lines for the very predictable archetypes / characters. Modern politics, drama, and power struggles.

Star Trek, according to him, took an entirely different approach—with science and engineering in mind. Simply sending ships and crews out into the universe to map and observe different cultures and life forms, but specifically directed never to interfere with or impose their own will or culture on what they witness.

Take those two, wildly diverse, last subjects, numbers and science fiction views of the universe, look at them under the same light, and you'll see something truly remarkable: for decades Steven R. Rochlin has selflessly guided a magazine for music lovers and audiophiles, Enjoy The Music.com.

Now, with this issue completing thirty years of publication online with hundreds of show reports, thousands of gear reviews, and sponsoring nearly every high-end luxury audio show in North America (no other publication comes close!), Enjoy The Music.com has boldly gone where no man or woman has gone before. This site continues to produce industry-relevant work that manages to fully serve both our music-loving and audiophile communities, plus has done so in a way that draws together science, engineering, aesthetics, expert knowledge of audiophile equipment, and software. We share with you a very high (expert level) degree of knowledge. Our love for music, which is the equipment's purpose to play.

In short, just as the number 360 can be said to be a mathematical "diplomat" bridging different fields and disciplines, the same can be said for Enjoy The Music.com, which successfully bridges science, technology, and culture to produce a single important publication. This is especially true as we migrate from legacy audio that our (great)grandparents discovered to modern immersivephiles. Like Star Trek, we observe, record, and brings things together without ever advocating any intrusive point of view. And with this September 2025 magazine as its 30^th Anniversary, that completes the circle and assumes particular significance.

What the industry has accomplished as they work along side Steven R. Rochlin is – at least to me – something entirely unique; a publication genuinely balanced in its presentation and appreciation of both music and the equipment made to play it.

There have been any number of publications about high-fidelity audio, going all the way back to 1951 monophonic and stereo, and the first appearance of High Fidelity magazine. That was published by Milton B. Sleeper, and printed first quarterly, then monthly. High Fidelity (which, yes, I am old enough to have read and remember) was mostly about hi-fi equipment and technical information and, although it did offer occasional articles or insights on music or recordings, they were mostly a secondary concern, and even its reviews or equipment articles were primarily objective—concentrating on technical specifications and build quality, and seldom, if ever, even mentioning what anything actually sounded like or what music, in which recording, by what performer(s) had been played in reviewing it.

In the last thirty years, there also were, and continue to be other publications that were, primarily or exclusively, about music – Fanfare and Gramophone, for example. They might have been read by the audiophile community, but Fanfare made it a point not to get involved with audio or audio equipment at all, and Gramophone, although it did and still does review audio gear and comment on audio technology and the proper use and set-up of a high-end audio stereo sound system, has its primary focus solidly set on the artistry and interpretation of classical music and its coverage of audio gear is just an additional service for its readership.

Enjoy The Music.com, to my knowledge, is still the only magazine that balances the scales between music and audio and—wonder of wonders—looks at hi-fi gear not as an end in itself, but as what it really is and is designed to be—a way to play music. Here in 2025 we know immersive / immersivephiles are the future as the music business and record labels move towards the future. We love monophonic and stereo recordings for their purity. Highly profitable stereo CD, vinyl LP, and reel-to-reel recording reissues will serve the audio market well into the future.

That's a great thing, and I'm pleased to write for this modern publication. I've been a Hi-Fi Crazy since I was twelve years old, but I've been a music lover all my life. And in that time, I've learned to take the Star Trek view of music in all its genres and all their performances. In a single session, I might listen to classical, country, Mexican, Pink Floyd, and Leonard Cohen. Everything is an exciting new journey that might be thrilling, educational, emotionally moving or – like surprisingly few, but including Hip-Hop or an hour of Tuvan Throat Singing – that I might feel lucky to get through alive.

Sound systems and gear are great, plus the journey is wonderful! But in the end, the important thing is to...

Enjoy The Music.com, and this publication has helped you to do that, whether from an audiophile's or music lover's standpoint, for thirty years.

 

 

Enjoy the music!

 

Roger Skoff