ZEPP'TALKS: Present from the past
The age of the audiophile dates so far back, no one really remembers the way it started.
So we thought we would do it for you, as much as we could, identifying classics in the hobby of Head-Fi in our latest ZEPP'TALKS.
Churning out a list of the top items from yesteryear wouldn't have been high on the priority list of many newcomers in the last two years. And why would they want to reminisce the age of old audiophilia, anyway? Things just weren't very good.
Or, at least, not as good as they are today. Small portables with lots of gain and not very much power. Headphones with dreaded frequency flaws. Lagging user interfaces.The gratuitous excess of big, hot and heavy monoliths unto Class A.
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This will sound like it contradicts previous views. It does not. Zepp may rail against sending off perfectly working technologies to an early graveyard of obsolescence.
But mired in nostalgia or romance of the past, we are not. Neither do we speak generally about the quality of everything, old or new. That's dependent, manufacturer to manufacturer.
So, when we've trusted manufacturers to roll out improvements every new release, and every new technological breakthrough today gets greeted with fanfare, why would we celebrate the old?
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Because they influenced a generation. We know where Head-Fi is going, after we know exactly where we've come from.
The vital context is there, the social studies of why things have developed to the way they are today. And Zepp Crew did not reach the mountaintop overnight. We paid our dues, becoming hobbyists and then collectors and, finally, professionals.
So we introduce you modern gear knowing exactly how good things have gotten today. Excuse the odd anecdote that surfaces along the way about our journey over the years. We think it adds personal touch and humanises our hobby.
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Because Head-Fi, like so many of the other causes that are worth undertaking, is first and foremost one of human endeavour.
Serious technological efforts at that time gave credibility to our hobby. The patterns that that drove the kind of conversations everyone had at some point is to confer influence and importance to all audio that has gone before us at the heart.
Borne of discussion, debate and embrace of what could be possible. Old equipment is institutionalised for the moments in time and points of interaction they produced for community.
It's nothing short of folklore. The evolving audiophile. The brave old days. The road we're on. How much we've progressed.
And then the technology that inadvertently morphed to the way it is today. That's how Sennheiser's HD650 paved the early way to eventually lead to HEDD's HEDDphone, 17 years later. Likewise Stax's SR-009, to the 009S – seven years its predecessor's senior.
So stay on this current hype train, because we're going places on it. You'll want to – it's already taken us this far.