Excellent customer service matters

Recently, my son stopped using the $50 Otterbox Defender case we had purchased for his iPhone 4S. He said it was too bulky. He’s a teenager, after all, and he can’t be seen with a belt clip. I started using the case for my iPhone 4S and discovered it was a damn strong and well designed protector for the device.

One little issue cropped up: the rubber surround that encloses the plastic case that encloses the phone (yup) started tearing in one spot and I was afraid it would finally come apart. I called Otterbox and explained the situation. The very nice young lady who took care of me said that they had redesigned the case with a stronger material and, since the plastic surround had also been redesigned, she would send me a new case at no charge.

Wow. That is the way to keep a customer for life. Thank you Otterbox for backing up your product. I’ll keep buying.

:::

Compare that with my experience in February 2011 with InCase, detailed in my letter to CEO Dave Gatto:

Dear Mr. Gatto:

I am long-time Mac user and owner of six Apple devices (seven if you include my Mac). I am a consumer of third-party peripherals and accessories for all of them: my iPad, my two iPods, my iPhone, my two AppleTVs, etc. I consider myself an educated consumer who wants to buy quality accessories commensurate with the quality I’ve come to expect from Apple.

Enclosed is an Incase iPod case I purchased at the Apple Store in late 2009 that I no longer need. As you can see, the gold paint has worn off the plastic. This was after only eight months of use by my son, not a boy who mistreats his gear. The attached email exchange explains all the salient facts regarding this iPod case, as explained to your customer support department.

Needless to say, I’m extremely disappointed, not only in your customer support, but in your product. It boggles my mind that a product that retails for $30, and that was used for only eight months, can exhibit such a level of wear and tear. I just purchased an Otterbox case for my son’s iPod, which has three times the level of protection of yours, at the same price. I can’t envision ever buying another Incase product again, considering the lack of value I’ve gotten from my purchase, and the inability of your support department to please a ticked-off customer.

Keep the case with my compliments. I have no further use for it.

I never received a response from Mr. Gatto.

InCase will never get my dollars again. Otterbox will. End of lesson.

A letter to Amazon.com’s Jeff Bezos

Lately I have had a few bad experiences with Amazon.com; this post talks about one…

Mr. Bezos,

Fifteen years is an eternity in Internet years.

I’m a long time Amazon.com customer. I bought my first book on Amazon in 1997 (Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, still on my shelf). I have completely changed the way I shop because of you.

I was sad with the demise of some my local music and book shops, and especially of Tower Records, a regular stop for me whenever I traveled to a city that had one. But I don’t feel guilty about buying on Amazon instead of my local merchants. Amazon delivers what they cannot: an almost flawless buying experience with a limitless catalog of new and used merchandise, second to none.

I buy just everything I need on Amazon. My CDs, books, movies. Last year I bought a Kindle Fire for my wife’s Christmas present. She’s ecstatic with it. And this bibliophile is (finally) beginning to feel more comfortable about reading e-books.

Bravo to you and your team.

Recently, I added one of your digital services, the 20 GB Amazon Cloud Drive because of the allure of keeping my MP3 and AAC music files free on the cloud instead of on expensive hard drives that fail at the drop of a hat. I’ve uploaded quite a bit of music on it as of today and have lots more to upload. But here’s my problem. Your Cloud Drive / Cloud Player product is flawed. Not in a bad way, but enough to cause problems for big collectors like me. (BTW, the player works beautifully on every device I’ve tried it on.)

First, I cannot change the metadata on my files after I upload them. This is a BIG, BIG flaw. I organize my music into twelve genres; my Cloud Player shows 102! That may be a result of my not changing the metadata before I uploaded the files. Unfortunately, once I uploaded the music and removed it locally — which was my case since I did not know I could not change the metadata — it was too late. At a minimum I should be able to change genres, artist name, album name, song name, etc. This is a VERY limiting shortcoming. Your Cloud Drive should have some mechanism to change metadata in Cloud Drive and effect the change in Cloud Player, and vice versa.

Second, the Adobe Air Amazon MP3 uploader has some silly bugs you need to know about. First, it ALWAYS assume upon launch you want to access iTunes. Very annoying. The user should be able to access what he wants and not be forced to change a default every time he launches the app. There should be a choice at launch to access folders on my Mac or PC, or in iTunes, and change the default. I have another service that uses Air and it is, at best, quirky.

Third, and last, as a Prime member, is the inability to share my cloud player with my wife, who I gave Prime family access for shipping. This is a BIG issue. You should allow your Prime members to share the cloud player (with one family member, at least) without having to use my login on another computer.

I hope you take these criticisms in the spirit in which they were given. When people ask me why I use Amazon I just tell them its the best Internet shopping experience. Bar none.

Thank you for your time.

George L. Moneo
Miami, Florida

I received this non-reply reply from Amazon’s Executive Customer Relations department:

Hi George,

I’m Brandon Broughton of Amazon.com’s Executive Customer Relations team. Jeff Bezos received your email and asked me to respond on his behalf.

Thanks so much for your feedback! Your comments are greatly appreciated; we want to provide service on a level customers will remember, and it’s great to know we’re succeeding in that goal.

I appreciate you sharing your thoughts on our Could Drive service. We really value your input and are always happy to hear our customers’ thoughts on how we can improve the services we offer. To ensure your idea’s reviewed, I’ve shared your suggestions with our Cloud Drive team for their consideration when planning future improvements.

In closing, I do want to ensure you have the right expectations for Cloud Drive. We’ve designed the service so you can access your files from anywhere and to also serve as a data backup in case you suffer any sort of loss to the original files. I’d encourage you to keep copies of the files on your computer, as we can’t be held responsible if a loss occurs to the data you’ve uploaded to Cloud Drive. As stated in our Terms of Use, we do not guarantee that Your Files will not be subject to misappropriation, loss or damage and we will not be liable if they are. You’re responsible for maintaining appropriate security, protection and backup of Your Files.

George, thanks again for taking the time to provide this feedback to us. Please feel free to reply directly to this message if I can be of further assistance.

Regards,

Brandon Broughton
Executive Customer Relations

And finally, my last response to him:

Thanks for your reply.

Despite the intended use of the cloud drive/player you state [above], most users will forego local storage because of HD failures. You want to know why?

We trust Amazon.

Keep that in mind because I’m not the only user who’ll want to move, not copy, a big chunk of his collection onto the cloud.

You’ve made it too convenient

Sadly, I won’t be using Amazon’s Cloud Drive and Cloud Player as I thought I would. I was able to find an old backup of my files and I removed all of them from Amazon. Simply stated, they have not thought this product out enough to make a dent in Apple’s dominance.

Steve Jobs, 1955-2011

There are very few people outside of my family that I can say have had a positive effect on me. Ronald Reagan was one such man. Another of these died this evening. Steve Jobs, the co-founder of Apple was another.

Since 1984 when I saw a Mac for the first time I started following the fabled company that started the PC revolution in 1977. One man and his singular vision revolutionized not one but several industries. His technological vision was such that from kernels of ideas he created the first personal computer, created a computer with a graphical user interface, practically invented the digital publishing industry along with Adobe and Aldus, changed the way we listen to music, buy it, interact with it. And, he gave us the best damn smartphone ever developed. I am sitting here, writing this on one iteration of that computer, my iMac, and next to it are my iPhone, my Apple router, my iPad, and my iPod. They just work. Thanks to Steve.

Jobs was a genius, no doubt, but his kind of genius is not the E=MC2 kind; his is the evolutionary kind whose life’s work, when taken in toto, amounts to a greatness few ever achieve, a greatness that touches so many lives with positive energy and delight. His company, built in his image, will continue to thrive and delight us with new products that I and millions upon millions of other people will buy. But Steve Jobs, the man the visionary, the creator, will be missed terribly. They only come around once in a generation. My generation has just lost its luminary.

Steve Jobs, 1955-2011

The end of an era, redux

It is ironic that yesterday, the day I finally recovered all of my data and operating system files on my Mac due to my second hard drive crash four days ago, and was able to do so because of the fantastic tools available to me because I use a Macintosh computer, Steve Jobs announced his resignation as CEO of Apple. I can’t say enough about what his company’s products have meant to me over the years. Read the essay Walt Mossberg wrote in All Things Digital:

Steve Jobs’s resignation as chief executive officer of Apple is the end of an extraordinary era, not just for Apple, but for the global technology industry in general. Jobs is a historic business figure whose impact was deeply felt far beyond the company’s Cupertino, Calif., headquarters, and who was widely emulated at other companies.

And now, for the first time since 1997, he won’t be the company’s chief executive.

To be very clear, Jobs, while seriously ill, is very much alive. Extremely well-informed sources at Apple say he intends to remain involved in developing major future products and strategy and intends to be an active chairman of the board, even while new CEO Tim Cook runs the company day to day.

So, this is not an obituary. But his health is reported to be up and down, and even an active chairman isn’t the same as a CEO.

CEOs resign every day, so why is this departure so meaningful?

Most people are lucky if they can change the world in one important way, but Jobs, in multiple stages of his business career, changed global technology, media and lifestyles in multiple ways on multiple occasions.

He did it because he was willing to take big risks on new ideas, and not be satisfied with small innovations fed by market research. He also insisted on high quality and had the guts to leave out features others found essential and to kill technologies, like the floppy drive and the removable battery, he decided were no longer needed. And he has been a brilliant marketer, personally passionate about his products.

More here from The Wall Street Journal.

Of Macs and Men

I love my Mac. When I bought it almost five years ago it was liberating to get away from the slavery of WinTel machines. Back then, all Windows had was XP, not the best OS they designed; that honor goes to NT and in the nineties and Windows 2000. They were pretty bullet proof. XP was not. (Windows 7, the OS on my son’s laptop is, hands-down, the best OS Microsoft has ever designed. Period.) I was desperate to get away from the daily crashes. the slow boots, and sundry other issues that plagued my custom built tower PC running Windows 2000 and then XP.

I was thrilled to get a Mac after lusting after them for over twenty years. I am a huge Apple fan: I own an iMac, an iPhone, an iPad and used to own an iPod until 2009. I’ve used their products and I love them. I use them for listening to music, watching movies, writing, news, photo editing, you name it. We depend on these devices. Without them we’d be in a world of digital oblivion.

However, while I can’t say the bloom is off the rose, I am a little upset over the hardware issues I have encountered with my iMac. As of this writing, on Saturday night August 20, 2011, I am in the midst of my second major hard drive crash on my late 2006 vintage iMac. The first crash occurred in 2008, barely two years after buying it. Three years later I have experienced the same problem — and know of two other examples of sudden hard drive crashes in Macs happening within the last year alone! Something is not right. I’m very careful with my machine, backing it up on a regular basis using Carbon Copy Cloner (a must-have utility for every Mac user), running repairs on disk permissions frequently. In other words, I take care of my machine. After Thursday night’s sudden and near catastrophic crash, I ran DiskWarrior 4 (another must-have utility). It was able to recreate a usable bootable disk for me from the old dead drive that took almost 20 hours to clone to a fresh new drive. I am now using this as a boot drive to fix my main drive.

I am now in my second full day of fixing my Mac. My advice to fellow Mac users is simple: beware and take care of your machines. Be religious — no, fanatical! — in your backups and maintenance routines. Shit happens and it will happen when you least expect it. In the future I’ll be running Disk Warrior at least once a week and backing up nightly, if not every couple of nights to a clone of my main drive. Do it for your continued computer mental health. If not, you will regret the day, when your precious music, photos and documents, your digital life are gone. Forever.

The Perfectly Realized Illusion: why high-end audio matters

One day, in the late nineteen-seventies, I visited my local high-end audio salon, Sound Components, in search of my favorite classical record magazine Gramophone. As I walked in, I was stopped in my tracks by a piano recording that was so lifelike, so real, that I had to sit down to listen to it through its conclusion. I was hearing the slow movement of a Mozart piano sonata played by the legendary Chilean pianist Claudio Arrau — a pianist I had the privilege of hearing live in Miami playing Liszt. This was an off-the-rack Dutch Philips LP playing on what was, arguably, one of two or three super-high resolution, stratospherically expensive — for then — two-channel audio systems: the Mark Levinson HQD system with, if I recall correctly, a Linn Sondek LP12 turntable as the source. The speakers used in that system to reproduce the midrange, where most music exists, were two pairs of the legendary Quad ESL-57 electrostatic loudspeakers, probably the most neutral transducer ever designed.

Being very familiar with the sound of a real piano at home and in the concert hall, that recording on that system was a revelation. Not because of the obvious allure of the gear, or anything like that; what impressed me was the perfectly realized illusion that Arrau was there in the store, in the flesh, playing Mozart on his Steinway, for me, and the two store employees who were having their fast-food lunch. It is not hyperbole to say it was paradigm-shifting in its impact and that it forever changed the way I listened to recorded music. It is the reason I am an audiophile today, in a constant quest to improve the sound that approaches what is heard in a live performance.

:::

I purchased my first audio system in 1975 at one of Miami’s discount audio shops: a 40wpc H.H. Scott receiver, a pair of Altec bookshelf loudspeakers, and a Kenwood turntable with a Shure M95 cartridge. My $500 system was simple for its day. It wasn’t expensive, but it wasn’t cheap, either, especially for an eighteen-year old earning subsistence mail-room wages. That system gave me enormous pleasure for many years, allowing me to discover all sorts of great classical music and, my solace during the disco years, jazz. The day I bought that system, if memory serves, some guy was talking to the owner and some of the salesmen and showing off photos of Audio Research amplifiers and Magneplanar Tympani loudspeakers. I had no idea what the hell they were but I remember the guy describing the system. They looked very cool to a newbie just starting his audio adventures.

It wasn’t until the advent of the compact disc in 1982 that I even started giving a thought to changing my components. I was perfectly happy with what I had since I could not afford anything new. The CD was touted by Sony and the record labels as “perfect sound forever.” Personally, I thought they sounded like shit: they were shrill and lifeless simulacra of what had once been recordings of music. They were not in the same universe as a British EMI or Decca pressing, a London FFRR, a Philips from Holland, or a pre-1964 Tulip-clad DG.

I was an analog holdout of the worst kind. I continued buying LPs and stubbornly refused to buy any CDs, to the utter amazement of my friends who had all jumped into the digital pool. By 1987, as supplies of vinyl dwindled at my local record stores, my LP collection stagnated. Due to enormous cuts in LP inventory — the infamous “black diamond massacres” in the monthly Schwann catalog — and a lack of any new releases on LP, I finally surrendered to digital.

The first CDs I purchased were Mahler’s Ninth Symphony, in a live performance by Herbert von Karajan and the Berlin Philharmonic that was recorded the same year I had heard them play the very same work at Carnegie Hall in October of 1982, and Bruce Springsteen’s Born To Run, the quintessential rock album, with my favorite rock song of all time, “Thunder Road.” I justified my betrayal of analog because that specific Mahler performance was not available on LP, and because I had worn out the Springsteen LP.

The dreams of Levinsons, Linns, Audio Research, Quads, Ampzillas, Phase Linears, et al, remained just that: dreams and fantasies that poor audiophiles have. I bought my first CD player, a $300 Yamaha model, because it was the best sounding of the ones I had heard that I could afford. After a year, when its drawer mechanically failed, I took it back to the store where I had purchased it and they generously exchanged it for a brand new Denon CD player. I took the occasion to upgrade my receiver as well, also a Denon. Not high-end, but not a system you would buy at K-Mart, either. The digital sound was satisfactory, not great, but I still had almost a thousand LPs to satisfy my musical avarice.

:::

The deaths in 1989 of Herbert von Karajan and Vladimir Horowitz, and in 1990 of Leonard Bernstein, all of whom I had been fortunate enough to hear perform live before their passing, was in a strange way a harbinger for what the nineties would become for me as a music collector. I came to the sad (and wholly incorrect) conclusion that LPs were no longer going to made or sold. I decided to replace as many of my prized LPs with CDs as possible. In 1992 I sold about eighty percent of my LP collection to a collector in Melbourne, Florida. He bought the whole shebang, less a couple of hundred I could not part with, for about $700. Despite my misgivings about digital sound, I was finally going to cross the digital Rubicon. In my mind there was no going back: I even gave away my turntable. “He that puts his hand to the plough, and looks back, is not fit for the kingdom of heaven.”

In those early days, I never enjoyed CDs as I had enjoyed my LPs. I knew this was a medium that was here to stay and I had to adapt or perish. In order to get the most out of CDs, I started experimenting with different options I would read about in Stereophile, The Abso!ute Sound, or Audio magazines. In 1993 I swapped out my very long-in-the-tooth Altecs for a pair of PSB Alphas, good bookshelf speakers that were very inexpensive and had been very well reviewed. They sounded so much better than the Altecs in just about every way.

Two years after that I purchased the Audio Alchemy DAC-in-the-Box digital-to-analog converter. I was hopeful that this little device would convert the digital stream from my CD player and improve it before reaching my receiver. It was the best money I had spent since going over to the dark side. My CDs finally started sounding better. The harshness was not gone, but I could actually listen to an entire CD without that “digital fatigue” that so plagued the early discs and machines. I found that a good disc transport (my Denon) and a good DAC were the way to go to actually begin to approach improving digital sound.

In 1998, I swapped my pair of PSBs for a new pair of Bowers & Wilkins DM302s. These small (and inexpensive) masterpieces of loudspeaker design, while superb in midrange, don’t go comfortably below 60Hz. However, just by changing my loudspeakers an amazing thing happened: these little speakers were so revealing that CDs I had thought sounded OK, started sounding like crap. What I once thought were good recordings and/or digital transfers, weren’t so hot after all; great recordings (Harmonia Mundis, Audiofons, MFSLs) were amazingly good, better in fact, than I had heard them before. Close but no cigar. This proved to me that digital had enormous potential if done properly.

(I still own those little 302s and use them very successfully, thirteen years after I purchased them, as my left and right front speakers in my 3.1 home theater. With a good subwoofer like my B&W ASW-650, these are killer loudspeakers. I can’t tell you how many people with mass-marketed home theater brands ask me why watching a movie in my living room system sounds so much better than theirs…)

My purchase of the B&W 302s led me to conclude that I needed to examine every single link in the chain to find out what could be improved upon. Did I need a subwoofer, or maybe a pair of full-range loudspeakers? Was my Denon CD player pushing all of those ones and zeroes out properly? Was a better transport the solution? Should I upgrade my cables? Should I see a shrink?

I decided to buy excellent gear, as needed, but used (or as the salesmen say, “pre-owned”), or reduced in price to where I could afford it. With a wife, a young kid, a mortgage, two cars (one car payment), an old house that occasionally sucked money out of us like an Oreck vacuum cleaner, I had very little (if any) discretionary funding to satisfy my hobby — a hobby that as we all know can cost in the high hundreds of thousands — even millions — of dollars if taken to its extreme.

Starting in 2001 I started my quest in earnest. I purchased a DAC made by California Audio Labs: the GAMMA. A highly regarded piece of gear that, for the price it was being sold for, would be a bargain addition to my system. That DAC made a very tangible improvement in my system. CDs that I considered references sounded very, very good, in fact, they sounded better than they had before. I retired the DAC-in-the-Box.

A serendipitous conversation with one of the guys that worked in the classical and jazz departments at a local record store I’d been haunting since the seventies led me to the next upgrade. He asked if I would be interested in buying his spare CD player, a California Audio Labs DX-2. It wasn’t one of the highly regarded vacuum tube players CalAudio made; nevertheless it was a top-notch high-end CD player he would let go for $300! I jumped at the opportunity to hear what this player would do in my system. I was more than a little shocked at the difference this one component made. What I heard when I played my favorite CDs proved to me that digital was not the devilish invention I once thought it was. Every one of the reference CDs I played sounded fresh and musical, and closer to analog than I had ever thought possible out of that shiny little 5-inch disc. I rarely used the Gamma again since the DX-2’s sound was excellent.

:::

Then, like a patient relapsing from a rare, debilitating, tropical disease, I developed a bad case of analog fever. I really, really wanted a turntable again. Not an Audi or a Porsche or a Harley. I wanted a turntable. Again. My wife described my condition as some sort of weird audiophile mid-life crisis and muttered something like, “you’ve gone completely nuts.”

Like Galileo, who had recanted his scientific discoveries, I had recanted my love of analog. I was desperate to say, “but it does move!” I wanted to rediscover that emotional bond we all have with our favorite music. So, in 2002, going on ten years without having an analog source in my system, I bought a new turntable I could afford: a Rega Planar 2 with an RB250 tonearm and a Grado cartridge. It wasn’t the best sound, but it was better than what I had had in the past I could now listen to the 200 precious LPs I had refused to part with. Of course, it also meant that I would have start to buying vinyl again. Dear Lord, I thought, I’m mad!

My favorite analog references are an LP of the eighth symphony of Shostakovich with the London Symphony Orchestra conducted by Andre Previn (on HMV), and Bizet’s Carmen conducted by Leonard Bernstein (on DG). My favorite digital references are a Mahler First and a disc of William Walton’s orchestral music, with the Florida Philharmonic, conducted by James Judd, both on Harmonia Mundi, and an album of solo lute music from the German Baroque, all engineered by Peter McGrath. Any one of these recordings, recorded, engineered and produced with singularly accurate and natural sound, will really give you an immediate yea or nay on whether your system (and especially your speakers) are up to snuff or not. Unfortunately, as good as those references sounded, my beloved little 302s could not deliver that the bass I had come to love in the concert hall. Now I had to upgrade my speakers to match the quality coming out of my CAL Audio.

I hate paying full price for anything when there are deals out there for the asking; you just have to have the guts to ask. Recently resurrected South Florida retailer Sound Advice was a Bowers & Wilkins dealer for a long time. After being bought by Tweeter Etc. in 2001, they stopped selling B&Ws for, what I was told, was a long-standing dispute between the two companies. I walked in to their store near my home looking to buy loudspeakers with a cast-in-concrete budget. My choices were limited by price and wattage, or so I thought. The salesman informed me that all floor models were for sale since they were no longer selling B&Ws. In other words, everything had to go. Not wanting to waste an opportunity presented by the audio deities, I auditioned all of the speakers on the floor and settled on a pair of B&W 604S2 loudspeakers that they sold to me for less than half-price and a little over my budget! For being at the right place at the right time I improved the overall sound of my system to new heights.

:::

I kept listening and listening and kept tweaking the my system. I added a pair of Parasound separates to replace my Denon receiver. It was a little underpowered for driving the 604S2s. I bought them new, at a very reasonable price. The lesson being that with a minimum of cash, anyone can build up a decent system: my Parasound pre- and power amps, my DX-2 and Gamma, and my Rega. And, of course, PS Audio interconnects.

In 2005 I upgraded to a Classe preamp I purchased used, and a Bryston 3B, also used, that is a workhorse. Since then I’ve gone through two Marantz SACD/CD players and a couple of different DACs.

As for analog, I finally fulfilled a long-time dream and bought a Linn Sondek LP12. It has an old tonearm and a new high-output moving coil cartridge. The prodigal listener who had mistakenly abandoned analog was determined to do it right this time. It’s a wonderful piece of equipment. My LPs sound like never before. Ever hear Toscanini’s Beethoven Symphonies on German pressings? Or the Harnoncourt Brandenburgs on Telefunken? Wonderful. And there’s nothing like Sinatra on vinyl.

In early 2008, through a fortunate circumstance, I was able to budget for a new pair of loudspeakers. I auditioned a pair of Magneplanar 1.6s with my Bryston amp. What speakers! In the end, though, I wisely decided against driving these magnificent speakers with my underpowered amp in my cramped room. One day, maybe. I opted instead for a pair of B&W 804S speakers. (Discounted, of course; old habits die hard.) These speakers, above all else, have revealed to me just how much bass I’ve been missing on my recordings. The bass drum smack in the last section of The Firebird is close to what I’ve heard in the real world. They are wonderful loudspeakers.

The last two tweaks I have made have been small, but have been very significant in what they have brought to the synergies in my system.

I was given the opportunity to buy some of Mapleshade Audio’s strange looking cables. And I can tell you the hype is true. They truly open the soundstage and what comes out of the CD or SACD is so much better resolved. I wouldn’t have believed these cables could do so much unless I had heard it myself.

I did not expect the last tweak I made to my system to make as much of a difference as it has. PS Audio sponsored a contest whereby a limited number of folks would get a PS Audio Soloist A/C Outlet if they wrote an email and explained why they needed it. I, of course, never looking a gift opportunity in the mouth, fired off an email and was generously selected to receive one in exchange for a write up. Of all the things I have done over the years to improve my system, changing my crappy electrical outlet for this one has had the overall effect of — and forgive me for not being able to describe it more precisely — using a Squeegee on a dirty windshield. There it is. Everything I play through my system sounds crisper and more alive since I added the outlet. The hum is gone. LPs, CDs, my reels, radio, my optical connection from my Mac. Everything sounds cleaner and quieter than in it had before. Paul McGowan isn’t kidding when he tells us how important clean A/C power is.

:::

So, here I am, 36 years later, still buying LPs and CDs. These days I also download high-definition tracks and play them through my Mac to my DAC, on my iPhone or iPod. I own over 2,500 CDs, over 1,000 LPs, and about half a terabyte of music on hard drives. I’m not as rigid in my thinking as I once was; this old dog is willing to learn new audio tricks, after all.

Is buying all of this gear and spending money on tweaks a complete waste of time and money? Couldn’t I get the same result with regular off-the-shelf stuff? No. I want to recreate what I heard so long ago, that perfectly realized illusion of great musicians playing just for me in my home. Why do I participate in this crazy hobby? Simple: the tears I shed whenever I hear the resignation in the Adagio of Mahler’s Ninth, or the love for his wife in the Adagietto of his Fifth; the power of Beethoven’s Eroica, and Grosse Fuge; Mozart’s Don Giovanni; the golden sadness of late Brahms; any Chopin; the anger of Verdi’s Requiem; the almost indescribable beauty of Puccini’s La Boheme; Bernard Herrmann’s score for Fahrenheit 451; the goose bumps I always get when Stan Getz begins “Here’s That Rainy Day”; Sonny Rollins attacking the notes in “St. Thomas”; when Paul Desmond and Dave Brubeck play anything together; Bruce Springsteen singing “Thunder Road”; Pink Floyd lamenting their friend in “Shine on You Crazy Diamond”; the amazing music of pre-revolution Cuba.

Despite all of our enthusiasms, the gear is always secondary; what the equipment does for us, in the end, is give us the wonderful gift of music.

(Originally published July 8 2011 on PSTracks.)

Steve Jobs at the WSJ D8 Conference

Here’s the full video at The Wall Street Journal.