August 2010
The Primacy Of Music
Editorial By Robert Harley

 

  As a teenager and young adult my first rule of moving house was that the stereo system was the last thing to get packed at the old location, and the first thing to get unpacked and set up at the new location. This strategy provided minimum time without access to my music collection. Within half an hour of arriving at the new apartment, the stereo was up and playing music again. Moving in those days involved not much more than a friend's truck and pizza and beer at the end of the day.

How things change. I just moved from New Mexico to California and can tell you that it was a good deal more complicated. I won't go into the details, but it was a huge logistical challenge, both physically and in coordinating two real-estate transactions in different states. As a result, I was too preoccupied to follow my first rule of moving that says the stereo system is the last thing to get packed and the first thing to get unpacked. But these days, "my" stereo system is not only vastly more complicated than the simple system of my youth, it also belongs to the various manufacturers who have placed the gear on loan with me. Consequently, the system had to be packed up and returned weeks in advance of moving, and the new system had to wait until the house was in sufficient order to have manufacturers visit with new gear. All this added up to me being without my hi-fi for more than a month.

As my wife and I began unpacking and setting up the new house, I found myself short-tempered and in a foul mood (unusual for me). This was despite just having realized a dream of living in coastal California, and everything going exactly according to plan. After a couple of days in the new house -- still without music -- I asked Neil Gader to send me the Simaudio Moon 600i integrated amplifier he had on hand for review. I connected the Simaudio to a pair of early-generation DALI Menuet bookshelf loudspeakers ($900 a pair eight years ago), positioning them on a fireplace without much regard for sound quality, and started a disc playing. Within seconds my attitude and general sense of well-being were transformed. I suddenly felt like a weight had been lifted from me. My spirits soared; I was lighter, more alive. I can't overstate the suddenness or the magnitude of the change in me. In addition, having music playing changed the "vibe" of the new house and made the job of unpacking suddenly seem less onerous. Without music, the house was just a physical structure; with music, it felt like our home. I've understood for a long time the importance of music, but before this experience I had no idea just how important it was to me.

I learned another -- perhaps more important -- lesson from this accidental experiment. I built my previous home with a dedicated listening room that was closed off from the rest of the house. The room had optimum dimensional ratios, multiple dedicated AC power circuits, and $33k worth of acoustic treatments. Music listening meant closing the door and sitting exactly in the sweet spot. It was the ultimate "man-cave." Yes, it sounded fabulous, and yet something was missing that I hadn't realized. That missing "something" became apparent when I started listening in the new home, whose listening room is the central space open to the rest of the house. Music was liberated from a single "head-in-a vice"' position in the man-cave and flowed instead through the entire house as my wife and I unpacked. I played music that I thought we both would like (we have different tastes), and in the process, expanded my range of interests. It helped that I was at the same time unpacking CDs, discovering anew discs I hadn't listened to for years.

It's unlikely that the new listening room will sound as good as the dedicated acoustically treated room, but I have a feeling that I'm going to be enjoying music a whole lot more.

 

 

 

SUBSCRIBE!
Click here to subscribe to The Abso!ute Sound.