Don’t forget the Music
Listening to music should not be a clinical exercise. Many manufacturers, reviewers and the general audio buying public seem to have forgotten this.  Music is a language of feeling an emotion –if an audio system doesn’t get the emotional message across, you’ll naturally switch off after a few minutes, get up and go and do something else; either that or you’ll be analyzing the hifi system, rather than the music it is presenting. This is where the equipment we are fortunate enough to be selling and representing is special.

A quote taken from  Zu Audio website below….

Why does modern hi-fi sound so clinical and dead?
Quite simple—the lunatics have taken over the asylum. Because more and more ‘stuff’ can be measured, people measure more and more stuff, and frequently, the stuff they measure takes on such import for measurement’s sake that all kinds of bad things are done to a design to ensure a good measured result, but at the expense of a raft of musically important stuff that doesn’t feature on the measurement guru’s agenda. In a nutshell—it’s chucking the baby out with the bath water. On top of all that, the majority of people’s exposure to music is through the TV, iPod, radio and the internet, all of which offer a pale pastiche of the real live event—the populace is losing touch with the only real reference worth having—real ‘live’ music. Once the ‘live’ reference has gone, we lose sight of the core essence of live music—the dynamics and scale of a living, breathing performance—funnily enough, the very virtues of Zu that differentiate them from every other speaker on the planet. So the bottom line becomes ‘what’s your reference—live music or an oscilloscope?’ For people who love listening to their hi-fi, scrutinizing every aspect of the recording and forensically dissecting the performance, there’s a raft of speakers out there for those lost souls. For people who are still in love with the music, who just want to be at that gig, who really don’t care about ‘audiophile’ recordings and all the attendant crap—for all those enlightened souls, there’s Zu

Don’t forget the dealer
There are high-end dealers and then there are retailers selling commodities.  They are very different.  The difference is like that of a long time family doctor vs. the generic physician in an urgent care Doc-In-The-Box.  The former knows you, your family and your history, the latter doesn’t and is working in a sort of factory.
Sadly the number of good high-end dealers is growing smaller in this country (and others) but there are still a few around. Even though I’ve worked in this industry for 23 years (I know I don’t look a day over 30) my passion for the industry, audio and music has never wavered. There are few high end stores in this country that I haven’t visited or conversed with at some time or another and I am happy to say that there are still some really knowledgeable and enthusiastic individuals selling this gear out there.  These are the individuals I strongly encourage you to track down and form a relationship with. …list to come….