As a kid, I always took mysterious devices apart and generally got hollered at for my troubles. I've built various non-electronics DIY stuff over the years, but I really contracted the disease five years ago when I got into guitar stompbox building. I've gone from complete novice to moderately literate hack in that time, and I'm still building loads of questionable guitar gear.

Recently, I got back into the concept of actually listening to music. For the longest time, I would listen to music down in the beavis basement labs through my computer and a pair of $120 Logitech 2.1 whatever's. The more I listened through that miserly rig, the more I began to miss the concept of really listening to music. I missed what I remembered from early days: the love of hi-fi.

I remember as a kid that whenever we moved somewhere new, the hi-fi was always one of the very first things to be hooked up. It was really important to my dad and he had his priorities straight in that regard. I remember getting that last speaker wire on the Sony Reel to Reel connected, spooling up one the Stan Getz tapes, and grabbing that big "play" lever and having at it.

(Years later, I ended up with that Sony reel-to-reel as a handmedown. But all my music was on vinyl and I had no amp or speakers. My only solution was to strip the ends off my turntable's phone plugs and literally scotch-tape the ends to the soldered leads coming of the tape deck's pickup head. It was a monstrosity of a rig, rife with impedance mismatches and bad sound, but I felt like I had personally invented electricity. It was perhaps my first heady moment of DIY Hackery--a feeling that I could solve any electronic problem....)

 I remember my dad's first solid-state amplifier. A sweet Fisher with faux wood grain on the top and 6 separate FM tuners each  with their own frequency dialgraphs. I remember the bic turntable and learning from my dad how it went into "phono" (doh). I remember the big ass Fisher stereo speakers (4 feet tall and I still have them!) and the sounds that would emanate from that wondrous array of hi-fi gear.

As a family, we lived mostly overseas. My dad was stationed all over the world and our dysfunctional brood of 5 kids would tag along to a new country every two years. Most of our time was spent in Africa. My parents did a lot of entertaining (which is what you did back in the 60's and 70's and usually involved all the adults drinking martinis, smoking cigarettes and dancing to some type of wicked good bossanova until all hours). And that entertaining always involved me getting the music set up and ready to go before being shoo'd off to my room. But I still remember the sound of those big Fisher XP-65 speakers going through the house.

I remember sticking crappy 3" radio speakers upside down on the top of empty beer cans to make them sound better.

I remember setting up my own first real "stereo", a cool silver Panasonic boom box where the speakers could be separated from the main unit. It was strictly a radio/cassette deal, but it had wild space-age shit on it like Dolby and metal tape switches. That thing lasted me for over six years.

I remember my first "real" set of a speakers. A big honking pair of B&W DM580s. These monsters were hooked up to my pimp-ass Sony receiver in my first apartment. And as you can imagine, they were the first things unboxed and hooked up, all the other boxes of "move-in" crap were secondary. I think my main sound-making device back in those days as a teac cassette deck, but those memories are a bit hazy do to overuse of illicit cannabinoid products. The DM580s were donated a few years ago to my favorite nephew Mike who used them in his killer basement Xbox and Tunes Rig.

As the years have gone by, I've bought, sold, traded and given away a lot of gear. And I remember how almost all of them sounded.

Which brings us back to the present...

A few months ago, I started noticing how my kids listen to music. They are both teenagers and their primary gear is strictly ipod/laptop. Usually they would listen through earbuds, but I was surprised to notice that they were perfectly content to also listen through the rinky-dink little crap speakers in their laptops. I asked them about it and they were of the attitude "Meh, it sounds ok." (Meh is a very common kid word these days).

So I hooked my daughter's laptop up a small Aiwa bookshelf system that she had never really used because it was built around one of those archaic "compact disk" thingies and she is proudly and firmly rooted in the iTunes world.

Of course she was amazed and delighted by the sound and uses that rig to this day. A similar setup for my son yielded the same results. In fact, both kids started commenting on being able to actually "hear" parts of music that had been masked before.

Fortunately, they did not use terms like "three dimensional sound stage, transparent lilting mids" or anything from the dreaded audiophile lexicon. It was more like "hey pops, did you know that there are actually two guitars playing in this Metallica solo?"

These experiences, the desire to really listen to music again, the little trips down hi-fi memory lane, watching my kids be audio doofuses, well it all started to coalesce. What started as a rekindled interest in hi-fi gear turned (in typical beavis fashion) into an all-consuming passion.

I started building small preamplifiers for my ipod, dusted off the old turntable and build a phone pre-amp for it. Discovered the fun of Class D amps for bookshelf systems. And on and on.

The result is this website.

So now is as good a time as any to explain why I'm stuck on the term hi-fi. I hate to apply labels and pigeon-hole folks as one thing or another. But the problem is that what I'm after in terms of learning, building and listening to is often called "audiophile." But it is NOT audiophile.

To me, the term "audiophile" has been piled up over the years with so many negative connotations, reinforced by crazy smug gear reviewers, big-money boutique equipment manufacturers and the resulting parade of snake-oil bullshit peddlers. Thousand dollar cables? WTF? Tonewood? WTF! A passive switcher for 20 thousand dollars? Seriously.

And at the same time, the mass manufacturers of shitty gloss/white/chrome Chino-bubble-boxes marketed as audiophile Ipod docks and alarm clocks and compact speakers or whatever the fuck they are lining the shelves of Best Buy this week, well they are further destroying any valid meaning of the word "audiophile."

So the word is simultaneously insulting and meaningless.

On the other hand, hi-fi evokes the idea of listening to music through good equipment. Good doesn't have to be expensive. And it doesn't have to be cheap. It simply has to follow this guideline:

To me, the spirit of hi-fi is about learning that high-end or low end audiophile crap is just that, crap. It is about building your own gear. It is about modding or tweaking gear you already have. It is about scouring the interwebs looking for cool used preamplifiers or new bookshelf speakers that I can park in my kitchen for parties. It is all good, and all positive.

So, to the three or four of you who actually read all the way down to the end here, I want to say thanks! Thanks for visiting my little corner of the world. I hope you enjoy it and find some fun and interesting projects and articles. And as always, I cannot thrive without feedback. Email me!

Your humble hi-fi servant,