Hi-fi dealership Big Kids Toys, in Greensboro, North Carolina, is aptly named. Since its 2002 inception, fun has been at the center of its ethos. At the outset, company founder Michael Twomey established a mantra: "Life is short. Enjoy yourself." It might not be all that original, but it's apt.
In the third quarter of 2024, Big Kids Toys began expanding to the Midwest: The dealership's sales manager, North Carolina native Luke Sumerford (above), opened a home-based dealership in Fort Wright, Kentucky, about five miles from the Ohio River and Cincinnati, Ohio. That's a long way from Greensboro.
Sumerford, at 29, is part of hi-fi's youth movement. He hopes to instillor reinforce, or bring backmusical enjoyment as the central pillar of the hi-fi hobby.
When I recollect the soundtrack to my acid-tinged summer of 1967, several LPs stand out: The Beatles' Sgt. Pepper's you-know-what, The Rolling Stones' Their Satanic Majesties, Richie Havens's Mixed Bag, and Dennis Brain's equally famed recording of the Mozart Horn Concertos, with the Philharmonia Orchestra conducted by Herbert von Karajan. Though all of them sounded potent and execrable, in equal parts, through our starvingex-student record players, neither the Mozart's monophonic provenance nor the too-distant sound of Brain's horn could diminish the joy it brought me...
How wonderful it is to revisit these tuneful, often jolly concertos played by a superb horn virtuoso, Alec Frank-Gemill, backed by the Swedish Chamber Orchestra conducted by one of the world's most distinguished period-practice authorities, Nicholas McGegan.
In addition to resetting that bit of conventional wisdom, Lund's study may have uncovered an important contributor to the feeling of envelopment so many audiophiles crave, itself a profound source of pleasure beyond the music itself. As I have often said, and probably written once or twice, listening to a good hi-fi system is like getting a massage.
Arriving in Japan from the United States is like being turned upside down. This condition lasts for much of the first week. When I visited in November, the time difference between Tokyo and New York was 14 hours. "The floating world" is a term for the pleasure-addled urban culture of Edo-period Japan, but it's also an apt description for the twilit and not-entirely-unpleasant weirdness of first arriving in Tokyo. Everything seems slightly unreal.
I'd come to Japan for several reasons, one of which was simply to spend more time in what for me is the most enjoyable place on the planet. Another was to explore the country's distinctive listening spaces, which I've been thinking and occasionally writing about over the past few years. During that time, listening bars and cafés from Boulder to Sydney have been popping up like mushrooms after a rainstorm, and for many of these new venues, Japan's jazz kissas (or kissaten in the Japanese plural) are both the model and spiritual mothership.