Take a look at any online forum for record collectors. Read any of the thousands of articles about the best turntable and the best speakers and the best sound absorbing wall panels. Walk into your local record store, take a look at their set-up. What do you see? I can tell you what you don’t see: a turntable set-up that is even remotely comparable to yours. You haven’t even heard of that brand of speakers. Is it better than yours? Is it more expensive than yours? Of course it is, because your set-up isn’t good enough. The bass is a loose pathetic mess, the soundstage is so bad it sounds like Stevie Wonder’s delicate piano chords are coming from the basement. Do you even have speaker stands? Are you serious? You just have your speakers on the same surface as your turntable? What’s so incredibly aggravating about this is that you basically haven’t even listened to Radiohead yet, not really anyways. You think Thom created In Rainbows so jerk-offs can listen to it on Bose Soundbar? HAWK-TUH! Why don’t you pull your copy of Igor out of its wall frame, slap it on to the Crosley record player your mom got you for Christmas and shut the fuck up. You are not a music fan, you are not a record collector, you are not an audiophile. You are a child with a toy that is driving up the price of records.
Do you know how long I had to wait in line for my copy of “Live At Bubbas?” 3 hours! You know why? Because I was stuck behind a bunch of idiots with yellow converse and corduroy pants that were listening to Frank Ocean on a Beats pill while they were waiting in line. Now normally I don’t let these kinds of people ruin record stores for me, but when they started comparing the rips and tears in their Death Grips shirts, I lost it! I grabbed the Beats pill and threw it across the street. Now suddenly this group of ironically dressed Zoomers was well aware of my existence. Before they could say anything, I explained to them that a pair of used passive speakers would be a huge improvement to any bluetooth speaker on the market, cheaper too; and that if they wanted to eventually upgrade to something like a Mcintosh C8 Tube amp they would have a set-up that would be more than serviceable for the type of music they listened to. I expected some kind of thanks or perhaps some follow up questions but instead they just stared at me, dumbfounded. You see, this is where I really began to get upset, this is the real problem with the younger generation, they think they know everything. They see one tik-tok about the best bluetooth speakers and suddenly they have more knowledge than someone who has spent thousands of hours listening to only the highest quality audio equipment. I asked one of them if they even knew what a driver was (he didn’t).
I was about to really lose it at this point but luckily the guy behind me intervened and reminded me that some people are just too thick to know what’s good for them. He told me that he had tried for years to get his wife to use his Sennheiser headphones but the dumb broad insisted on using the Beats she got at the Apple store. We had a good laugh about how some people are just okay living their lives surrounded by absolute garbage. If it wasn’t for the subsequent conversation we had about the experience he had listening to a set of Zellaton Reference MkII’s, I would’ve fallen into another one of those week long depressive episodes I’ve been plagued with the last few years.
Life is good.