Yes, Stereokarter, the majority here seem to be scourched inwardly by the passion for advanced audio technology--a modern and most hellish vice. (Why did not God anticipate Mark Levinson and Goldmund and include "Though shallt not reproduce the divine human voice" among the old Christian canon of the deadly sins?) What would become of some audiophiles if they could not sate their ears on enormous torments of sound, tons of LPs and the pleasures of a good tweak? There are many dangers that lurk in our age--Mapleguy has put his finger on a few, and I thus sympathetically read his post--and I think that many reside in different destructive processes of unprecedented rapidity. i.e. (biological, technological, military, political) speed. The passion for speed violates against the natural order. Stereokarter does homage to this extreme passion in his desire to attend the Indy car race. Personally speaking, the passion that brings down the greatest portion of my profane doom is simply continuing to live in Europe as an American expatriate--expatriation as the extreme of externality. How many American citizens know the baroque complications of a German "Ausländer Amt" or the contrived interventions of fate provided by a Portugese policeman's "baggage search"? It is a convenient arrangement for my audiophile demon that I live in Europe. I am so completely in the grip of the passion for quality sound that I spend a good portion of my vacations fulfilling the demon's urgings--whether it be looking for Harmonia Mundi LPs in southern france, or tracking down musique concrete classics in Belgium, or scouring London for Deccas and RCAs. I am almost incapable of any other passion; I am too exasperated. So much so that the only other vice that can emerge is the vice for writing and reading. Writing is the ritardando of audiophilia. I am incapable of writing while listening to my system--which is nearly everywhere in the apartment nowadays. But write and read in vacui. I even take silence retreats to ensure that this passion flames and flickers in the breeze of fate.
