Alex Halberstadt most recent Brillant Corners


Read Alex goes to CAF in the most recent issue of Stereophile. Probably the most bigoted and prejudiced introduction to a column I’ve ever read. sad the future of Stereophile when they let garbage like this be published. 

drambuiequillhill

I don't know whether to laugh or to cry.  I'm sitting here keying this response in South Florida, where my sweat pants are shorts, no hair piece on my bald head as it is a bit hot for such as that right now anyway.  Yellow gold Rolex does send a certain signal, mine is white gold.  Fortunately no hearing aid required...yet.  But if these sights offend you steer clear of South Florida.  What I am trying to fathom is why you are offended?  Alex described the crowd as he entered the show.  Bigoted?  Prejudiced?  What are you reading into it that I am missing?  With respect, may I suggest you take a moment for introspection?  

@billstevenson +1

I think one has to be trying very hard to come up with OP's conclusion. What seems to be the problem?

Could it be you are offended because you resemble the article? 

I felt the same way as Alex when my wife and I did a 2 week cruise on Viking....It was a Nursing Home Cruise. 

I explained to Ken that I don’t like crowds. Or airports. That trying to listen while people are talking loudly over the music aggravates my Generalized Anxiety Disorder. And that having to sit through anything at all by Dire Straits rubs me even wronger than it did in high school. But this year my curiosity got the best of me, and on a crisp November night I rode the Acela to Washington’s Union Station, then took the Red Line to North Bethesda, and at long last, tired and already regretting my Amtrak dinner, trudged toward the twinkling lights of a Canopy by Hilton.

The following morning, at another Hilton five minutes away, I walked into my first US audio show. The global, all-ages vibe of High End Munich was nowhere to be found, nor were the airy digs of its MOC convention center. Under fluorescent lighting, the crowd was overwhelmingly male and distinctly American. During my first 15 minutes at CAF, I spotted at least five pairs of sweatpants, four hearing aids, three yellow-gold Rolex Submariners, two tiger-themed Ed Hardy jackets, and one hairpiece. I was also surprised to find myself on the younger end of the CAF age spectrum. As a fellow audio journalist tartly noted, the Rockville Hilton sported “more canes than women.”

The current theme in society is to stretch as far as you can to be offended, no matter what the circumstance. I really do believe that some people roll out of bed in the morning with the singular thought of “what can I be upset about today”?

I attended CAF and there certainly were folks there as described in the article. I thought there were also a fair number of younger folks and some women. In fact I took one of those with me. His description doesn’t offend me at all and I’m not a young guy. I have a cheap seiko not a Rolex so I guess he wasn’t talking about me