Louder, Daddy.

Damn you, YouTube. My algorithm decided that I, a 54-year-old white male with a modicum of disposable income, might, for some reason, enjoy videos about hi-fi equipment. And I’ll be cornshucked if YouTube wasn’t exactly correct.

Let me backtrack to a strange moment from my early adolescence that’s always remained with me. I was 13 or 14, walking somewhere, appropriate given the fact that I was listening to my Sony Walkman at the time. I can’t remember exactly what I was listening to; the 80’s synth band Orchestral Maneuvers in the Dark, maybe?

Suddenly, something weird happened. I don’t know what caused it – did I turn my head a funny way? – but the music in my ears went from being a passive experience to being an intensely active one. I don’t know how else to describe it, but, without any warning, the music suddenly seemed to overwhelm my ears, filling my skull in an almost cinematic way. The best word to describe the sensation is probably “immersive,” like I was in it.

The experience lasted no more than five seconds, I think, before the music escaped again, like steam from a tea kettle, until it was back to being normal music again. For those of you old enough to remember the sound quality of the original Sony Walkman and the cheap foam headphones it came with, you know this is not an experience commonly associated with that device. As I said, I don’t what happened or why, but I’ve never forgotten those bizarre and wonderful few seconds.

Oddly, I don’t think I’ve ever shared that with anybody, but in interviews I’ve conducted with musicians over the years I’ve occasionally alluded to it. I asked the great singer Audra McDonald about the way her body experiences music; I asked Josh Groban to describe what it felt like when he first allowed himself to fully open up his voice as a teenager discovering the sounds he could make. I’ve bemoaned the fact that I don’t seem to hear music the same way musicians do and I’ve wondered if there’s something wrong with me. That, ever since that moment with OMD, I’ve felt like I’ve been missing something.

Occasional instrument of teleportation.

Forty years later, YouTube is serving me a steaming heap of hi-fi videos featuring middle-aged nerds talking about ohms and two-oscillations and frequency response.

Within a couple days, I’m in deep, and thinking to myself that this might be the answer. Perhaps I can replicate that adolescent moment with a proper audiophile’s stereo set-up. Perhaps, like a true Democrat, I can simply throw a bunch of money at the problem and hope for a miraculous result.

Within a week or so, I’m narrowing down my choices. If you don’t know anything about stereo equipment, you probably won’t be surprised to learn that the component choices are practically endless. Speakers, amps, pre-amps, DACs, etc. etc. etc. A thousand companies creating products with inscrutable names like the “ELAC Debut DB63-WNs featuring an aluminum dome tweeter, a woven-fiber aramid-fiber woofer, and internal bracing”. Such delicious jargon! Yum, yum, yummy yum.

About a week ago, I placed my order. (Audiophiles are now preparing to froth at the mouth over my fairly pedestrian choices because the first thing I’ve learned about audiophiles is that they all hate everybody else’s set-up). Before I tell you what I got, here was my thinking: I want a great “entry-level” audiophile system. The simpler, the better. The speakers had to be small enough and stylish enough to not offend my interior designer wife. To play them, I just needed, again, a small and stylish entry-level amplifier. After much back and forth (and a reconsideration due to Trump’s fucking tariffs), I landed on the KEF LS50 Meta speakers and the Wiim first generation amp. With speaker wire, the total price was something like $1,600.

I’d never spent that kind of money on audio equipment and, frankly, I was nervous. Did I just throw away a bunch of cash on a piece of technology my ears might not be sensitive enough to perceive as anything more than a nicer iteration of the crappy little speaker I’ve got in my kitchen? As I’ve said, all previous attempts to replicate those five seconds from forty years ago had failed. Would a new stereo succeed or, more likely, was Martha going to kick me out of the house for wasting our hard-earned (it isn’t hard-earned; I sit in a TV studio and make jokes) cash?

The stereo showed up yesterday. We moved three weeks ago, and our new house remains a tangle of half-empty boxes and disassembled furniture. My time probably did not need to be devoted to anything other than organizing our home. So naturally, I spent the afternoon getting the speakers positioned.

First impressions were good but unspectacular. Right away, I noticed a serious uptick in the quality and clarity of the music, but I can’t say it came anywhere close to that anomalous audio moment from my childhood. After fiddling for a while, I decided to take a break for dinner and conversating with the wifey. I figured I could mess around with the equalizer or something a little later. Maybe I’d be able to squeeze something a little more out of the system. Or maybe I’d just made a nearly two-thousand-dollar mistake.

Martha went to bed before me, so I decided to go back to the stereo, this time positioning myself as an equilateral triangle between the speakers, about six feet away, per YouTube’s instructions, the better to highlight the KEF’s “imaging” and “soundscape.” I faced away from the speakers and put on a Spotify list I’d found from some dude specifically curated to show off these particular speakers.

What followed was the single greatest night of music-listening I’ve ever had. Honestly, one of my best nights period.

My precious.

That immersive feeling I’d had once for five seconds was back, only it lasted for as long as I listened. All that shit audiophile’s talk about the way instruments are “placed,” the way cymbals can “sizzle,” all the subtle nuances that I just assumed they were making up – for the first time in my life, I heard it all. And it was fucking spectacular.

Until last night, I’d never been able to just sit down and listen to music for more than a few songs. An album, tops. Friend, I sat there for hours. It’s a hard thing to describe and I’m not really going to try. The closest thing I could say about it was that the overall impression was of being in the studio with the artists. For the first time, I felt like I could hear production choices, if that makes sense. I’m sure I’m doing a terrible job explaining it, but – rare for somebody of my age – sitting there listening to music felt like a genuinely new experience. And before you ask, YES I TOOK AN EDIBLE.

I listened to music I knew and music I didn’t know. All genres except hip-hop and electronica because I want to hook up my old sub-woofer before I do that. I listened at varying volumes and, unique for somebody like me who prefers his music on the softer side, I found myself turning it up as much as I dared without disturbing Martha. The only reason I turned it off at all was because we had some plumbers showing up at dawn (8:00, ungodly) this morning.

So, was it worth the $1,600? Here’s the truth: I would have paid that much just for last night. Like, if the stereo people showed up this morning to repossess everything, I’d be like, “Worth it.” So yeah, I can’t promise anybody else will have the same kind of revelatory experience I had last night after dropping a chunk of change on a new stereo. All I can tell you is that I’m still kind of - as the innocents say - shook.

This morning, I’ve got the speakers on in the background. Low volume, and I’m positioned far enough way that they sound, again, like regular speakers. I’ll probably try to recreate the experience tonight, but I’m not optimistic. It was probably just hearing them for the first time and noticing things about the music I never had before. Tonight’s listening sess will, almost certainly, not land the same way. And what sucks is I suspect I’m going to be chasing that dragon for the rest of my life. As if I needed another obsession. Goddamnit, YouTube. You got me. You got me good.