Somebody on a plane asked me what I do for a living. I told them I have a company that makes stereo equipment. "Oh, like Best Buy stuff?"
Sigh.
For a long time my next move was the long version — the one about high-end audio and vinyl and DACs and speakers that disappear, and the thing about how a great system doesn't reproduce a recording so much as convince you the recording never happened. Somewhere around minute two, I'd notice my seatmate's eyes had gone gently glassy, and I'd realize I'd done it again.
What we do isn't really about DACs or speakers or amplifiers, any more than what a chef does is really about knives. The gear is the tool. What we're actually doing is closer to something you can say in one line.
We unlock the magic of music in people's homes.
Nobody has to know what a preamp is, or what a Power Plant does, or why a subwoofer belongs a few feet from the wall to understand a house where music suddenly moves you the way it did the first time you heard it done right.
The eyes on the plane don't glaze over when I say it that way. They light up a little. Because everybody has a version of that memory — the song at a wedding, the first they attended a live event. What we do is bring that back on demand, in the room where they live.
The gear matters.
But that's not the point.
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