Stone Flavors

Fine Whining | Power Line:

A fun little article from PL poking a little fun at wine review pretensions -- "stone flavors". My suspicion is "stonED flavors" might be more to the point.

Anyway, it brought back memories of my dabbling in "High End Audio" ... sound stage, imaging, tubes, amps and cables better found on arc welders, insanely expensive everything, gigantic speakers with a "Wife Acceptance Factor (WAF) of 0.0 ... well, you get the picture.

The two main magazines were "The Absolute Sound (TAS)" and "Stereophile", which we christened "The OBSOLETE Sound" and "Stereo Pile".

TAS would brook no digital -- the sweet sound of vinyl and tubes were the only way to sound NERDvana. Digital and integrated circuits produced "a threadbare mid-range", "an emaciated mid-bass", and "lacked palpable presence".

None of us ever went completely whole hog, although a couple buds had very nice systems and there were certain songs that to this day remind me of us crowding together to try to get in "the sweet spot" ... "Riders on the Storm" by the Doors and "Fast Car" by Tracey Chapman leap to mind ... but there was a lot of Jennifer Warnes, some Pink Floyd and other interesting stuff as well.

Yes, there was pretension and quite a bit just imaginative posturing, but it was a lot of fun!!! Sometimes I think that my friends and I may have "grown up" just a bit too much!!

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