Stephen Mejias

(all you ever have to know about life is that little girls are taught to dance and little boys are taught to kick it's all over from there my son is going to get a whole bunch of garbage for his birthday and i'll say here boy play music)
—lines from an old poem, "the green water rocks / make me cry," by me

I'm not sure, exactly, what the hell I was talking about. I know that it had something to do with the band I was in. We banged on garbage cans, you know, and many of our "instruments" were things we'd simply found around campus, and especially along the Hackensack River, things that were thrown away by other students, or left to collect mold in abandoned buildings. So, in part, I think I was saying:

1.) music is really important
2.) music can be made with anything
3.) music can be found everywhere

But what about those differences between little girls and little boys? I won't be coming back to this later. What did I mean by saying "little girls are taught to dance and little boys are taught to kick?" It doesn't really matter. And "it's all over from there?" What was that about? It's not important.

Seriously, I had completely forgotten what was going through my mind when I originally wrote those words. There had to have been an idea. But what was it? The spark only just reappeared a few seconds ago, when I re-wrote the words here for you. I remember now. It's suddenly so clear: I was walking along River Road in Teaneck, New Jersey, on a quiet Saturday morning.

On Saturday mornings, our campus was freed from the usual dress of professors and students, athletes and artists, frat boys and sorority girls, and redecorated with young, colorful children. They came from their nearby homes and dotted our pathways like jellybeans, filled our study halls with pink and blue announcements, dangling shoelaces, glitter and glue.

A parade of children came pouring out of Becton Hall, where I normally studied American History, the boys dressed in white, barefoot and kicking; the girls dressed in so many shades of pink and purple, sparkling and dancing. I swear. Inside, there had been a couple of weekend courses, offered to the community through some partnership or other, promising to enrich, entertain, provide. It was a world of ballet and Taekwondo: Little girls taught to dance, and little boys taught to kick.

Perhaps I saw in this some implicit conflict that would forever ruin the mingling of the sexes. It's all over from there. I was probably having trouble with my own girlfriend at the time, and looking for something to blame it on. She may have practiced ballet when she was younger, but I certainly never studied Taekwondo.

This, however, is all peripheral. What I'm really trying to figure out—what I've been trying to figure out for the last six years—is:

Where do audiophiles come from? I don't want to get into all of the bologna that's so often aligned with audiophilia. I'm not interested in debates over double-blind testing. I'm not interested in outrageously expensive equipment. I'm not interested in death cries and survival tactics. I'm not interested in conspiracy theories and snake oil. Not now, at least. Though I know all of these things exist and are major issues for some people, what I'm interested in, what I want to explore right now, is the spark. What sparks the enthusiasm for high-fidelity sound reproduction? Where does it come from? We know that audiophiles have an affinity for takeout menus and pornography, and are subject to sudden fits of self-deprecation and parody, but what comes before all that?

Where is the dance? What is the kick? Erik Bobeda, an audiophile, shares with us his spark:

I'm the son of two jazz trombonists. As a child, I saw a lot of live performances. Not only that, but there was always music in the house. I have fond memories of my mom practicing. The sound was only interrupted when she made an error, paused briefly, and said "no" into her mouthpiece.

I think another reason the children of musicians often have an appreciation for accurately reproduced music is that the parents have that same appreciation because they know even better what everything should sound like. When my parents were still together, we had a system upstairs and down. I've been around audio gear since birth.

One of the first records I bought (several months ago now) was The Chicago Transit Authority, the debut album of the group thereafter known simply as Chicago. I grew up hearing Chicago all the time and they continue to be one of my favorite groups. The band isn't really important, though. What really struck me was one instrument: the trombone. That old, familiar friend from my past that I hadn't heard in years suddenly was right in the room with me, as soon as stylus met vinyl. All the memories of concerts and practicing came back so quickly that it almost brought a tear to my eye. It was so real. The love of hi-fi is, at its heart, the love of music.

I think this is a beautiful story. And what is so interesting to me is that I've heard stories like this before, from loudspeaker manufactures, from audio reviewers, from engineers and designers, from all sorts of people who openly refer to themselves as audiophiles. I want to collect these stories like John Atkinson collects loudspeaker measurements, hoping that someday I'll be able to set them out, side by side, and come up with an idea.