Copper Contributor Ken Kessler was recently featured on The Luxury Dispatch With Tom Chamberlin and The Rake, a podcast and YouTube channel that covers, as they put it, “the refined, the rare, and the relentlessly well-made.” Hosted by The Rake’s Tom Chamberlin, the podcast covers everything from watches to cigars to exclusive clubs to…in Ken’s case, high-end audio. Here’s the YouTube podcast, “The Luxury of Listening: Hi-Fi, Vinyl, and Audiophile Culture,” for your viewing enjoyment.
Here are excerpts from what Tom and Ken talked about:
Tom Chamberlin: For many, [hi-fi] is not merely about equipment, but about the experience of listening itself, the way music fills a room and transforms it. What defines hi-fi?
Ken Kessler: In order to enter the world of high-end audio, you have to not just love music, you have to worship it. The whole thing, the entire thing, unless you're just a gadget guy, is about getting music in the home that's virtually indistinguishable from reality. The term “high fidelity” means faithfulness to the music.
Basically, when you listen to an amazing hi-fi system…if you were to get someone like Joni Mitchell on an acoustic guitar, and you close your eyes, and there's a frisson, a moment where you think she's sitting right there playing to you, height, scale, everything.
My audiophile readers are not going to want to hear this, but I really don't care about hi-fi. I care about music. Now that sounds like a cliche. It sounds like a truism, but I was obsessed with music. My earliest memory was Elvis Presley on TV in 1956.
The good news is that…I could put together a system for a thousand pounds and before someone goes, “a grand!,” come on. A grand will buy nothing in a four-star restaurant for four people. I'm talking about something you'll have for the rest of your life that will give you music 24/7 if you so desire. When you start talking about extreme hi-fi…you could put together a system easily for two million pounds.
TC: Is it a solitary pursuit and enjoyment?
KK: You'd think it's solitary, fundamentally, because the best sound systems [would be] set up for a “hot seat” [sweet spot]. But equally, most audiophiles hang out with other audiophiles. And as with every single item in the luxury field, you want your friends to know that you have it.
TC: So it's a sort of community passion, but a solitary pursuit.
KK: Both. It's both.
Header image: Ken Kessler (left) and Tom Chamberlin (right) on The Luxury Dispatch.
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