Were you an audiophile in the 1980s and 1990s?

I had a turning point in 1968 when I heard my first pair of KLH-9's at a house in the West Portal neighborhood of San Francisco. A teenager at the time, I had no idea such things existed. Reading Audio, Stereo Review, and such had not really prepared me for that.

I later ran through equipment like nobody's business. Name it, I had it. I got into repair and everything breaks. Repair people get everything. Dynamic Specialties in Redwood City with Jay and Bob was in it's heyday. What a place.

Those were fun times. I loved JGH (IWEWT) and could not read the pompous HP.

To me though, the most important HiFi writer at the time has not been mentioned.

That's because he wasn't a HiFi writer at all. He wrote music reviews for the Chronicle or the Examiner, I forget which. One was the morning paper, one the afternoon. Anyway, unlike most reviewers, he would write not about what was wrong but what was right.  Oh, he wasn't any Pollyanna, he was a realist but he wrote about what he liked and didn't quibble about the trivial.

A lot of HiFi to me has long revolved around the "analytic" side of things. Which hair should we split as opposed to what do we actually find pleasure in. That leads to the "Amplifier of the Month Club" that I've often opined about. One gets the newest and shiniest in the living room, finds fault, and seeks another.

The cycle repeats.

That way leads to madness.

Such is audio folly.

I should know. I've been there. It's a sickness.

I don't know exactly what turned me around. One day or should I say one evening I realized that just sitting back with a good single malt in the quiet of the evening and relaxing beat all the heck out of stressing about silly details that I didn't care about.

Why look for flaws that are inevitably there and force myself to be dissatisfied?

it's been a long road. More missteps than anything else to be sure but that's the story of most journeys.

That Writer that I mentioned earlier? Ralph J. Gleason was the guy. At the time he was just the music reviewer for the local fishwrap.

In my era of HiFi misadventures, he was the voice of common sense.

Yeah, I know, common sense in a HiFi environment. What a maroon.

Ah, the good old days.

Lance Cochrane

As time passes, sometimes things change dramatically and you don't even think about it.

Back in the Stone Age, we didn't have the Internet, email, and nobody carried a cell phone. Audiomart was a "magazine", not a website. I say magazine generously. It was more of a pamphlet with individual ads typed on a typewriter in a little booklet deal. The commercial ads looked like they were cut and pasted in.

That's cut and pasted like with scissors and Elmer's. Seriously, things were every bit that primitive. the rag was published in Pennsylvania so those of us on the West Coast were at a serious disadvantage. Most all the good stuff was gone by the time we got our copies. 

We had to spend extra for First Class postage to have any chance at listings. Yes, things were like that then. A typed booklet through the mail was the best we had.

Real old timers will remember this--we used to place ads in the Classified section of the newspaper in the Audio section to buy and sell components. Yes, we did. The classified section of the newspaper.

Have any of the youngsters out there even seen a newspaper Classified section?

That's what I thought.

Then there were the garage sales. There was a period of time where nobody wanted that old tube stuff. Transistors were the way to go man. Dump the old junk and get what you could.

I found a bunch of Dynaco, Scott tube amps and preamps, what have you at garage sales for peanuts. They were happy to get rid of it. I heard about dumpsters that they had thrown the stuff into. No the dumpsters were gone, no diving thank you.

Times change. The way we do business has changed radically. It's easy to forget about that. eBay didn't exist. eBay became the great leveler for prices long ago.

People will just look up stuff and on their cell phones these days and get an idea of pricing.

We didn't have eBay listings to check. Even if we had, we had no cell phones to check with.

That was life in the Stone Age. 

I get all sentimental sometimes. Pardon me while I brush away a tear.

These kids today don't understand.

And their music, it's all noise. Now in my day...