Me, in the old cubicle at 110 Fifth Avenue, just eight months into the new job. I was thinner then, and had more hair.
I began working with
Stereophile exactly nine years ago, on August 10, 2000. I was 22 years old, I was living in my uncle's basement, and I didn't even know that "high end audio" existed. I had never heard the word "audiophile." I was in a band. I listened to all of my music through
a simple Magnavox boombox.
My life has changed considerably since then, thank goodness.
I live on my own in
a small apartment, and I know a little more about hi-fi. (But I am constantly horrified by all that I don't know.) I
am an audiophile, kind of. I like to think about the old band. And I feel that I'm in some sort of endless competition to discover stranger, greater recordings and styles of music to impress
my new music-obsessed friends.
My current system is made of an Exposure 2010S compact disc player and matching
integrated amplifier,
Rega P3-24 turntable (in white, with the outboard power supply and an Elys cartridge), a very special pair of DeVore Fidelity Gibbon 3 loudspeakers (with bamboo cabinets, the result of materials experiments!) coupled to the top plates of their Target stands with small pads of Blu-Tack, a Polycrystal equipment rack (given to me by Jonathan Scull), and Furutech cables and interconnects. I also own a pair of
PSB Alpha B1 loudspeakers because they're cheap and awesome and everyone should own a pair, duh. I like my system very much. I feel no need to change it in any way. Maybe that makes me an un-audiophile.
I've got more records than I've got room for. Every now and then, I think of moving into a larger apartment so that I can have a dedicated listening room. Hi-fi has been very, very good to me.
I want to thank the forces of the universe for directing me to
Stereophile, I want to thank the readers for their encouragement and enthusiasm, and I want to thank John Atkinson for keeping me around. Thanks, JA, for all of the above and more.
