Bench Talk

I’ve always been fascinated by the audiophile community, as it strives to achieve the absolute best possible audio fidelity, and in the late ‘60s and ‘70s I read magazines like Stereophile, The Absolute Sound, and yes, Stereo Review and High Fidelity cover to cover. I marveled at the insanely-expensive equipment I couldn’t possibly afford but did everything I could within my severely restricted budget to create a system that delivered high-quality audio. I treated my (now-scorned) Shure V15 Type IV cartridge and records like they were gold, built my own speakers, and performed rudimentary testing on them. I was in pseudo-audiophile heaven.