Further adventures in hi-fi: Or ‘And he’s buying a stereo to heaven’

Good puns, bad puns — you know I’ve had my share. Good stereo systems, bad stereo systems (or accursed pieces of leviathan-size audio-visual assemblages from hell) — even more so.

Let me start in medias res, the way epics used to do.

Last January, I was at AstroVision in Greenhills and was stupefied at the bankrupt state of CD selection the store carries: K-pop, Lady Gaga, and absurdly grotesque albums composed of mixed tracks put together by local celebrities to soothe the listener’s aching souls (mixed tapes of sorts of love songs that even Adolf Himmler or Hermann Göring would consider crimes against humanity). Wait, did I say K-pop? There were also hundreds of karaoke CDs; one was even being tested by a salesman trying to ape Katy Perry on a Script song. I thought I had removed myself to the Twilight Zone — the middle ground between light and shadow, between science and superstition, and it lies between the pit of man’s fears and a row of sunbathing California Gurls.

This is not just peculiar to AstroVision; it’s the norm in almost all records stores in our beautiful yet strange metropolis. It’s as if some godlike executive is thinking, “Ninety million Filipinos love Bruno Mars, One Direction, and those indistinguishable Korean boybands, so the non-converted must bow down to the dictates of vox populi.” Bruce Hornsby said it’s just the way it is through L.S.S.-inducing repeating salad of synth riffs.

Nothing like no choice to make you feel at home, agrees Jack Nicholson in one of his brilliant identical roles. So, I wandered over to the racks of Satchmi vinyls that AstroVision carries. It was as if the choirs of angels or the kids from the Loboc Choir of Bohol started humming their hallelujahs. “Behold,” I muttered: “Blonde on Blonde” by Bob Dylan, “Ah Um” by Charles Mingus, “Kid A” by Radiohead, “What’s Going On” by Marvin Gaye… There was the sun, the moon and the Rolling Stones; plus, newer releases by Vampire Weekend, Arcade Fire, the Arctic Monkeys, The National, Band of Horses, the Civil Wars — all wrapped inside beautifully-made, all-original sleeves. Record labels are releasing vinyl again and stores are stacking them up.

Thank you, Satchmi and AstroVision; but thanks also to secondhand record stores in Cubao X and Makati Cinema Square (Bob’s Bebop Records, for one), among others for allowing the faithful to plow through the dusty record bins of memory to keep the black circles in spin during the Dark Ages — when the entire world at that time was saying digital music was to be the future of sound; before that, compact discs. Supposedly.

Thanks to DJs, diehard vinyl-lovers and the members of the analog resistance movement for keeping the faith while the rest of us were iTuning legally and Torrenting illegally those MP3s and FLACs into our lives via X-number of terabytes of sleek, compact ether. (Special thanks also to hipsters for buying vinyl and parting with their parents’ hard-earned money.) What use is owning the entire discography of Tom Waits or Black Flag, anyway, when one crash of your computer leaves you with a clean state? Destroying your Ameri Ichinose porn collection in the process, an even greater tragedy.

It got to a point where I bought a Cocktail Audio X-10 machine, which can be hooked up to an amplifier, play or rip CDs, and store two terabytes of digital music in its attached hard drive. I filled that bad boy up with albums meticulously burned from my then-impressive CD collection (from AC/DC to Zappa). “What now?” I asked myself when the last two albums — “Highway to Hell” featuring the late great Bon Scott and “Ship Arriving Too Late To Save A Drowning Witch” (“Z ∆”) with the equally dead genius, Mr. Zappa — had been ripped. Like Wile E. Coyote having at last captured the Roadrunner, I was stumped: a lifetime’s worth of music was right there in a black box in my living room and I couldn’t even be bothered to press a few buttons and search for a track, any track. But with the small bitrate and degree of compression, songs are going to sound cold, clinical and boring, anyway. Like long-dead musicians playing loud, dead tunes brought to half-life by technology — or, in other words, like Metallica’s “Death Magnetic.” Hooking up the device or an iPod to a dock with coffin-size speakers improved the sound, only for while, though. But I swear by Cocktail Audio’s Internet radio function. Far-out avant-garde classical music from Austria, anyone? It’s more ear-splitting than rock ‘n’ roll!

Then for a time, I hardly listened to my storehouse of CDs (hauled from HMV, RecoFan, and Tower during trips abroad). I opened the media player only to make quirky play-lists (“Pomp Rock,” “Guilty Pleasures,” etc.). To think I was only putting on music as aural wallpaper,  as another iPod gathers bytes of dust.  

Pity how things nearly ended that way. Where was the baby whose favorite lullaby was — according to the mom, Elena — Nilsson’s Without You. Where was the teenager who wanted to be in Queen, then the Pistols? Where was the man who found solace in Bob Dylan’s “Blood on the Tracks” or Beck’s “Sea Change” after every bad breakup? I used to lose myself in John Coltrane’s sheets of sound, but now I am merely lost.

I grew up in a house that was always blasting music. We had a Rek-O-Kut turntable atop a Hitachi television set housed in an imposing wooden cabinet (termites would see it and think they died and went to buffet heaven.) My brother Dennis collected records — Deep Purple, Bloodrock, Eric Clapton, the Bee Gees, Led Zep — which he meticulously washed with soap and water(!). He blew his money on albums and Japanese speakers, sketching portraits of Andy Gibb and writing slogans like “Music is addictive” on pages of his beloved of Jingle magazines. I caught the music bug from him since I would wake up to Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young harmonizing in the house (just like Dennis Leary) and always, always, The Beatles. The old man had The Platters; my sisters dreamt of being Karen Carpenter or the blonde chick from ABBA; everybody loved the stars on 45. But those turntables of yore got submerged in flood and forgetting; the records neglected and left to warp. Relatives moved out, passed away or lingered on. The years spun out of control. I bought my first CD in the ’90s from the money I earned from writing gigs (“My Favorite Things” by Coltrane), used the Bose equipment handed down to me by my brother, and never looked back down the “Vinyl Highway to Hell” — as Scott Garceau would say.

Just when I thought I was out, they pulled me back in.

That day in January, I got three platters from Satchmi: the Stones’ “Exile on Main Street,” Pink Floyd’s “The Dark Side of the Moon” and Joy Division’s “Unknown Pleasures.” God, this was the first time I saw them as brand-new records. The sleeve art of each is outstanding; the vinyl itself weighs in at 180 grams — obviously the thicker, the better. But I didn’t have a turntable (my old Technics SL-QD33 died a natural death ages ago), so I got a Crosley Cruiser Turntable sold also at AstroVision. I know the critics only have bad digs on this machine (because of its heavy ceramic cartridge, vibrating built-in speakers, etc.), but I love its “modern vintage” Kubrickian look, its portability (can be brought to picnics and family reunions with “Karen C.” and “Agnetha Fältskog”) and, most importantly, accessibility.

See, young listeners can experience vinyl right away with the Crosley as their starter kit. They are spared in the meantime from going into audiophile stores selling high-end equipment that go for astronomical prices and meeting snobbish salesman who know right away who has the dough to shell out for expensive, majestic sound — usually senatorial-looking seniors, businessmen types with manicured nails and gold pendants, or shady pork-barrel scammers.

(Later on, I would find out that there are stores such as The Grey Market in Katipunan and Hyperaudio on Calatagan St. in Makati that offer outstanding yet affordable audio equipment with proprietors who gave really, pardon the pun, sound advice. Here’s a shout-out to Reno Rivo and Jay Amante, and also Claire of AstroVision.)

The Crosley, I sold eventually. Got a Technics SL-1600 and a hotrod Sakura AV-200T tube amp (which was upgraded to a silver-face Cayin). Bought PSB (Paul and Sue Barton) Alpha B1 bookshelf speakers in cherry red (which was upgraded to maple Q Acoustics 2050i floorstanders). The sense-surround system has been shelved. More records purchased, less food consumed. Sleep? What sleep? 

Then it hit me.

Suddenly I was talking like one ‘em audiophiles. A constant soliloquy of “moving coil cartridges, capacitors, interconnects,  tonearms, auditioning tube amplifiers, ultralinear or triode modes, phono stages, KT88 valves…” To beat or not to beat, that could’ve been Will’s question.  

You see, true audiophiles would dismiss my setup as laughably, tragically entry-level. (An old joke: “If pedophiles molest children, what do audiophiles do to audio? I suspect they’re into ‘aural’ sex.”) I have friends who are both audiophiles and music-lovers at the same time — not always the case with others. They could go on and on and on about this or that particular record that saved their lives. “Erwin” gave me his prized Joni Mitchell “Hejira” album and a couple of out-of-print jazz titles (Ben Sidran’s, Dexter Gordon’s). “Bob” and “Allen” are walking Wikipedias of records; they love all the incarnations of Miles, of Chick. They both have that “lost” Juan de la Cruz album. These guys know that pieces of effective yet expensive audio gear are just the means to an end. They love the music, not just the transporter.  

But the others — those with stereo systems virtually developed by NASA engineers, bought with obscene amounts of money, bragged about every chance they get — are a breed apart. Scoff and sneer are what they usually do. They may have the P100k turntables connected to P100k phono preamplifiers connected to P100k tube amplifiers connected to…. But sometimes their musical tastes are suspect. One guy I know salivates over Carly Rae Jepsen’s Call Me Maybe (just imagine how the high-end Conrad Johnson or Macintosh stereo systems “faithfully reproduce” this pap), another digs crates for Pat Boone records. (Nat King Cole I would find unobjectionable… but bane on Boone!)

One time I was at Grey Market, a guy asked for an M.Y.M.P album. I nearly went Jack Black on the guy. (“Do we look like the kind of store that sells I Just Called to Say I Love You? Go to the mall.”) And when they get together, the members of the “Golden Ears Rotisserie Club” talk about their gold speaker cables that cost as much as a motorcycle; seldom about a life-changing record you could buy from Bob of Bebop for P500. The jargons, they are a-flowing. It feels like a Klingon convention. And poor you: feel their derision once they find out you owned a piece of Bose equipment at any point in your life. It’s like the mark of Cain.

Kind of reminds me years ago of a professional photographer named Krusty who saw my entry-level Nikkon EM camera and commented, “Oh, that’s a girl’s camera!” I wanted to tell him, “Well, Krusty, you have a clown’s name.” 

No matter what gear you have, what’s important is what wafts from your speakers at the end of a long, soul-sapping day. When you dim the lights, get a bottle of SMB from the fridge, and invite Patti, Nico, Aretha or Yoko into your living room. Or when you open that cool crimson-and-black box of “Mothership” vinyls by Led Zeppelin for the first time. Truly it’s as good as it gets.

Dear readers, what they say about records are true. The music comes across warmer, it breathes and has body, layers and textures (not just the cackling or the hiss of ancientness). CDs or MP3s sounds flattened, sterile. Putting the needle on a black vinyl, there’s something ritualistic about it. Thus, you sit through the entire record. To digest the tunes, while gazing at the record sleeve (you don’t need a magnifying glass for that). To listen to the nuances (the high hats in Josie, the artificial harmonics in Birdland). To be moved, definitely to be moved. The Beatles and producer George Martin spent countless hours recording, splicing together tapes, matching speeds and keys just to give people Strawberry Fields Forever; Brian Eno nearly wiped the master tape of Where The Streets Have No Name because the guys from U2 were going nuts orchestrating the dynamics, the tricky tempo changes in that song; Jimi Hendrix, in one instance, dipped his amp in water since he was striving for a watery, aqueous tone… all for you. All those notes for you! And then you’re going to listen to their music in packets of crummy megabytes? On shuffle? So, I could understand why audiophiles blow wads of money just to get that pristine sound: those who truly love music would want to hear their favorite albums the best possible way.

Yeah, the songs remain the same, quoting Messrs. Page, Plant, Jones & Bonham; but the ears (connected to a free mind, connected to an even freer soul connected to…) have gone through changes upon changes. It’s yesterday once more, alright, but only different.

It was vinyl then and it is vinyl now.

An entire lifetime in between grooves.