Brett Gideon: The Wonder Years or “How I Became a HiFi Junkie” part 2

There was one evening that changed me from a bloke who just “had a thing for music” to an audiophile, always trying to get the best possible sound from my system.

Back in the late eighties, my good friend Lynton had been putting together a stereo system, I popped round for a listen and was literally stunned. His system wasn’t fancy at all and it certainly wasn’t made up of expensive components. The building blocks were:

NAD CD player

JVC Class A integrated amp

Canton stand mount speakers (which he’d rewired internally with van den Hul cable)

van den Hul speaker cable and interconnects

Decent spiked speaker stands

If there was ever an example of system synergy, this was it. It was far more than the sum of its parts and sounded better than it had any right to. The music was so crisp and clear, it felt like I was listening on a whole new level and effectively I was. Details of every note from top to bottom were right there for the taking even at low volume levels and that’s the aspect that really got to me. The old Hifi cliché about a layer of dirt being removed from the window into the music never made as much sense to me as it did then.

I’ve been chasing that system for nearly twenty years and while I’ve been fortunate enough to have heard some of the most incredible high end stereo systems in NZ since I started at TONE, none of them have had the same impact on me, despite their almost supernatural levels of charisma, impact and musicality.

I guess it’s true that your first time is always the best.

My own stereo systems have evolved and devolved over the years and I’ve enjoyed all of their various incarnations but I don’t feel that I’ve ever reproduced that startling clarity outside of a headphone based system although I’ve been close. I’m not entirely deluded though, I know that I’ve built Lynt’s admittedly fine system up in my mind until it’s some kind of unassailable mystic dream but that’s fine with me. I’ll just keep plugging away with new components until I’m happy (which may be never) and I’ll probably get a kick from every part of the process.

In the spirit of that experience, I’m making some changes to my system at the moment:

1. Running in two new amplifiers

2. Waiting for an estimate for the repairs on my CD player (may be time for an upgrade)

3. Holding the line while my new speakers are being built in Christchurch (details to follow)

I can’t wait to see what I end up with.